Letter to the Prime Minister, March 25, 2002
“For Iraq, “regime change” does not stack up. It sounds like a grudge between Bush and Saddam. Much better, as you have suggested, to make the objective ending the threat to the international community from Iraqi WMD […].”
How did Tony Blair come up with his propaganda strategy? Who were his fellow strategists in the Bush administration?
Why are American media so lethargic about telling the public that their emotions about the national tragedy of 9/11 were cynically manipulated into the urgent need to invade Iraq? Why don’t more US media voices, whether from the right or left, express the same revulsion about this premeditated war crime as Eric Margolis, quoted below, who writes for a conservative Canadian newspaper.
Web of cold-blooded lies By Eric Margolis, Toronto Sun
[…] And so it went. Lie after lie. Scare upon scare. Fakery after fakery, trumpeted by the tame media that came to resemble the lickspittle press of the old Soviet Union. Ironically, in the end, horrid Saddam Hussein turned out to be telling the truth all along, while Bush and Blair were not.[…]
U.S. mass media amply confirmed charges of bias and politicization levelled against them by first ignoring the MI-6 memo story, then grudgingly devoting a few low-key stories to the dramatic revelation. Front pages, meanwhile, featured outing of the Nixon era’s “Deep Throat,” who, it turned out, was part of a cabal of Nixon-haters rather than a selfless patriot.
In retrospect, former president Richard Nixon’s misdeeds appear trivial compared to Bush’s illegal, unnecessary and catastrophic war against Iraq […] ((06/12/05,Eric Margolis, Toronto Sun))
Why aren’t more voices in the US media decrying the ginned up case? Maybe media silence today relates to keeping a lid on their own bad behavior during the conjured march to war.
- Too few stories offered alternative perspectives to the “official line” on WMD surrounding the Iraq conflict;
- most journalists accepted the Bush administration linking the “war on terror” inextricably to the issue of WMD; and
- most media outlets represented WMD as a “monolithic menace” without distinguishing between types of weapons and between possible weapons programs and the existence of actual weapons. (03/09/04 by E&P Staff, Editor & Publisher)
Media Coverage of Weapons of Mass Destruction (pdf format), also available in summary form, is available at the CISSM web site