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Recent
Stories
June
6, 2003
David
Krieger
The Big Lie
Ramzy
Baroud
Sharon and the Myth of the Peacemakers
Anthony
Gancarski
Sharansky: "Crucifixion is a Privilege"
Sam
Hamod
His Own Little Country
Sean Carter
Why Indict Martha Stewart and Not Ken Lay?
David
Lindorff
Cracks in the Consensus
Stew Albert
Ari's Great Set
Elaine
Cassel
Ashcroft the Insatiable
June
5, 2003
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Pools of Fire: The Looming Nuclear
Nightmare in the Woods of North Carolina
Imraan
Siddiqi
Ann Coulter's Foul Mouth
Michael
Leon
Clinton, Reno & Waco: Remember What They've Done
Robert
Jensen
Texas Pledge Law Undermines Democracy
Ann Harrison
Rosenthal is Free, But the Fight isn't Over
Paul
Dean
How You Can Be Deliriously Happy in the Age of Bush
Gary Leupp
When Spooks Speak Out
Website
of the Day
Evidence in Black and White?
June
4, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
Federal Judge Blinks; Rosenthal
Walks
Lisa
Walsh Thomas
The Isaiah Crowd: The Threat of Neo-Christianity
Jason
Leopold
Manufacturing the Iraq War
John Chuckman
Blackmail as Policy
Mazin
Qumsiyeh
Summit: Peace or Pretense?
Issam Nashashibi
Sharon's Sword of Damocles
Steve
Perry
Wolfowitz of Arabia: the VF interview transcript
June
3, 2003
Chris
Floyd
Copycat Killers: Bush, Jakarta and
the Slaughter in Aceh
Jason
Leopold
Wolfowitz Tells All
Elaine
Cassel
We Interrupt Your Normal Show to Bring You an Important Message
from Michael Powell: "Go to Hell, Americans!"
Tom
Crumpacker
The Politics of US Cuba Policy
William
S. Lind
Fourth Generation Warfare in Iraq
Sam
Hamod
The Final Brick in the Wall
Uri
Avnery
The Altalena Affair
Hammond
Guthrie
Stepping into Some Deep DARPA
Steve
Perry
The WashTimes'
al-Qaeda nuke "exclusive"
June
2, 2003
Arundhati
Roy
Day of the Jackals
Norman
Madarasz
Behind the Neo-Con Curtain: Plato,
Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom
Alain
Frachon and Daniel Vernet
The Strategist and the Philosopher: Strauss and Wohlstetter
Anthony
Gancarski
Anti-Imperialism, Then & Now
Standard
Schaefer
Wasted at the Pentagon
Jason
Leopold
Rocky's Advice to the Dems
Guthrie
& Albert
HUAC 58 Years Letter
Steve
Perry
The Politics of Terror Alerts
May
31, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
A Whiner Called Horowitz
Gary Leupp
The Frauds of War
Dave
Lindorff
Clinton, Bush, Lies and Impeachment
Tom Stephens
Does It Matter that the Bush Administration Lied?
Sasan
Fayazmanesh
Who Is Next?
Joanne
Mariner
Trivializing Terrorism
Wayne
Madsen
Ayatollah Ashcroft's Busy Week
Larry Magnuson
Is a Television a Radio or a Billboard?
Elaine
Cassel
Wake Up, America!
Gila Svirsky
Waiting for the Lament to End
Susan
Davis
Kitchen Dreams
Chris Clarke
Barbra Streisand: Environmental Hypocrite
Chris
Floyd
Bush Locates Source of World Evil: God
Adam Engel
Gravity's End Zone
Poets'
Basement
Reiss, Guthrie, Orloski, Albert
May
30, 2003
Ben
Tripp
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Agenda
Neve
Gordon
The Bad Fence
Todd
Steiner
Endangered Ocean
Robert
Freeman
Bush's Tax Cuts: a Form of National Insanity
Sean
Carter
Utah Gets Fired Up for Executions
Daniel
Bacher
How Bush's War Violated International Laws
Tariq
Ali
Re-Colonizing Iraq
Steve
Perry
Bush Wars
Web Log
May
29, 2003
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Jason
Leopold
Despite Thin Intelligence Reports,
US Plans Overthrow of Iran Regime
Ron
Jacobs
Popular Uprising, Inc.
Michelle
Ciaccorra
Bush's Nuclear Policy: Do As I Say, Not As I Do
Yves Engler
The Economics of Health Care in
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Kimberly
Blaker
Vouchers for Jesus
Harry
Browne
Stakeknife: Britain's Army Spy at
the Top of the IRA
Stew
Albert
Cops of the World
Steve Perry
Greens 04: In or Out?
Hot Stories
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Elaine
Cassel
Civil Liberties
Watch
Michel
Guerrin
Embedded Photographer Says: "I
Saw Marines Kill Civilians"
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
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June
6, 2003
Trapped by Their Own Lies
Cracks in the
Consensus?
By DAVID LINDORFF
It's too early to predict how far things will
go, but it does appear that the Bush political juggernaut, much
like the army's tanks and armored personnel carriers in Iraq,
has begun to show signs of breaking down from overuse.
The big issue at the moment is the administration's
blatant lies about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction--the justification
for the American/British war of aggression against Iraq.
The obvious fact that, after all, Iraq
did not have such weapons any more by the time of the invasion
is leading for mounting calls, both in the U.S. Congress and
the British Parliament, for an investigation of the run-up to
war, and into how intelligence information was manipulated or
manufactured. Perhaps even more important, the American media,
which for over half a year played lapdog to Bush and his warhawks,
is starting to report more critically about the issue for the
first time.
On May 26, media critic Howard Kurtz
of the Washington Post published an article airing a set of vitriolic
emails between New York Times Iraq bureau chief John Burns and
one of the paper's in-house cheerleader for pre-emptive war,
reporter Judith Miller, whose thinly sourced stories repeatedly
and breathlessly  touted discoveries of
WMD sites only to have each discovery subsequently debunked.
Those emails make it clear, Kurtz writes, that Miller's only
real source for these stories was Ahmad Chalabi, the convicted
swindler being promoted as a potential Iraqi leader by Bush's
warhawks in the Pentagon.
Citing New Yorker writer Seymour Hersh,
Kurtz suggests that Chalabi was a key source of WMD "evidence"
for the infamously biased "intelligence unit" known
as the Cabal set up in the Pentagon by Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld last fall, when he found he couldn't get what he wanted
from the CIA. Kurtz goes on to say, "Chalabi may have been
feeding the (New York) Times and other news organizations the
same disputed information."
Even the Philadelphia Inquirer, which
in the run-up to the war was taking a moderately pro-war stance
in both its reporting and its editorials, has become more openly
critical. On June 1, the paper published a news story by Inquirer
Washington bureau reporter John Walcott headlined, "Doubt
on war felt at top levels." In it, Walcott says that the
war, which Bush's top advisers have hoped would be "the
centerpiece of Bush's reelection campaign," was becoming
"a political, diplomatic and military mess."
He goes on to report that, "A growing
number of critics in Congress and some within the administration"
are now saying that "much of the administration's public
rationale for the war, and much of its planning for the war and
its aftermath, appears to have been based on fabricated or exaggerated
intelligence that was fed to civilian officials in the Pentagon
by Iraqi exiles."
Walcott reports that although officials
in the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the State Department
were all warning that their information was "unreliable
at best," Chalabi and other Iraqi exiles, "got a hearing
in two important places. One of these was Rumsfeld's made-to-order
in-house Pentagon "intelligence" team, and the other
was "the New York Times."
Media critic Ed Herman, an emeritus professor
at the University of Pennsylvania who has long monitored the
Philadelphia Inquirer, says the Walcott story suggests that a
shift has taken place in that newspaper's political and editorial
stance on the Iraq war and the Bush administration's handling
of the issue. The same repositioning seems to be taking place
in other media outlets, too.
Coming at a time when the Bush administration
is starting to face mounting criticism on a number of fronts--Iraq,
economic policy, the Federal Communications Commission's railroading
through of a massive media deregulation plan, and the Justice
Department's abuse of immigrants and its undercutting of civil
liberties--it looks like the monolithic consensus within the
power structure which has characterized the post 9-11 political
environment has begun to fracture.
It remains to be seen whether these fracture
lines will grow, whether elements within the mainstream media
will become more critical of administration policy, and whether
the largely spineless Democratic opposition will begin to take
the offensive.
At a minimum, the cracks in the pro-Bush
concensus within the media on Iraq policy provides an opening
for progressive politicians like Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio)
to get their arguments heard. Kucinich, one of nine candidates
seeking the Democratic Party's nomination for president and one
of the most consistent and outspoken Congressional critics of
the Iraq war, has, along with candidates Al Sharpson and Carol
Moseley-Braun, heretofore been largely ignored by the mainstream
media (though he has been getting favorable responses from the
public on the stump).
On Tuesday, Kucinich announced that he
will introduce a Resolution of Inquiry in the House to demand
the release of the intelligence that led to the war in Iraq,
and to Administration claims that Iraq had tons of biological
and chemical weapons, delivery systems, and a 'reconstituted'
nuclear program. A rarely used House procedure, Kucinich invoked
the resolution tactic successfully in March to get the Bush administration
to release the controversial 12,000-page weapons report which
Iraq had submitted to U.N. weapons inspectors--a report that
contained embarrassing evidence that U.S. firms had for years
been primary suppliers of WMD-making supplies to Iraq.
"This Administration led this nation
into war based on lies," said Kucinich, in announcing his
plan for the new resolution. "I think that this Congress,
and the American people, have a right to know what information
this Administration had, and how they justify their public comments.
Now is the time for truth-telling."
Dave Lindorff
is the author of Killing
Time: an Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal.
A collection of Lindorff's stories can be found here: http://www.nwuphilly.org/dave.html
Today's
Features
David
Krieger
The Big Lie
Ramzy
Baroud
Sharon and the Myth of the Peacemakers
Anthony
Gancarski
Sharansky: "Crucifixion is a Privilege"
Sam
Hamod
His Own Little Country
Sean Carter
Why Indict Martha Stewart and Not Ken Lay?
David
Lindorff
Cracks in the Consensus
Stew Albert
Ari's Great Set
Elaine
Cassel
Ashcroft the Insatiable
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