Judith Miller, Telling Stories
New York Times reporter Judith Miller has been "fired" or rather negotiated out of a job. What took so long?
Miller was the dupe who reported all the lies about Iraq's WMDs in the run-up to the war and even after the shock and awe. We all know by now that she was getting her information from the crook Ahmad Chalabi of the so-called anti-Saddam insurgency group Iraqi National Congress. Then she would verify his lies with Scooter Libby and others in the Bush Administration who would confirm that same information that Chalabi also told them. Miller was the dupe in the middle.
In Iraq after the ground war began she was embedded with the units looking for WMDs and was reporting things like the discovery of mobile biological weapons labs which were almost immediately denied as true by Colin Powell. As a side note George Bush also made that same claim AFTER Powell had made his statement.
Miller has now been traveling the talk circuit and I caught a bit of her act on Larry King last night. I flipped stations after she made the same false claim that EVERYONE thought Hussein had WMDs. This is the lie of those who now claim they were fooled. Virtually every so-called piece of evidence that was presented prior to the shock and awe had been either flatly disproved or was considered highly doubtful before the bombs began to fall.
Miller tried to claim there were no reporting on this, when in fact her own newspaper had printed stories questioning the various parts of the WMD case. For instance the aluminum tubes that were supposedly being imported to Iraq for the use in nuclear centrifuges, the NYT reported that they were considered not for that purpose. The problem is that these stories that were contrary to the standard WMD case were either reported in the back pages in newspapers or in very small time segments on TV in contrast to huge time allotments to the false stories.
All those WMD sites that Colin Powell had aerial reconnaissance photos of were investigated by Hans Blix and the UN inspection team and found not to be WMD sites. The "missing" vials of biological weapons didn't even matter as even had they existed they had expired and lost their toxicity. Anyone wanting to point this out were virtually ignored in the media. And finally the case of the uranium yellowcake based on forged documents was interesting in the fact that Blix asked the US to let the UN inspectors see copies and were denied access until the eve of war. Once they had the documents they had found they were easily debunked using Google.
Let's face it, the media had an agenda for ignoring the truth about the WMDs and were readily accepting of the lies. The answer was simple, war sells newspapers and increases viewership on TV and radio. The media was simply following a business plan, increase revenues from advertising buys due to increased readership, listeners and viewership. Further the Bush Administration knew this about the media and manipulated the release of information, along with the use of administration officials to voice the pro-war talking points.
The American people were absolutely bamboozled by people like Dick Cheney among the administration and reporters like Judith Miller among the media. Not all of us though.
Some people like myself had a good deal of skepticism of the government and the media. Some people became contrarians and look to the argument not being heard and the evidence barely being presented. And some people simply remembered what Abraham Lincoln said, "You may fool all the people some of the time, you can even fool some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all the time" and refuse to fall into the last category.
Miller was the dupe who reported all the lies about Iraq's WMDs in the run-up to the war and even after the shock and awe. We all know by now that she was getting her information from the crook Ahmad Chalabi of the so-called anti-Saddam insurgency group Iraqi National Congress. Then she would verify his lies with Scooter Libby and others in the Bush Administration who would confirm that same information that Chalabi also told them. Miller was the dupe in the middle.
In Iraq after the ground war began she was embedded with the units looking for WMDs and was reporting things like the discovery of mobile biological weapons labs which were almost immediately denied as true by Colin Powell. As a side note George Bush also made that same claim AFTER Powell had made his statement.
Miller has now been traveling the talk circuit and I caught a bit of her act on Larry King last night. I flipped stations after she made the same false claim that EVERYONE thought Hussein had WMDs. This is the lie of those who now claim they were fooled. Virtually every so-called piece of evidence that was presented prior to the shock and awe had been either flatly disproved or was considered highly doubtful before the bombs began to fall.
Miller tried to claim there were no reporting on this, when in fact her own newspaper had printed stories questioning the various parts of the WMD case. For instance the aluminum tubes that were supposedly being imported to Iraq for the use in nuclear centrifuges, the NYT reported that they were considered not for that purpose. The problem is that these stories that were contrary to the standard WMD case were either reported in the back pages in newspapers or in very small time segments on TV in contrast to huge time allotments to the false stories.
All those WMD sites that Colin Powell had aerial reconnaissance photos of were investigated by Hans Blix and the UN inspection team and found not to be WMD sites. The "missing" vials of biological weapons didn't even matter as even had they existed they had expired and lost their toxicity. Anyone wanting to point this out were virtually ignored in the media. And finally the case of the uranium yellowcake based on forged documents was interesting in the fact that Blix asked the US to let the UN inspectors see copies and were denied access until the eve of war. Once they had the documents they had found they were easily debunked using Google.
Let's face it, the media had an agenda for ignoring the truth about the WMDs and were readily accepting of the lies. The answer was simple, war sells newspapers and increases viewership on TV and radio. The media was simply following a business plan, increase revenues from advertising buys due to increased readership, listeners and viewership. Further the Bush Administration knew this about the media and manipulated the release of information, along with the use of administration officials to voice the pro-war talking points.
The American people were absolutely bamboozled by people like Dick Cheney among the administration and reporters like Judith Miller among the media. Not all of us though.
Some people like myself had a good deal of skepticism of the government and the media. Some people became contrarians and look to the argument not being heard and the evidence barely being presented. And some people simply remembered what Abraham Lincoln said, "You may fool all the people some of the time, you can even fool some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all the time" and refuse to fall into the last category.
posted by jon at 6:48 AM
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