The former head of a group that contracts with the Pentagon to produce propaganda material used oversees has admitted to launching a similar disinformation campaign against two U.S.-based reporters.

In April, two USA Today journalists claimed they were the victims of a deliberate “reputation attack” after they wrote a series of stories about the Pentagon’s contracts with groups that specialize in the production of propaganda. Days after the journalists began speaking with officials at the Pentagon and other sources for the story, fake websites and social media accounts set up in the names of the two reporters were mysteriously registered and began trying to discredit the stories.

Camille Chidiac, the minority owner and former president of Leonie Industries, one of the consulting firms that works with the Pentagon and was featured prominently in USA Today’s reporting, took responsibility for the misinformation campaign. USA Today reports:

“I take full responsibility for having some of the discussion forums opened and reproducing their previously published USA TODAY articles on them,” he said a statement released by his attorney, Lin Wood, of Atlanta.

“I recognize and deeply regret that my actions have caused concerns for Leonie and the U.S. military. This was never my intention. As an immediate corrective action, I am in the process of completely divesting my remaining minority ownership from Leonie,” Chidiac said.

Chidiac says Leonie Industries and the Pentagon had no knowledge of the smear campaign, and no funding from either entity was used in the attack. Leonie Industries has received at least $120 million in Pentagon contracts since 2009.

Earlier this month, Rep. Hank Johnson (D-GA) called on the Pentagon to launch an investigation into the smear campaign against the USA Today journalists and said it should “consider suspending all contracts with Leonie Industries until such investigation is complete.”

The U.S.’s top military officer today delivered an extraordinary repudiation of a class taught as the U.S. military’s Joint Forces Staff College. The course, “Perspectives on Islam and Islamic Radicalism,” used apocalyptic rhetoric and cast Islam as a “barbaric ideology,” employing numerous anti-Muslim tropes. For example, the class taught the lessons of “Hiroshima” to wipe out whole cities at once, targeting the “civilian population wherever necessary” in a “total war” against Muslims.

At a press conference today, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey explained how the materials taught in the class were brought to his attention and expressed a harsh criticism of them. He said:

DEMPSEY: As you know, I’ve made an inquiry into a particular course that was brought to my attention by one of the students because he was concerned that it was objectionable and that it was counter to our values — you know, our appreciation for religious freedom and cultural awareness. And the young man who brought it to my attention was absolutely right. It’s totally objectionable.

And so we are looking at how that course was approved, what motivated the individual to adopt that — it was an elective, but what motivated that elective for being part of the curriculum. And we are looking across the institutions that provide our professional military education to make sure there’s nothing like that out there.

It was just totally objectionable, against our values, and it wasn’t academically sound. This wasn’t about pushing back on liberal thought; this was objectionable, academically irresponsible.

Watch the video:

As Dempsey mentioned, he ordered an investigation of the class upon recognizing just how “objectionable” the material therein was. The examination of other teaching materials might find a good place to start by looking into Lt. Col. Matthew A. Dooley, who facilitated the class, remains, for the moment, in his position at the Joint Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Virginia.

The largest circulation daily newspaper in America, USA Today, reports that two of its journalists were targeted by a campaign to discredit their work shortly after publishing pieces about a Pentagon propaganda operation.

The journalists, Pentagon reporter Tom Vanden Brook and editor Ray Locker, worked together on a long and critical feature story — and did follow-up stories — about a Pentagon campaign to improve the image of U.S. military adventures abroad, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Pentagon program paid contractors — 172, for example, during a three-year period in Iraq — such as California’s Leonie Industries to run what it calls “information operations.”

Yesterday, USA Today published its own story about what one expert called “reputation attacks” that were likely run by people with experience. USA Today reporter Gregory Korte wrote that after inquiries went in to contractors involved with the Pentagon propaganda campaign and stories were published, fake websites and twitter accounts using the journalists’ names began to pop up. Korte explained:

For example, Internet domain registries show the website TomVandenBrook.com was created Jan. 7 — just days after Pentagon reporter Tom Vanden Brook first contacted Pentagon contractors involved in the program. Two weeks after his editor Ray Locker’s byline appeared on a story, someone created a similar site, RayLocker.com, through the same company.

Once in place, the websites and twitter accounts were used to discredit reporting by the journalists. Wikipedia entries for the journalists were also created and misleading information about them published there.

The websites using their names were registered through false addresses and routed through proxy servers to conceal their origins. Registering a website costs about $10 and routing it through a proxy about $50. USA Today noted that if federal funds were used, “it could violate federal law prohibiting the production of propaganda for domestic consumption.”

The Pentagon said it was “unaware” of such activity and deemed it “unacceptable.” A source told Korte that the Pentagon had asked the related contractors if there had been any such activity, and all had denied it, but the inquiries were “informal and did not amount to an official investigation.” After USA Today made inquiries to the Pentagon about the websites, they were taken down.

The propaganda campaigns waged by the Pentagon can be lucrative for both the Defense Department and contractors. The long feature by Vanden Brook and Locker noted:

From 2005 to 2009, such spending rose from $9 million to $580 million a year mostly in Iraq and Afghanistan, Pentagon and congressional records show. Last year, spending dropped to $202 million as the Iraq War wrapped up. A USA TODAY investigation, based on dozens of interviews and a series of internal military reports, shows that Pentagon officials have little proof the programs work and they won’t make public where the money goes. In Iraq alone, more than $173 million was paid to what were identified only as “miscellaneous foreign contractors.”

(HT: Robert Mackey)

More than seventy retired military officers wrote a letter to Congress urging that the body not cut the budget for non-military means of executing U.S. foreign policy. The letter, written under the auspices of the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition’s (USGLC) national security advisory group, spoke out against “disproportionate cuts” that would cut civilian programs while boosting military spending, calling on Congress to ensure that “civilian programs have the resources needed to maintain the hard-fought gains of our military.”

The letter (PDF) defending the so-called international affairs budget that covers non-military spending went on:

Development and diplomacy keep us safer by addressing threats in the most dangerous corners of the world and by preventing conflicts before they occur. The State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development and other civilian-led programs are especially critical at a time when we are asking them to take on greater responsibilities in Iraq and Afghanistan. Addressing today’s challenges with civilian tools costs far less than it does to send in the military in dollars and, more importantly, in terms of the risks to the lives of our men and women in uniform. At just over one percent of federal spending, the International Affairs Budget is a strong return on our investment.

The letter comes just a week after Republican Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI) released a budget that called for the international affairs spending to be slashed by 11 percent, or $6 billion, while boosting military spending by at least $8 billion. Ryan’s budget document took shots at the administration, noting in one section that Obama “has chosen to subordinate national security strategy to his other spending priorities.” Speaking to U.S. News and World Report, Russell Rumbaugh, a former senior Senate Budget Committee aide now with the Stimson Center, said:

This reflects more an ideological statement than any real discussion about what the international budget levels should be.

An Iraq and Afghanistan war veteran summed up the Republican plan: “They cut every tool in the president’s toolbox that isn’t a gun,” said Michael Breen, who works with the Truman National Security Project, recounting how it was a foreign language-enabled diplomat — not their own weapons — that once helped him and fellow soliders get out a jam.

The ostensible aspirations of the Ryan plan, meanwhile, are shared by the USGLC letter signatories, who wrote that they “recognize that we must reduce our nation’s debt.” Yet, with non-military spending such a relatively small piece of the pie and capable of a “strong return” on the investment, the ex-military leaders urged Congress to “support a strong and effective International Affairs Budget and oppose disproportionate cuts to this vital account.”

Republicans and their allies on the right reacted yesterday with expected indignation to Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta’s announcement of a 2013 Pentagon budget and five-year plan that flattens previously proposed spending levels. In a statement, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said:

I am deeply concerned that the size and scope of these cuts would repeat the mistakes of history and leave our forces too small to respond effectively to events that may unfold over the next few years.

House Armed Services Chairman Buck McKeon (R-CA) released a statement saying:

This move ignores a critical lesson in recent history: that while high technology and elite forces give America an edge, they cannot substitute for overwhelming ground forces when we are faced with unforeseen battlefields.

And Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s defense policy adviser Max Boot writes in the neoconservative magazine Commentary:

The fault in that line of thinking was displayed in Iraq and Afghanistan, where we quickly found out there was no substitute for a humble rifleman to impose our will on the enemy at bayonet point. Now the Obama administration is fooling itself into thinking we will never have to fight another major ground war again.

The notion that the Obama administration’s cuts to previously proposed budget numbers — which on average over the next two years actually increase the budget but, accounting for inflation, amounts to holding spending steady — are setting up a U.S. inability to fight a ground war or prepare for the next conflict doesn’t hold water. Even if the full amount of nearly $950 billion in reductions are enacted — if sequestered cuts are added to the ones outlined yesterday — the military budget would still be at 2007 levels, when the U.S. was fighting two ground wars.

Furthermore, McClatchy newspapers today notes that “planned reduction in ground forces by 2017 would still leave a larger military than before the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.” And Center for a New American Security fellow Andrew Exum points out that hardware is much harder to scale up than troop levels should a war arise: “[I]n the event of a major war, you can recruit and train new infantry battalions quicker than you can design and build ships.”

Yesterday, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said the cuts to past projections for military spending were “tough” and “real,” and said they “obviously will cause some pain.” The cuts, as Center for American Progress analysts Lawrence Korb, Max Hoffman and Alex Rothman wrote today, constitute a “positive first step and a major achievement. It will be the first real reduction in baseline defense spending in more than a decade.” But more needs to be done: “[T]here is a long way to go to reach sustainable levels of defense spending and bring the Pentagon budget back in line with historical norms.”

First the hard numbers: The reductions to projected spending resulted from what Panetta called “mandated savings” in his Pentagon presser, imposed by Congress in the Budget Control Act.

The upcoming year’s Pentagon baseline budget will indeed be smaller than this year’s — by $6 billion, representing about a 1.1 percent reduction from 2012′s $531 budget. But, as the L.A. Times notes:

[O]ver the next four years, the Pentagon budget would rise each year, reaching $567 billion by 2017. In inflated adjusted dollars, spending is essentially flat, Pentagon projections show.

The Pentagon budget will actually be rising in nominal terms. In 2017, the Pentagon will be spending $36 billion more than this year. That’s an average 2 percent increase over five years. However, the New York Times adds that “adjusted for inflation, the increases are small enough that they will amount to a slight cut of 1.6 percent of the Pentagon’s base budget over the next five years.” (The numbers exclude spending on the Afghanistan war, which is appropriated separately and expected to drop from $115 billion this year to $88 billion next year.)

Making good on Panetta’s commitment “not to hollow out the force,” McClatchy notes that the Pentagon’s “planned reduction in ground forces by 2017 would still leave a larger military than before the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

The Center for American Progress analysts also took into account the end of the Iraq war and, coming within three years, the end of the Afghanistan war:

Unfortunately, we have done nothing to roll back more than a decade of continuous growth in military spending, despite the end of the war in Iraq and the beginning of our drawdown in Afghanistan.

They wrote that the cuts to proposed spending “represent a small step toward a more reasonable, sustainable strategic stance,” but merely kick the can down the road on other “hard choices the Pentagon must face over the coming years.”