Mainstream reporters never contradicted Bush’s false WMD history to his face

[NNN0LHI]

http://inthesetimes.com/article/5663/sorry_rove_bush_did_lie_about_iraq/

Sorry, Rove, Bush Did Lie About Iraq
By Robert Parry

March 9, 2010

<snip>Media complicity

And never did mainstream reporters contradict Bush’s false history to his face. Indeed, some prominent Washington journalists even adopted Bush’s lie as their own. For instance, in a July 2004 interview, ABC’s veteran newsman Ted Koppel used it to explain why he – Koppel – thought the invasion of Iraq was justified.

“It did not make logical sense that Saddam Hussein, whose armies had been defeated once before by the United States and the Coalition, would be prepared to lose control over his country if all he had to do was say, ‘All right, U.N., come on in, check it out,” Koppel told Amy Goodman, host of “Democracy Now.”

In the real history, Hussein did tell the U.N. to “come on in, check it out.” But faux reality had become the trademark of the Bush presidency – and of its many supporters in the press corps.

Washington’s conventional wisdom eventually embraced another fake belief, that Hussein provoked the war by misleading people into believing that he still possessed WMD. The fact that Hussein and his government had declared they didn’t possess WMD was forgotten.

In line with the bogus version of history, “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley asked FBI interrogator George Piro, who had debriefed Hussein in prison, why the dictator kept pretending that he had WMD even as U.S. troops massed on Iraq’s borders, when a simple announcement that the WMD was gone would have prevented the war.

“For a man who drew America into two wars and countless military engagements, we never knew what Saddam Hussein was thinking,” Pelley said in introducing the segment on the interrogation of Hussein about his WMD stockpiles, which aired Jan. 27, 2008. “Why did he choose war with the United States?”

This “60 Minutes” segment never mentioned the fact that Hussein and his government did disclose that the WMD had been eliminated. Instead Pelley pressed Piro on the mystery of why Hussein supposedly was hiding that fact:

[LiberalFighter]

1. Koppel has always been useless.

I stopped watching the scumbag years ago.

[Arctic Dave]

2. I'm not the smartest guy in the world but even I remember Shitbag telling the UN inspectors

to get out.

[RaleighNCDUer]

3. “Why did he choose war with the United States?”

Because sometimes having a high-profile enemy is good.

It did wonders for Castro - kept him in power for 45 years.

And in line with his own Byzantian politics, he always thought a deal was possible, even as the tanks were crossing the border. He expected the other side to be equally corrupt as himself - he never imagined they'd be MORE so.

[gratuitous]

4. Well, who are you going to believe?

A bunch of archived articles and videos from back in the day, or the deathless pronouncements the talking heads have agreed to issue today? If it weren't for all the dead bodies and wasted money, it would be almost humorous. Back in the day, the Oregonian newspaper had an editorial calling the anti-war protestors "naive" for their "No Blood for Oil" signs. Of course, there were thousands of others, but that was the one the paper's editorial board singled out for ridicule.* Today, without comment, they ran a letter to the editor that again made that explicit connection between the launching of the Iraq invasion and the expected plunder of its oil. I guess we're not naive anymore.

*The paper also went to a lot of trouble in hiring aerial photography for the demonstration and march, and had experts review the photos to gainsay the organizers' claims of how many people participated. I don't see the Oregonian going to such lengths for the tea bagger pep squads. Since their editorial board hasn't said why that is, I'm left to my own assumptions.

[tavalon]

5. That is why I have alternatively called them Presstitutes

and Presspoodles. Little yappy stenographers selling their souls if not their bodies.

[sam sarrha]

6. if Bu$h43 had walked out at the debates and shit on the floor he'd been declared the winner, and all

we'd heard for weeks was how it smelled like roses, the beautiful steam and how the light shined on it and sparkled.

F'n wet brain alcoholic Weasel

[Echo In Light]

7. PNAC- Bushco got their way every time b/c so much was being covered up

[young_at_heart]

8. Let's hope some of them feel even a small amount of guilt

I remember so much mainstream attention being paid to things like 'The Gary Condit Affair' and similar stories. I also remember a college girl in my state being visited by the Secret Service and police because she had an anti-Bush poster in her dorm window. What a huge contrast to now!

[troubledamerican]

9. Uniquely American

[chill_wind]

10. We had no free press. We had embedded press. And indy press for a mere few weeks with targets

on their backs.

All the rest stayed home and hid in their dressing rooms behind their hairdressers and paychecks.

Messages were sent. This war wouldn't be televised.


Memory lane...

April 10, 2003

The Pentagon has held up its practice of "embedding" journalists with military units as proof of a new media-friendly policy. On April 8, however, U.S. military forces launched what appeared to be deliberate attacks on independent journalists covering the war, killing three and injuring four others.

In one incident, a U.S. tank fired an explosive shell at the Palestine Hotel, where most non-embedded international reporters in Baghdad are based. Two journalists, Taras Protsyuk of the British news agency Reuters and Jose Couso of the Spanish network Telecino, were killed; three other journalists were injured. The tank, which was parked nearby, appeared to carefully select its target, according to journalists in the hotel, raising and aiming its gun turret some two minutes before firing a single shell.

Journalists who witnessed the attack unequivocally rejected Pentagon claims that the tank had been fired on from the hotel. "I never heard a single shot coming from any of the area around here, certainly not from the hotel," David Chater of British Sky TV told Reuters (4/8/03). Footage shot by French TV recorded quiet in the area immediately before the attack (London Independent, 4/9/03).

(...)

http://www.fair.org/press-releases/iraq-journalists.html