Failed New York Times Reveals Think Tank It’s Cited for Years to Be Corrupt Arms Booster

A recent New York Times article (8/7/16) detailed, in often scathing terms, what many media critics already knew: that think tanks are frequently not objective, neutral arbiters of information, but corporate- and government-funded agenda-promoters with an academic veneer to give the appearance of impartiality.

One of the two think tanks the Times’ Eric Lipton and Brooke Williams raked over the coals was the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which published a report advocating the expansion of drone sales while being funded by drone makers, namely General Atomics (emphasis added):

As a think tank, the Center for Strategic and International Studies did not file a lobbying report, but the goals of the effort were clear.

“Political obstacles to export,” read the agenda of one closed-door “working group” meeting organized by Mr. Brannen that included Tom Rice, a lobbyist in General Atomics’ Washington office, on the invitation lists, the emails show.

Boeing and Lockheed Martin, drone makers that were major CSIS contributors, were also invited to attend the sessions, the emails show. The meetings and research culminated with a report released in February 2014 that reflected the industry’s priorities.

“I came out strongly in support of export,” Mr. Brannen, the lead author of the study, wrote in an email to Kenneth B. Handelman, the deputy assistant secretary of State for defense trade controls.

But the effort did not stop there.

Mr. Brannen initiated meetings with Defense Department officials and congressional staff to push for the recommendations, which also included setting up a new Pentagon office to give more focus to acquisition and deployment of drones. The center also stressed the need to ease export limits at a conference it hosted at its headquarters featuring top officials from the Navy, the Air Force and the Marine Corps….

“CSIS will not represent any donor before any government office or entity, including congressional lawmakers and executive branch officials,” Mr. Hamre, the chief executive, said in his statement to the Times. “We do not lobby.”

The result was a victory for General Atomics.

As the Times also notes, CSIS is funded largely by Western and Gulf monarchy governments, arms dealers and oil companies, such as Raytheon, Boeing, Shell, the United Arab Emirates, US Department of Defense, UK Home Office, General Dynamics, Exxon Mobil, Northrop Grumman, Chevron and others.

Anyone with a seven-year-old’s understanding of causality can conclude that CSIS would, in the aggregate, promote the expansion of the military and surveillance state, since that’s who pays their bills; what the Times did was reveal a specific, rather direct example, using heretofore secret documents.

New York Times readers didn’t need a smoking gun in any event, since CSIS’s agenda can be seen with simple inference. Since it was the Times that broached the topic, let’s use what CSIS fellows have written or said in the Times over the past year, and

.