UPDATED - ColdType

EMBEDDED: WEAPONS OF MASS DECEPTION
Bush Administration has followed since, appeared
in the News Hour with Jim Lehrer on PBS. He
revealed that the Administration was planning to
link Saddam Hussein to Osama Bin Laden.
The cat was out of the bag. Others reported
Dick Cheney’s call for war on Iraq on that day. It
was not classified. None of it was. None of our
media wanted to say that the emperor had no
clothes, if just possibly, just plausibly, and parenthetically,
he did.
Taking on this naked ‘Emperor’ also meant
being willing to incur the wrath of what the head
of MSNBC called the “patriotism police,” aided
and abetted by an ascendant Fox News Channel
which smartly exploited the political environment
that the Bush Administration cultivated.
THE MEDIA FAILURE
AN examination of the sordid story of media coverage
of this war reveals a media failure as blatant
and troubling as the record of failures by
the Administration in Iraq and the war on terror.
Less than a year after Bush’s exaggerated and
alarmist proclamation in Ohio, and just a few
months after the war in Iraq was said to end,
fresh doubts about the reasons for the war are
being raised by pundits, members of Congress
and the “we-told-you-so” activists of the largest
anti-war movement in history.
No one is still clear on the real agenda for the
war. Was it oil, power, or global imperial ambition?
Was it regime change or region change?
Was it to satisfy the macho needs of unhappy
white males who found new role models in
Bush’s new action army, as writer Norman
Mailer opines. Or was there a higher power
involved, some divine purpose as suggested by
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the President himself, who said in June, 2003
while visiting the Holy Land that “God instructed
me to strike at Saddam.”
“You can’t put it plainer than that” Chris Floyd
commented in The Moscow Times, “The whole
chaotic rigmarole of Security Council votes and
UN inspections and congressional approval and
Colin Powell’s whizbang Powerpoint displays of
“proof” and Bush’s own tearful prayers for
“peace” – it was all a sham, a meaningless exercise.
“No votes, no inspections, no proof or lack
of proof – in fact, no earthly reason whatsoever –
could have stopped Bush’s aggressive war on
Iraq. It was God’s unalterable will: the Lord of
Hosts gave a direct order for George W. Bush to
“strike at Saddam.”
A TIME FOR REASSESSMENT
COLORFUL polemic aside, these issues will be
debated for years to come. Already the journalism
reviews and op-ed columnists are debating
the role the media played-or refused to play. This
is a time for reassessment.
One thing is certain: that the war coverage of
the US invasion of Iraq is unlikely to win the kind
of praise that Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black
heaped on major media outlets in the aftermath
of the Pentagon Papers case. “In my view, far
from deserving condemnation for their courageous
reporting, The New York Times, the
Washington Post, and other newspapers should
be commended for serving the purpose that the
Founding Fathers saw so clearly, “ he wrote.
“In revealing the workings of government that
led to the Vietnam War, the newspapers nobly
did precisely that which the Founders hoped and
trusted they would do.” ●