@@ New York Times LIES exposed @@
Arash
October 24, 2005
Media, Democrats Complicit in Rush to War
By Patrick Buchanan
While President Bush and his War Cabinet bear full moral responsibility for Iraq,
they could not have taken us to war without the complicity of the "adversary press"
and "loyal opposition".
Today, this town is salivating over the prospect that Karl Rove
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Rove) and Irv Lewis "Scooter" Libby
(http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ind/libby/libby.php) will be indicted for outing Joe
Wilson's wife as a CIA operative (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plame_affair).
Thirty months ago, many of those anxious to see the White House brought down were
hauling its water. Consider the role played by our newspaper of record, The New York
Times.
To stampede us into a war neoconservatives had been plotting for a decade, Douglas
Feith (http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ind/feith/feith.php), the Pentagon's No. 3, set
up an Office of Special Plans (OSP). Its role: Cherry-pick the intel that Saddam was
acquiring weapons of mass destruction and was hell-bent on using them on the United
States. Then, stove-pipe the hot stuff to the White House Iraq Group, WHIG
(http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=White_House_Iraq_Group) and ignore the
contradictory evidence.
A primary source of the hot Intel about poison gas vans and nuclear bomb programs was
a tight-knit exile group led by Ahmed Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress
and neocon-Pentagon favorite to lead the new Iraq.
But once the hyped Intel suggesting Saddam was an imminent and mortal threat had been
extracted, the WHIG needed to run it through a media centrifuge to convert it into
hard news.
Enter Judith Miller, self-styled "Miss Run Amok" and the go-to girl for the War Party
(http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/26911).
Judith Miller (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Miller_%28journalist%29) of New
York Times took the cherry-picked Intel and planted it on page one, enabling War
Party propagandists to hit the TV talk-show circuit and reference ominous stories in
The New York Times about how imminent a threat Saddam had become.
These propagandists were parroting their own pre-cooked intel, but it now had the
imprimatur of the New York Times. The White House had seduced the good Gray Lady of
43rd Street into turning tricks for war.
While the New York Times has played this role before, it was usually in leftist
causes. In the early 1930s, Walter Duranty
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Duranty) got a Pulitzer for covering up Stalin's
starvation of the Ukrainians (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor).
In the late 1950s, Herbert Matthews used the New York Times' front page to introduce
Fidel Castro to the world as the "Robin Hood of the Sierra Maestra". And who can
forget the New York Times columnists who assured us how much better off the Cambodian
people would be under the benevolent rule of Pol Pot
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pol_Pot) ?
But the indispensable enablers of war are the New Democrats and potential
presidential nominees, Senators Kerry, Edwards, Clinton, Biden, and Bayh. Fearful
that Bush and Rove would use their refusal to authorize war in October 2002 to
impeach Democrats' patriotism, they voted to give him a blank check for war. Six
months later, Bush cashed it.
The Democratic Senate could have slowed the stampede. And if it could not have
stopped it, it might at least have gotten answers to crucial questions. How many
troops would be needed? What was the probability of guerrilla war? What was our exit
strategy? Instead, the Senate surrendered the war powers the Founding Fathers
reserved for Congress to the president and abdicated its constitutional duty.
And what of the punditocracy, which cheer-led us into war? Did they serve their
country, or did they service the king and his courtiers by reciting such fairy tales
as Mohammed Atta's secret meeting in Prague with his Iraqi controllers?
In the run-up to war, from left, center and right, voices were asking exactly what
threat Saddam posed to America.
His nation had been crushed in six weeks and his army routed in 100 hours in Desert
Storm. His weapons factories had been demolished. Terrified of U.S. retaliation, he
had not used one WMD. The United Nations had rummaged through Iraq and destroyed
other WMD and their factories. He had not imported a tank, plane, or gun in 12 years.
Mohamed ElBaradei and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) had scoured Iraq
and found nothing. Saddam had invited the CIA in to have a look.
Though 40,000 U.S.-British sorties had been flown over Iraq since 1991, he had been
unable to shoot down a single plane. There was no evidence he or his regime had any
role in 9/11, any connection to the anthrax attack, any tie to al-Qaeda, or committed
any act of terror against us.
Why, then, was it necessary to go to war?
Whatever the sins of the WHIG in savaging critics, however, at least most of them
believed in this war. But what is to be said for those who transmitted to a trusting
public what they had to know or at least suspect were propaganda fabrications to dupe
the people into sending their sons and daughters to fight and die in an unnecessary
war? This is the greater scandal. This is the real scandal.
* Patrick J. Buchanan was twice a candidate for the Republican presidential
nomination and the Reform Party’s candidate in 2000. He served three presidents in
the White House.
http://www.antiwar.com/pat/?articleid=7736