[lit-ideas] Record Of Iraq War Lies To Air April 25 On PBS
- From: "Andreas Ramos" <andreas@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "Lit-Ideas" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2007 09:38:37 -0700
RECORD OF IRAQ WAR LIES TO AIR APRIL 25 ON PBS
By David Swanson
TruthOut
April 12, 2007
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/041207D.shtml
Bill Moyers has put together an amazing 90-minute video documenting the lies
that the Bush administration told to sell the Iraq war to the American
public, with a special focus on how the media led the charge. I've watched
an advance copy and read a transcript, and the most important thing I can
say about it is: Watch PBS from 9:00 to 10:30 PM on Wednesday, April 25.
Spending that 90 minutes will actually save you time because you'll never
watch television news again -- not even on PBS, which comes in for its own
share of criticism.
While a great many pundits, not to mention presidents, look remarkably
stupid or dishonest in the four-year-old clips included in "Buying the War,"
it's hard to take any spiteful pleasure in holding them to account, and not
just because the killing and dying they facilitated is ongoing, but also
because of what this video reveals about the mindset of members of the DC
media. Moyers interviews media personalities, including Dan Rather, who
clearly both understand what the media did wrong and are unable to really
see it as having been wrong or avoidable.
It's great to see an American media outlet tell this story so well, but it
leads one to ask: When will Congress tell it? While the Democrats were in
the minority, they clamored for hearings and investigations, they pushed
Resolutions of Inquiry into the White House Iraq Group and the Downing
Street Minutes. Now in the majority, they've gone largely silent. The chief
exception is the House Judiciary Committee's effort to question Condoleezza
Rice next week about the forged Niger documents.
But what comes out of watching this show is a powerful realization that no
investigation is needed by Congress, just as no hidden information was
needed for the media to get the story right in the first place. The claims
that the White House made were not honest mistakes. But neither were they
deceptions. They were transparent and laughably absurd falsehoods. And they
were high crimes and misdemeanors.
The program opens with video of President Bush saying "Iraq is part of a war
on terror. It's a country that trains terrorists. It's a country that can
arm terrorists. Saddam Hussein and his weapons are a direct threat to this
country."
Was that believable or did the media play along? The next shot is of a press
conference at which Bush announces that he has a script telling him which
reporters to call on and in what order. Yet the reporters play along,
raising their hands after each comment, pretending that they might be called
on despite the script.
Video shows Richard Perle claiming that Saddam Hussein worked with al Qaeda
and that Iraqis would greet American occupiers as liberators. Here are the
Weekly Standard, The Wall Street Journal, William Safire from The New York
Times, Charles Krauthammer and Jim Hoagland from The Washington Post, all
demanding an overthrow of Iraq's government. George Will is seen saying that
Hussein "has anthrax, he loves biological weapons, he has terrorist training
camps, including 747s to practice on."
But was that even plausible? Bob Simon of "60 Minutes" tells Moyers he
wasn't buying it. He says he saw the idea of a connection between Hussein
and al Qaeda as an absurdity: "Saddam, as most tyrants, was a total control
freak. He wanted total control of his regime. Total control of the country.
And to introduce a wild card like al Qaeda in any sense was just something
he would not do. So I just didn't believe it for an instant."
Knight Ridder Bureau Chief John Walcott didn't buy it either. He assigned
Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landay to do the reporting and they found the
Bush claims to be quite apparently false. For example, when the Iraqi
National Congress (INC) fed The New York Times's Judith Miller a story
through an Iraqi defector claiming that Hussein had chemical and biological
weapons labs under his house, Landay noticed that the source was a Kurd,
making it very unlikely he would have learned such secrets. But Landay also
noticed that it was absurd to imagine someone putting a biological weapons
lab under his house.
But absurd announcements were the order of the day. A video clip shows a Fox
anchor saying, "A former top Iraqi nuclear scientist tells Congress Iraq
could build three nuclear bombs by 2005." And the most fantastic stories of
all were fed to David Rose at Vanity Fair Magazine. We see a clip of him
saying, "The last training exercise was to blow up a full-size mock-up of a
US destroyer in a lake in central Iraq."
Landay comments: "Or jumping into pits of fouled water and having to kill a
dog with your bare teeth. I mean, this was coming from people who are
appearing in all of these stories, and sometimes their rank would change."
Forged documents from Niger could not have gotten noticed in this stew of
lies. Had there been some real documents honestly showing something, that
might have stood out and caught more eyes. Walcott describes the way the INC
would feed the same information to the vice president and secretary of
defense that it fed to a reporter, and the reporter would then get the
claims confirmed by calling the White House or the Pentagon. Landay adds:
"And let's not forget how close these people were to this administration,
which raises the question, was there coordination? I can't tell you that
there was, but it sure looked like it."
Simon from "60 Minutes" tells Moyers that when the White House claimed a
9/11 hijacker had met with a representative of the Iraqi government in
Prague, "60 Minutes" was easily able to make a few calls and find out that
there was no evidence for the claim. "If we had combed Prague," he says,
"and found out that there was absolutely no evidence for a meeting between
Mohammad Atta and the Iraqi intelligence figure. If we knew that, you had to
figure the administration knew it. And yet they were selling the connection
between al Qaeda and Saddam."
Moyers questions a number of people about their awful work, including Dan
Rather, Peter Beinart and then Chairman and CEO of CNN Walter Isaacson. And
he questions Simon, who soft-pedaled the story and avoided reporting that
there was no evidence.
Landay at Knight Ridder did report the facts when it counted, but not enough
people paid attention. He tells Moyers that all he had to do was read the UN
weapons inspectors' reports online to know that the White House was lying to
us. When Cheney said that Hussein was close to acquiring nuclear weapons,
Landay knew he was lying: "You need tens of thousands of machines called
'centrifuges' to produce highly enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon.
You've got to house those in a fairly big place, and you've got to provide a
huge amount of power to this facility."
Moyers also hits Tim Russert with a couple of tough questions. Russert
expressed regret for not having included any skeptical voices by saying he
wished his phone had rung. So Moyers begins the next segment by saying, "Bob
Simon didn't wait for the phone to ring," and describing Simon's reporting.
Simon says he knew the claims about aluminum tubes were false because "60
Minutes" called up some scientists and researchers and asked them. Howard
Kurtz of The Washington Post says that skeptical stories did not get placed
on the front page because they were not "definitive."
Moyers shows brief segments of an "Oprah" show in which she has on only
pro-war guests and silences a caller who questions some of the White House
claims. Just in time for the eternal election season, Moyers includes clips
of Hillary Clinton and John Kerry backing the war on the basis of Bush and
Cheney's lies. But we also see clips of Robert Byrd and Ted Kennedy getting
it right.
The Washington Post editorialized in favor of the war 27 times, and
published in 2002 about 1,000 articles and columns on the war. But the Post
gave a huge anti-war march a total of 36 words. "What got even less ink,"
Moyers says, "was the release of the National Intelligence Estimate." Even
the misleading partial version that the media received failed to fool a
careful eye.
Landay recalls: "It said that the majority of analysts believed that those
tubes were for the nuclear weapons program. It turns out though, that the
majority of intelligence analysts had no background in nuclear weapons." Was
Landay the only one capable of noticing this detail?
Colin Powell's UN presentation comes in for similar quick debunking. We
watch a video clip of Powell complaining that Iraq has covered a test-stand
with a roof. But AP reporter Charles Hanley comments, "What he neglected to
mention was that the inspectors were underneath watching what was going on."
Powell cited a UK paper, but it very quickly came out that the paper had
been plagiarized from a college student's work found online. The British
press pointed that out. The US let it slide. But anyone looking for the
facts found it quickly.
Moyers's wonderful movie is marred by a single line -- the next to the last
sentence -- in which he says, "The number of Iraqis killed, over 35,000 last
year alone, is hard to pin down." A far more accurate figure could have been
found very easily.
............
THE PREMIERE OF BILL MOYERS JOURNAL, ³BUYING THE WAR²
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/moyersonamerica/index.html
The premiere of BILL MOYERS JOURNAL, ³Buying the War,² explores the role of
the press in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, including how the
government¹s claims about weapons of mass destruction and terrorist ties to
Saddam Hussein were largely accepted at face value by the mainstream media
and cheer-leaded by the ³partisan press.² The marketing of the war has been
much examined, but BILL MOYERS JOURNAL looks at how key elements of the
media bought into the propaganda. ³Buying the War² features interviews with
Dan Rather, formerly of CBS; Tim Russert of ³Meet the Press²; Bob Simon of
³60 Minutes²; Walter Pincus of the Washington Post; Walter Isaacson, then
president of CNN; editor at large of The New Republic and author Peter
Beinart; talk show host Phil Donahue; and James Wolcott, Jonathan Landay and
Warren Strobel of Knight Ridder, which was acquired by the McClatchy Company
in 2006. Virtually alone, Knight Ridder asked for the hard evidence to back
up the president¹s justification of the war.
³We¹re sending young men and women, and nowadays not so young men and women,
to risk their lives. And everyone wants to be behind them. And everyone
should be behind them,² says James Walcott, Washington bureau chief of
Knight Ridder. ³The question for us in journalism is, are we really behind
them when we fail to do our jobs?²
............
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