The former White House press secretary Scott McClellan has come under blistering attacks from the Bush surrogates and the media for his memoirs implicating Bush, Cheney, Rove, and the media in the Iraq war deception. McClellan writes in "What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception" that the Iraq war was sold to the American people with a sophisticated "political propaganda campaign" led by President Bush and aimed at "manipulating sources of public opinion" and "downplaying the major reason for going to war."
McClellan writes in the new book that President Bush "veered terribly off course" and "rushed" to an unnecessary war in Iraq.
Regarding the media complicity, McClellan writes, "And through it all, the media would serve as complicit enablers. Their primary focus would be on covering the campaign to sell the war, rather than aggressively questioning the rationale for war or pursuing the truth behind it… the media would neglect their watchdog role, focusing less on truth and accuracy and more on whether the campaign was succeeding."
While the Bush team and the media are expressing utter surprise and shock at these revelations, the fact is that other former Bush officials have said similar things after their departure, though not as explicitly as McClellan has.
"From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go," former treasury secretary Paul O'Neill told CBS, after the release of his tell-all book in 2004. "For me, the notion of pre-emption, that the U.S. has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do, is a really huge leap." The implication in O'Neill's remark is that the Iraq war decision was made well before any of the "facts" such as Saddam's WMD were invented to support it.
"The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason," former deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz was quoted as saying in a Pentagon transcript of an interview with Vanity Fair in 2003.
In terms of media complicity, the term "embedded journalists" was invented during the Iraq war. The deceptive selling of Iraq war was exemplified by the WMD reporting by Judith Miller for the New York Times. She was eventually let go by NY Times after her reputation was completely tarnished for her false WMD reports and involvement in the Valerie Plame affair. Earlier, Judith Miller was accepted in media circles to be an expert in weapons of mass destruction as well as on Islam, despite her lack of a science background and her inability to speak Arabic. When she initially joined the Times staff, Miller’s beat was the banking and securities industry.
It is clear that both the Bush supporters and the media are faking a surprise here at McClellan's "revelations". Too many of them were participants in the conspiracy to invade Iraq. What the Americans need now is to be alert to the coming deception to invade Iran or Pakistan or some other country in the last days of the trigger-happy Bush-Cheney administration. Such an invasion would create another huge mess for the next president who'd already be saddled with massive deficits generated by what Nobel Laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz calls "The Three Trillion Dollar War".
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2 comments:
Jessica Yellen on CNN said in her coverage of the McClellan story that she personally felt a lot of p0ressure from the media execs and editors to present positive stories about President Bush and the war prior to and at the start of the Iraq war. Her pieces were either heavily edited or not given the space/time or both. She hastened to add that she wasn't with CNN at the time. I believe she was with ABC and MSNBC prior to joining CNN.
Katie Couric of CBS has expressed similar sentiments as Jessica Yellin. She says there was pressure by corp media execs to support the administration in its march toward the Iraq war.
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