Tuesday, October 25, 2005

Cheney's nukes of the mind

Good Salon piece on Cheney's manufacturing of the nuclear Iraq claim that served as one of the justifications for the Iraq War. This is a difficult essay to excerpt adequately, so read the whole thing. But here's a bit anyway:

In fact, a close examination of how the pre-war propaganda machine worked shows that it was led by the neocons and their associates outside the administration, particularly those on the Defense Policy Board (DPB) like Perle, Woolsey, and Kenneth "Cakewalk" Adelman (and Judith Miller of the Times) who had long championed the cause of Ahmad Chalabi and his Iraqi exile organization, the INC, and were also close to the Office of Special Plans that Douglas Feith had set up in the Pentagon to cherry-pick intelligence. They would invariably be the first to float new "evidence" against Hussein (such as the infamous supposed Prague meeting of 9/11 conspirator Mohammed Atta with an Iraqi intelligence officer). They would then tie this "evidence" into ongoing arguments for "regime change" in Iraq that would often appear in the Times or elsewhere as news and subsequently be picked up by senior administration officials and fed into the drumbeat of war commentary pouring out of official Washington.

It is by now perfectly clear that the neo-conservatives on the outside were aided by like-minded journalists, particularly the Times' Miller -- then the only "straight" reporter on the client list of neoconservative heavyweights and columnists represented by Benador Associates -- and media outlets, especially the Wall Street Journal's editorial page and Fox News. Working hand-in-glove with the war hawks on the inside, they created a powerful and persuasive machine to convince the public that Saddam Hussein's Iraq represented an imminent and potentially cataclysmic threat to the United States that had to be eliminated once and for all. The failure to investigate and demonstrate precisely how seamlessly this web of intra- and extra-administration connections worked in the run-up to the war -- including perhaps in the concoction of the Niger yellowcake documents, as some former intelligence officials have recently suggested -- has been perhaps the most shocking example of the mainstream media's failure to connect the dots (the reporters from Knight-Ridder excepted.)

And, yes, Knight-Ridder deserves a huge amount of credit for its reporting in the leadup to the war and during the war. Among the major news outlets, it was the only one that investigated and reported on -- how should we say it... -- reality.

No comments: