http://www.indypendent.org/?p=812Words of Mass Deception: 5 Years Ago The New York Times’ Use Of Unnamed Sources Helped The Bush Administration Launch A War. Is It Happening Again?John Burns
Former tennis partner of George Bush Sr. and the Times’ longtime Baghdad bureau chief, Burns will be leaving Iraq in the summer of 2007 to serve as London bureau chief. In an interview with Charlie Rose of PBS in February 2007, Burns blithely moved from conversations about his own curly hair to the grim fact that nearly every barber in Baghdad was dead, the victims of unrelenting sectarian violence.
In answering the question, ‘Was the Iraq war lost?’ Burns recently told CSPAN, “I think the honest answer is that we – that we don’t know, that the situation is extremely complicated, that it looks pretty dire, but all hope is not exhausted.”
Michael Gordon
After voters threw the Republicans out of power in Congress in November, the Times’ longtime military correspondent Michael Gordon responded with a barrage of front-page stories – “Get Out Now?
Not So Fast, Some Experts Say” (11/14/06), “General Warns of Risks in Iraq if GIs Are Cut” (11/15/06), “Will it Work on the Battlefield?” (12/07/06) – that helped shift the debate about the future conduct of the war from withdrawal to “surge.” Gordon and co-author Lt. General Bernard E. Trainor wrote Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq. Gordon is also the author, along with Judith Miller, of the infamous Sept. 8, 2002 article on Iraq’s aluminum centrifuges, an article that was later cited back to the press by members of the Bush administration as “proof” of Iraqi WMDs.
Bill Keller
The executive editor of The New York Times, who, as a columnist in 2003, supported the invasion of Iraq and called himself a member of the “I Can’t Believe I’m a Hawk Club.” Two days after the war began, Keller called upon Secretary of State Colin Powell to resign because of the general’s support for continued U.N. diplomacy. Keller favorably referred to then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz as the “Sunshine Warrior.” Five months later, Keller assumed the executive editor’s position in the aftermath of the chaos surrounding the Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal. Keller later faced a Blair-esque crisis of his own with disgraced reporter Judith Miller. Keller stood behind Miller for months in her battle with CIA leak prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald before abruptly engineering her resignation (and handsome severance package) in October 2005. snip
— “THREATS AND RESPONSES:
THE IRAQIS; U.S. SAYS HUSSEIN INTENSIFIES, QUEST FOR A-BOMB PARTS” Sept. 8, 2002, Michael R. Gordon and Judith Miller