Pentagon Press Office Now a Classified Area

Icing on the Sad Media Cake.

The Defense Department has declared that its press office is now a classified space inaccessible to journalists.

Acting Pentagon press secretary Joel Valdez confirmed the designation on X:

The Pentagon Press Office has been redesignated as a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility due to speechwriters from the Office of the Secretary of War sharing the facility.

These speechwriters routinely handle classified material … As a result, journalists will no longer be permitted to enter the office space. There’s nothing controversial about that.

The Eisenhower Media Network disagrees with this decision. Designating the Pentagon Press Office a classified space restricts media access to U.S. military leadership, and is part of a broader attempt at keeping the public in the dark.

“This is nothing less than information warfare aimed at controlling the perceptions of the American people,” says Senior Fellow John Rosenberger, summarizing EMN’s general consensus. “There is no transparency whatsoever from this war-mongering administration.”

Keep It Hidden

“The Pentagon’s real goal is to hide its incompetence and incoherence,” says Senior Advisor Bill Hartung.

What might that include?

Senior Fellow Matthew Hoh suggests, details about the “murder of over 200 unnamed sailors in international waters, the kidnapping of a foreign head of state [Nicolás Maduro], fleets of ships that can’t sail and aircraft that can’t fly, $500 billion more for a Pentagon that can’t pass an audit, and a war of choice that the U.S. can’t win and can’t get out of.”

Other issues that the administration is trying to conceal include the “botched special operations raid to seize Iran’s enriched uranium, which was couched as a downed pilot extraction; the actual waste and destruction of U.S. military bases in Gulf Cooperation Council nations; the total loss of manned and unmanned aircraft; the dangerous depletion of the U.S. military’s offensive and defensive missile stocks — anything that reflects we are losing this war,” says John Rosenberger.

“This reminds me of Leslie Nielson in The Naked Gun standing in front of an exploding fireworks factory and yelling, ‘There is nothing to see here!’” says Matthew Hoh. “I’m surprised this administration hadn’t shut down the press office sooner.”

Historical Perspective

“For four years I managed all of the Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff’s speech writers and for four years I managed the Secretary of State’s. We never intentionally used classified information. We even had many key speeches run by intel personnel to ensure nothing classified got into them inadvertently,” explains Senior Advisor Larry Wilkerson.

“The American people are [now] fed lies, misinformation, and spin to the effect that nothing the administration says or U.S. Central Command reports can be believed,” says John Rosenberger.

“It’s no longer a press office: it’s a suppress office,” Senior Fellow Bill Astore notes, offering a new motto for the Pentagon: “Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies.”

Moving Forward

U.S. media have long been characterized by big business interests, news deserts, and government censorship. Designating the press office a classified area is icing on the cake.

“George Orwell’s phrase in 1984 — ‘War is Peace’ — is no more absurd than the Pentagon’s new approach to classifying the press room,” Bill Hartung says. “When was the last time Pete Hegseth or any other administration official provided actual information in a speech?”

“The American people deserve far better,” says John Rosenberger.

“Make Orwell Fiction Again!” EMN Director Dennis Laich concludes.

To do so would require shedding the two-party system that caters to corporate greed and keeps the country at war and the working class immiserated.

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