The Marprelate Tracts
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Saturday, June 21, 2003

Where is the outrage?

 

Where are the high priests and priestesses of our nation’s moral health when the occupant of the white house can lie to start a war in order to boost his sagging poll numbers?

 

No nukes, no “weapons of mass destruction” not even a chemical weapons trailer as alleged by the liar’n’thief Dubya (in case you haven’t heard, and I can’t imagine why our liberal media might have buried this item… but it turns out that those trailers were likely used for filling weather balloons with hydrogen).

 

Gee, isn’t it funny how the press in Britain is so much more savage than the press here – unless you compare it to what happened when Clinton was president….hmmm, Bush exalted but both Blair and Clinton excoriated… wonder if media moguls like Rupert Murdoch or Conrad Black could enlighten us on the key differences?

 

And speaking of Conrad Black, the heat was turned up this past week to prove that his Telegraph exclusives concerning “Iraqi documents” are not forgeries. Why? because of their similarities to these forged “documents” alleging the same thing. Read that story and then read this one, where the Christian Science Monitor smugly peddled lies – now proven lies – with the following arrogant statement:

 

Jay Jostyn, communications manager for The Christian Science Monitor, declined to respond to Galloway's statement. ``The story speaks for itself and that's kind of how we're leaving it,'' he said.

 

Yep, that’s how they left it – until they were exposed.

 

My, aren’t there a lot of forgeries floating around? First forged “documents” -- cited by no less an authority than Dubya during his state of the union address -- “proving” Iraq had a nuclear weapon program, now forged “documents” aimed at discrediting Iraq War opponents… I wonder how many other unproven assertions await discovery?

 

Of course the press would actually want to discover such items, and with Dubya sitting in the white house they just don’t seem to have the fire in their belly….

 

All except Paul Krugman – who is at the top of his game with this gem (“Who’s Accountable,” 6/10/03):

 

The Bush and Blair administrations are trying to silence critics — many of them current or former intelligence analysts — who say that they exaggerated the threat from Iraq. Last week a Blair official accused Britain's intelligence agencies of plotting against the government. (Tony Blair's government has since apologized for January's "dodgy dossier.") In this country, Colin Powell has declared that questions about the justification for war are "outrageous."

 

Yet dishonest salesmanship has been the hallmark of the Bush administration's approach to domestic policy. And it has become increasingly clear that the selling of the war with Iraq was no different.…

 

Last fall former U.S. intelligence officials began warning that official pronouncements were being based on "cooked intelligence." British intelligence officials were so concerned that, The Independent reports, they kept detailed records of the process. "A smoking gun may well exist over W.M.D., but it may not be to the government's liking," a source said.

 

But the Bush administration found scraps of intelligence suiting its agenda, and officials began making strong pronouncements. "Saddam Hussein recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons — the very weapons the dictator tells us he does not have," Mr. Bush said on Feb. 8. On March 16 Dick Cheney declared, "We believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons."

 

It's now two months since Baghdad fell — and according to The A.P., military units searching for W.M.D.'s have run out of places to look.

 

One last point: the Bush administration's determination to see what it wanted to see led not just to a gross exaggeration of the threat Iraq posed, but to a severe underestimation of the problems of postwar occupation. When Gen. Eric Shinseki, the Army chief of staff, warned that occupying Iraq might require hundreds of thousands of soldiers for an extended period, Paul Wolfowitz said he was "wildly off the mark" — and the secretary of the Army may have been fired for backing him up. Now a force of 150,000 is stretched thin, facing increasingly frequent guerrilla attacks, and a senior officer told The Washington Post that it might be two years before an Iraqi government takes over. The Independent reports that British military chiefs are resisting calls to send more forces, fearing being "sucked into a quagmire."

 

I'll tell you what's outrageous. It's not the fact that people are criticizing the administration; it's the fact that nobody is being held accountable for misleading the nation into war.


2:23:57 PM    

Now readers tell me true did I miss something here?...

 

Jayson Blair, who has been “ghost-writing” for the NY Times since June, 1998 has his lies uncovered (and believe me, they are not that much different from what the rest of the media does – their handling of the truth makes sausage-making look like a fine art) in 2003.

 

So as a consequence, the head editor, Howell Raines, who became head editor just before 9/11, 2001 – the same guy who cleans up the Blair mess – is canned?

 

And replaced by his predecessor, Joe Lelyveld, the very guy who presided over the unfolding of the mess to begin with?!?

 

Sounds to me like Raines is being taken out not because of Blair – after all, he’s the one who actually did the paper a favor by removing him – but rather that Blair’s situation is being used merely as an excuse. Really, if your concern was what Blair did, and the newsroom ethics that allowed him to get away with it, would you really want to bring back the very guy under whom Blair got his start and under whom such “ethics” were tolerated? Or would you rather keep on the fellow who uncovered the lax ethics and tried to correct the situation? Sounds to me like Lelyveld’s appointment merely says “no more self-scrutiny” and “no more bad PR.” Enforcing journalistic ethics (BTW an oxymoron that ranks with “military intelligence”) leads to bad PR, particularly when you uncover that slime left by the former head editor, who – not surprisingly – was extremely popular with the newsroom folk. And why wouldn’t he be, since apparently he let them do whatever, as long as it was salacious and sensational – ethics and truth be damned.

 

It’s no secret that Raines was reviled by the substantial and influential conservative forces that now so dominate the media landscape, not to mention by the Bush regime. I suspect his removal had a lot more to do with reestablishing rapport the NYT’s had with the rich, powerful, the conservative and the connected when Lelyveld was aggressively peddling lies about Whitewater among other things (also see here, here and here) than it did with any concern over the truth. And what did Raines think he was doing… exposing the NYT to bad publicity – all in the name of righting the record? No wonder he had to go…


1:06:32 PM    



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