Remember WaPo told us the case for war was literally “Irrefutable?” I do, even if you can no longer find its warmongering op-ed piece from 2003 in the Post’s archives:
AFTER SECRETARY OF STATE Colin L. Powell’s presentation to the United Nations Security Council yesterday, it is hard to imagine how anyone could doubt that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction. Mr. Powell left no room to argue seriously that Iraq has accepted the Security Council’s offer of a “final opportunity” to disarm. And he offered a powerful new case that Saddam Hussein’s regime is cooperating with a branch of the al Qaeda organization that is trying to acquire chemical weapons and stage attacks in Europe. Mr. Powell’s evidence, including satellite photographs, audio recordings and reports from detainees and other informants, was overwhelming. Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr., the senior Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, called it “powerful and irrefutable.”
Yeah, that was our beloved Joe Biden, doing his sniveling best not to stand in the way of the coming train wreck kniown as the Iraq War. Not his best moment, though he was obviously far from the only political figure, right, center, or left, to voice support for a war to stop the imminent threat of Saddam’s mushroom clouds. And the Washington Post hasn’t changed much since 2003. They are still trying to cover their ass for being the propaganda wing for Cheney’s Fourth Branch of government. WaPo asked Greg Mitchell to write a piece on the Iraq war, but then decided not to run it because he blamed the media for becoming the Bush administration’s de facto propaganda ministry. I guess our media elites really can’t handle (much less report) the truth.
I’m publishing below the assigned Outlook piece that I submitted to the Washington Post on Thursday. I see that the Post is now defending killing the piece because it didn’t offer sufficient “broader analytical points or insights.” I’ll let you decide if that’s true and why they might have rejected it.
The original appeared almost word-for-word at The Nation this weekend (there I added a reference to Bob Woodward and to Bob Simon). I had absolutely no plans to even mention that the piece was killed until late last night when I saw that Paul Farhi of the Post had written for Outlook a piece claiming that the media “didn’t fail” in the run-up to the Iraq war.
Maybe this had something to do with the Post’s decision not to run Mitchell’s analysis of our media’s collaboration with Cheney and the plethora of neocons in the Bush administration who lied us into the most costly war in our history:
THE MINI-CULPA This phrase was coined by Jack Shafer of Slate after The New York Times published an “editors’ note” in May 2004, admitting it had publishing a few “problematic articles” (it didn’t mention any authors) on Iraqi WMDs, but pointing out it was “taken in” like most in the Bush administration. Unlike the Times, Washington Post editors three months later did not produce their own explanation but allowed chief media reporter Howard Kurtz to write a lengthy critique. Editors and reporters admitted they had often performed poorly but offered one excuse after another, with phrases such as “always easy in hindsight,” “editing difficulties,” “communication problems” and “there is limited space on Page 1.” One top reporter said, “We are inevitably the mouthpiece for whatever administration is in power. “
Mouthpiece for whatever administration is in power (well, any Republican administration)? That’s how the Post’s reporters saw their job at a time when everyone in the Bush administration was demanding our nation go to war – the most momentous act that any government can take, and the most dangerous – a war they insisted was necessary based on ginned up intelligence, half-truths, scary rhetoric and outright lies: as a mouthpiece for Bush and his merry band of warmongers. God forbid they should have acted as independent journalists.
And on that note, I have nothing further to say, for what could be more damning than the Post’s own actions and statements?
Time to move on – to Iran!