Morning news gave me the blues

[Quahog]

I was watching the local ABC affiliate in Providence RI this morning while pressing a shirt for work. I was mainly interested in the weather outlook for the day, deciding whether to brave the elements and ride my environmentally friendly motorcycle to the office (31 degrees at 6:30... no thanks!).

Then the anchor-boy spokesmodel said a very interesting thing. I remember his words exactly, because it struck me as overt editorializing. He said that yesterday the 9-11 commission had "heard evidence that nothing could have been done to prevent the attacks on the US."

You know, we here at DU watch the live coverage on C-SPAN, or the reruns, or read the transcripts. We bounce the testimony we hear off of others on this forum, and we compare and contrast what's being said with what we have learned through our own research over the last two years. But the vast majority of Americans watch their local news at best, Fox at worst. And this is the official talking point coming out of ABC as of this morning, that the commission is hearing evidence that nothing could have been done, by bush or anyone else. I don't blame the anchor or even the local news station... I'm sure this copy came straight off the wire from the home office. NBC and CBS are undoubtedly spinning in much the same way.

My impression is that this is the very conclusion that the commission has pre-determined, but at this point, it doesn't seem to matter much what they determine. The media have already found bush inculpable (and Clinton too, in all fairness). It was all just a tragic series of misunderstandings and miscommunications, and Saddam won that round, he got us good. But we sure kicked his butt right back, didn't we? Heh-heh.

You see where this all is going. The whole thing is a charade at this point, anything Clarke has to say this afternoon will already be irrelevant. The reports have already gone out: nothing could have been done.

Short of issuing indictments, this commission will do nothing to damage the momentum of the rolling juggernaut that is the unholy PNAC alliance. Shortly after bush is re-selected in November, Syria and Iran and Saudi Arabia will be invaded by a "US-led coalition," and this time they won't even bother coming up with a bullshit excuse to do it, they'll just do it.

Time to start thinking about the revolution solution.

[Imajika]

1. The commission is only succeeding...

...in laying the groundwork for future pre-emptive invasions.

The entire thing seems to revolve around the idea that the US should have invaded Afghanistan and taken out the Taliban and Al-Queda in the years prior to 9-11.

You see what's happening here? The direction the commission is going, and the media coverage that follows, has the effect of validating Bush's doctrine of pre-emption.

Bush can argue that he attacked Iraq on the theory that they might attack us with WMD's or some other type of weapon someday in the future. He was pre-empting the threat, which afterall, is what the media and this commission seem to be suggesting should have been done in Afghanistan.

What will be next? Syria? Iran? There are definately terrorist organizations in both.

I am not at all happy with the way this is going.

Imajika

[Quahog]

3. Exactly

The overall tone seems to be, "The US did everything we possibly could have to stop bin Laden prior to 9-11, OTHER THAN EXERCISING THE MILITARY OPTION." This is the one area where it's implied that we erred on the side of caution. Clinton, we are told, had a number of opportunities to launch a major military strike on some location were bin Laden was probably hiding out, but the conventional wisdom at the time was that there would be too many civilian casualties, that it might look like the US had just gone off half-cocked. I was actually a bit surprised that this was not laid more squarely at Clinton's feet; it sounded as though there was bipartisan agreement that we couldn't just go rolling in with guns blazing.

But the current administration would have no such qualms, as they demonstrated in Iraq. Bombs succeed where diplomacy fails. Sure, tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis died, along with nearly 600 US soldiers so far. But this is TERROR we're combating here. No price is too great.

This is all very chilling as far as I'm concerned.

[pagerbear]

2. I have no way of backing this up...

...but I've been told anecdotally that the official editorial stance of ABC and its related affiliates is the government stance.

[Algorem]

4. ABC.They're the ones that are doing a big huge Rumsfeld-is-wonderful

commercial called Prime Time Thursday tomorrow night,based on their ads for it I've seen.