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The
Deadly Lies of Reliable Sources
Ninety-five
days before the invasion of Iraq began, I sat in the ornate
Baghdad office of the deputy prime minister as he talked about
the U.N. weapons inspectors in his country. “They are doing
their jobs freely, without any interruption,” Tariq Aziz said.
“And still the warmongering language in Washington is keeping
on.”
The White House, according to Aziz, had written the latest
U.N. Security Council resolution “in a way to be certainly
refused.” But, he added pointedly: “We surprised them by saying,
‘OK, we can live with it. We’ll be patient enough to live
with it and prove to you and to the world that your allegations
about weapons of mass destruction are not true.’ ”
Speaking that night in mid-December 2002, Tariq Aziz—dressed
in a well-cut business suit, witty and fluent in English—epitomized
the urbanity of evil. As a high-ranking servant of a murderous
despot, he lied often. But not that time.
With knee-jerk professional reflexes, American journalists
assumed that Iraqi officials were lying about weapons of mass
destruction—and also assumed that officials such as George
W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and (especially) Colin Powell were
being truthful. Overall, the news media helped to create a
great market for war.
An author who soared in that bullish market was Kenneth Pollack,
the former CIA analyst whose 2002 book The Threatening
Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq was a media-driven smash.
A frequent presence on national television, Pollack eagerly
promoted a book and a war at the same time. He called for
a “massive invasion” of Iraq.
Now, in the current issue of the Atlantic magazine,
Pollack has a long essay with a somewhat regretful tone. “What
we have learned about Iraq’s WMD programs since the fall of
Baghdad leads me to conclude that the case for war with Iraq
was considerably weaker than I believed,” he writes. “I had
been convinced that Iraq was only years away from having a
nuclear weapon—probably only four or five years. That estimate
was clearly off, possibly by quite a bit.”
But most journalists and pundits touted such estimates as
reasonable because the media pros were predisposed to believe
the pronouncements from administration officials. Now we’re
told that only hindsight has provided us the chance to see
how wrong those estimates were. That’s nonsense.
Extensive information, poking huge holes in key deceptions,
was readily available at the time—but major U.S. media outlets
are still reporting as though Bush’s pre-war claims were credible
when they were made. In reality, any “intelligence failure”
was dwarfed by a contemporaneous media failure.
(If you have any doubt that the Bush gang’s WMD claims could
have been recognized as transparently bogus from the start,
take a look at dozens of news releases assembled during many
pre-war months by my colleagues at the Institute for Public
Accuracy. Those releases, from 2002 and the first months of
2003, remain posted at www.accuracy.org without any change
in wording.)
In late January, Senate committees heard testimony from the
man who headed the 1,400-member weapons inspection team in
Iraq during the last half of 2003. Longtime hawk and Bush
2000 campaign supporter David Kay declared: “Let me begin
by saying, we were almost all wrong.” And: “It is highly unlikely
that there were large stockpiles of deployed militarized chemical
and biological weapons there.”
A week later, on Feb. 4, the Pentagon’s Donald Rumsfeld appeared
before the Senate Armed Services Committee and simply drew
from an inexhaustible supply of fog: “It was the consensus
of the intelligence community, and of successive administrations
of both political parties, and of the Congress, that reviewed
the same intelligence, and much of the international community,
I might add, that Saddam Hussein was pursuing weapons of mass
destruction.”
In the grand tradition of manipulatively farcical commissions
appointed by a president to assess his devious actions, a
front-page New York Times article reported with delicate
euphemisms that Bush’s new panel will “examine American intelligence
operations, including a study of possible misjudgments about
Iraq’s unconventional weapons.”
“Possible”—as
though there’s still any question about the pre-war intelligence
verdicts proclaimed by the likes of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld
and Powell.
“Misjudgments”—as
though the White House hadn’t summoned any and all pseudo-evidence
to rationalize its from-the-outset determination to invade
Iraq.
After 27 years as a CIA analyst, Ray McGovern knows a few
things about propaganda. He notes that “the ‘investigation’
is slated to go past the election. Members will be picked
by the president, and the scope is unconscionably wider than
is necessary.” McGovern contends that “the key question for
2004 is whether the administration’s stranglehold on the media
can be loosened to the point where the electorate can wake
up, take away the president’s driver’s license and put an
end to the reckless endangerment.”
The media war of 2004 is well underway. To the victor goes
the White House.
—Norman
Solomon
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