[Peace-discuss] Moyers' "Record of Iraq War Lies" April 25
Karen Medina
kmedina at uiuc.edu
Fri Apr 13 11:18:25 CDT 2007
Dear Peace list,
Watch PBS on April 25th, 9:00 to 10:30 PM
Bill Moyers' "Record of Iraq War Lies"
(I haven't verified if this is Central time or not)
-karen medina (multitasking)
> Record of Iraq War Lies to Air April 25 on PBS
> By David Swanson
> t r u t h o u t | Guest Columnist
>
> Thursday 12 April 2007
>
> 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.
>
> ---------
>
> This article by David Swanson was first published at
>http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/21146.
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