Media Continues to be MIA on the Truth about Iraq War

[Bennet Kelley]

Lessons Not Learned:

The Media Continues to be MIA on the Truth about Iraq War

By Bennet Kelley

A year after the President's "Mission Accomplished" Top Gun moment, the New York Times ran an apology to its readers for its failures in its pre-war Iraq coverage. Over the next four years many media outlets and personalities admitted to failing to give the public the vigilant reporting it deserved and assured us it would never happen again. The Fourth Estate was back on the job and our republic was safe once again - or maybe not.

Last month, after former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan's book, "What Happened? Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception," gave an insider's account of how the Bush administration used propaganda to lead us into an unnecessary war and chided the "liberal media" for not doing its job - the media returned to defending its coverage.

A week later, the Senate Intelligence Committee offered the media another chance at redemption when it finally released Phase II of its assessment on the administration's use of pre-war intelligence on Iraq, revealing that the

administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent in making the case for war.

These findings were consistent with a prior study released by Congressman Waxman and a Center for Public Integrity report that President Bush and administration officials made 935 false statements about Iraq in the two years following September 11th. Nonetheless, the media largely buried the story or ignored it altogether.

Enter the New Republic's neo-con apprentice James Kirchick who claims that Bush never lied to us about Iraq and that to make such a claim is "cowardly and dishonest". Kirchick "rebuts" the Senate Intelligence report by noting a prior Intelligence Committee report found no evidence that the administration attempted to coerce intelligence analysts to change their judgment, but this merely begs the question since, as Senator Feinstein noted in the report, the "cauldron boiling below the surface" was the question of whether information received from "the intelligence community, whether right or wrong, good or bad, were fairly represented to the Congress and to the American people."

Kirchick's one feeble assault on the actual findings of the report, is to claim victory as a result of the finding that the administration overstated limited contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda to falsely link the two "as a single threat" and insinuate "that Iraq played a role in 9/11," since this confirms there were links between the two (regardless of whether they were grossly overstated). He then follows White House talking points by noting the number of Democrats who spoke of Iraq as a dire threat prior to the war, ignoring the fact that those that did were relying upon the information supplied by the Bush administration and that 147 Democrats actually voted against the war.

Kirchick not only ignores the other reports detailing the Bush administration's pre-war lies, but he fails to address the many lies that followed the invasion or to recognize that the pre-war statements were part of the administration's "culture of deception" that, according to Nixon counsel John Dean, has elevated mendacity to the level of public policy. Dean's view is supported by McClellan's book and sworn testimony which charges that Bush failed "to be open and forthright on Iraq" and instead relied on propaganda to sell the war.

I launched BushLies.net shortly before the start of the war because I was frustrated by the media's failure to address the administration's pattern of falsehoods and half-truths which only a few sources such as The New Republic and the Washington Post's Dana Milbank dared report. Five years and nearly 45,000 casualties later, little has changed.

In 2004, a woman who had lost of nephew to an IED in Iraq sent me a copy of a note she sent to the President pointedly asking

I want to know why you lied . . . I want to know how you found a link between the 9-11 attacks and Iraq that no one else had uncovered. . . . You owe me and America answers.

She is right, we deserve answers. Kirchick, apparently, has no interest in any answers that do not fit neatly in his neo-con world view but yet he has the audacity to call those who dare expose neo-con fallacies and sophistry "cowardly and dishonest".

It has been said that the role of a journalist is to speak the truth for the voiceless and in this case the voiceless include over 4,000 families who have lost loved ones in this war. Sadly, the McClellan revelations and the Phase II report reveal that, despite their public penance, much of the media would rather ignore this whole matter and thereby avoid a confrontation with the administration while allowing their past mistakes and the truth to be buried by the dust of history.

Bennet Kelley (bennetkelley.com) is an award-winning columnist, political analyst, publisher of BushLies.net and founder of the Internet Law Center. He also was the co-founder and former national co-chair of the Saxophone Club (the Democratic National Committee's young professional fundraising and outreach arm during the Clinton era).

Originally published on Huffington Post.

Links:
Phase II Report - http://intelligence.senate.gov/080605/phase2a.pdf
Waxman Report - http://oversight.house.gov/IraqOnTheRecord/pdf_admin_iraq_on_the_record_rep.pdf
Kirchick column - http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-kirchick16-2008jun16,0,4808346.story
Center for Public Integrity Report - http://www.publicintegrity.org/WarCard/
BushLies.net - http://www.bushlies.net

[TomInTib]

1. KnR. Great post.

If you are, indeed, Bennet Kelly, I am certainly glad you found this site to post your stuff. I have seen some of your work at HuffPo and always enjoy it.

Tom

[Bennet Kelley]

3. thanks!

we are one and the same, although I am not the priest whose books they advertise next to my name on HuffPo. That was my uncle.

[Raster]

2. Excellent!!! Welcome to DU!

Wake up America!:kick:

[dlawbailey]

4. NY Times: Bush Winning Iraq War!

I know! I didn't think it was possible either! But then the NYT told me so this morning! Cool, right?

"http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/21/world/middleeast/21security.html"

Just look at the picture!!! The surge has worked! Kids are in playgrounds! Soon there will be victory, baby!

It'll be just like in Afghanistan! That victory was AWESOME, dude! Remember that?

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9807E4D71E30F933A25750C0A9649C8B63"

Strangely, the Times doesn't.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/20/opinion/20fri2.html

But anyway, they are totally going to report what Petraeus is going to "report" to the Nation -- in sober, careful, somewhat tentative, yes, but hopeful words : Victory in Iraq may finally be on its way.

The Bush Administration hasn't won the peace in Louisiana yet, - still a need for troops there, three years after Katrina, still haven't quite sorted out the security situation IN AN AMERICAN CITY AFTER THREE YEARS - but it's very important for us to realize - the New York Times believes - that the Administration is making things better in Iraq.

http://www.washblog.com/story/2008/6/21/165142/553

[Ztarbod]

5. Partisan politics at its worst

There is plenty of fault for both major parties in sending this country on an invasion of Iraq. No justification, just fault. The congress and the president, democrats and republicans, teamed up on this one.

[Bennet Kelley]

6. yes and no

You are right that Congress deserves blame for doing exactly what the media did - failing to critically evaluate White House claims on Iraq (or even read the classified analysis provided before the vote). That is true of both Democrats and Republicans.

But I think misleading Congress and the American people in making the case for war is a far greater offense and one that history will always remember and never forgive.

[Faygo Kid]

7. A pleasure to kick this.

When the best analysis is a Lara Logan appearance on The Daily Show, you know the media consists of cowardly fuckwads.

[Tutonic]

8. The Media was co-opted by the Bush Administration.

The Administration's "succeeding in Iraq", "winning", "mission accomplished" has always been based on rhetoric or the use of carefully planted phrases. The Bush Administration took precautions to pursue media complicity to avoid publishing pictures of death or personal destruction in Iraq and to instead focus on carefully crafted articles that always presented the military conflict in terms of saving western civilization from terrorists. The US consumer never fully witnessed the death and destruction of war--like in Vietnam and therefore accepted what was communicated by press secretaries, members of the military, government agents (Bush, Powell, Rice, etc). Embedded journalists coexisted with government agents and elevated their stature and utility to the American public through exaggeration of their war-torn experiences and observations in the "war" zone--when for the most part American journalists were kept well within the confines of the green zone beyond conflict areas. This was not the case for many BBC reporters and civilian Iraqis who worked during the day in the Green Zone. They tell a different story--one that Kirchick would label as cowardly and dishonest. The US media whores in their quest to become the next Rather or Murrow during wartime scaled the divide that up until 9-11 existed between the media and government. The dividing wall presupposed a level of objectivity and distance. The quid pro quo complicity embedded network and cable journalists alike--became a cadre of "Super" journalists. However, the objectivity, the invisible division, the questioning voice was lost. Thus it is easy to see someone such as Kirchick become "embedded" with his pronouncement that anyone who claims that Bush lied is "cowardly and dishonest." Cowardly? Dishonest? The press has turned a complete 180 degrees in its condemnation of the public and any unembedded journalist that would merely ask a question that Rather, Murrow, Jennings, Conkrite and a host of other newsreaders would have unabashedly asked forty years ago. How then does one begin to question the actions of authority if a different viewpoint becomes accepted as cowardice by the main stream media? How too does one speak out about the lack of clear or consistent information if this becomes accepted as dishonesty? Doesn't this closely resemble fascism. The occupation of Iraq has become a rhetorical war of words that will not be won by the massive build-up of troop levels on the ground. Only when the media becomes "unembedded" and removes complicity with the government will the war be won.