Worldview Blog

Perhaps the most important TV documentary of the decade is Bill Moyers' PBS special Buying the War, first aired in April of 2007. (You can watch the full video and download a transcript.) This documentary does an excellent and convincing job of demonstrating that the Bush administration's argument for war on Iraq, carried out in March of 2003, was based on faulty evidence and dubious sources. Yet the establishment press, such as the New York Times and Washington Post, failed in the most egregious way to perform their duty and bring this to public awareness. Indeed, they were major boosters of the war, as the Beltway Bubble of politicians, elite media and neocon think tanks worked themselves into a frenzy of war fever divorced from reality. For convenience, I will try to outline the argument made in the documentary, though so much detail seems important that it may be difficult to summarize.

The compliant establishment press

The administration could not have gone to war without a 'compliant press'. Prior to the war, the press 'largely surrendered its independence and skepticism', according to Moyers, thus enabling a pre-emptive attack on a country that had not attacked us, based on unsubstantiated links between Saddam Hussein, WMDs and Al Qaeda. As Dan Rather reminds us, the post-911 atmosphere was 'overwhelmingly patriotic', and Walter Isaacson (who was then CEO of CNN) speaks of a 'patriotism police', ready to brand as traitors all those who did not go along with the president. Scores of angry emails added to the general feeling that one should not overly criticize the president during a time of war, when the nation is seemingly under threat. For example, showing the civilian casualties in Afghanistan led to phone calls from 'big people' at 'major corporations' claiming that CNN was being 'anti-American'. Memos were sent to the staff urging that any reporting on civilian casualties be constantly offset by reminders of the horrors of 911 (which begs the question of why innocents should suffer for unrelated victims). Moreover, hawkish competitor Fox News was exploiting the situation to portray CNN as unpatriotic and anti-American.

War party all over the airwaves

Rather knew the administration wanted to invade Iraq long before 911. Hours after the attack, Rumsfeld 'put Saddam on the hitlist' and lets aides know it. Neocon cheerleaders Richard Perle and Bill Kristol were all over the airwaves linking Saddam and Al Qaeda and making exaggerated threats about alleged WMD programs (more on that shortly). Perle and Kristol were members of the Defense Policy Board advising the president, as was James Woolsey, another neocon kingpin and former head of the CIA. All three received inordinate airtime, as did other neocons. The conservative pundits we see ad nauseum on Sunday morning TV immediately signed on: William Safire, Fred Barnes, Charles Krauthammer, George Will, Jim Hoagland, etc., as did the editorial board of the New York Times and the Washington Post. (Let us note in passing that the speculative and unsubstantiated linking of Saddam to Al Qaeda was a trick played by the establishment throughout the Cold War, where a 'Communist' threat was concocted whenever we wished to invade or bully a country that was annoying us in some way.)

Real establishment journalists ignored

However, journalists like Bob Simon of CBS, who was actually stationed in the Middle East, could immediately tell that something didn't ring true. He knew that a secular dictator like Saddam was a 'total control freak' who would never take a chance with a wildcard like Osama Bin Laden, so that the very notion of a link between the two was an 'absurdity'. Naturally, the beltway pundits did not bother to check with someone stationed in the region of interest, since the whole purpose of being in the beltway vortex is to play the power game by reinforcing the echo chamber (with resulting mental delusion). That, rather than telling the truth, is good for your career.

Heros at a non-establishment newspaper discover the truth

Meanwhile, at non-establishment media company Knight-Ridder (now McClatchy), two intrepid (and perhaps somewhat naive) journalists named Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landay were scratching their heads. Not being part of the beltway club, they had to do their reporting in the tedious, old-fashioned way, by calling up experts and mid-level officials who actually knew what they were talking about. They soon realized that there were 'two messages': the administration version and the insider version (where 'insider' refers to the lower-level government bureaucrats). Most of all, there was simply no hard evidence to be found for a Saddam-Al Qaeda link. For example, the administration's 'star witness' was one Ahmed Chalabi, a leading Iranian defector. He was essentially a creation of the CIA, who had funded his Iraqi National Congress (INC) to the tune of $350K a month in the 1990s (according to James Bamford). When they realized he was a con artist, they dropped him. Did this stop his neocon-Pentagon handlers in Washington? Heck, no. He went on to 'charm' Congress and the beltway punditry, by providing the stories that made sensational press and reinforced the administration's strategy. Even if Chalabi hadn't been a known con artist, the simple fact that he was a defector from Iraq should have made the press skeptical, but nothing of the sort happened, with few exceptions. The New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, even the seemingly left-wing New Yorker all gave major press to Iraqi defectors, with few questions asked (cf. Jeffrey Goldberg's article in the New Yorker called The Great Terror).

Red flags ignored

Even 'liberal' PBS was taken in (kudos to Moyers who probably annoyed some important contacts). Frontline aired a show on 8 November 2002, featuring a Captain Sabah Khodada, who provided crude drawings of what was said to be a terrorist training camp outside Baghdad (hardly the equivalent of a satellite photo). Frontline warned viewers that Khodada was a defector brought to their attention by the INC, but that pesky detail was swamped by the sensational story itself. A more important case was that of Judith Miller of the 'immensely influential' New York Times, who aired the testimony of a Kurd named Al-Haideri, who was said to be privy to Saddam's inner council and who reported of hidden chemical and biological WMD facilities, some underneath Saddam's very palace. Al-Haideri was sponsored by none other than Chalabi. As Landay tells us, that should have immediately raised two 'red flags': (i) that an enemy Kurd could possibly be privy to Saddam's inner circle, and (ii) that anybody would build a biological WMD laboratory under their private residence. There were further clues, for those who wished to see. Al-Haideri's rank kept changing from story to story, as did his purported activities. Worse, a little digging revealed that those who knew Al-Haideri back in Iraq called him a liar and a nutcase. The stories got even more 'fantastic' in Vanity Fair, which is very influential in media circles. Tales were told of terrorist trainees jumping into pits of fouled water and killing dogs with bare teeth. Those Muslim terrorists are something else! David Rose of Vanity Fair protested that the stories were confirmed by 'high ranking government officials', the same neocons who invented the Iraqi threat in the first place!

Chalabi's basic trick

As explained by John Walcott, bureau chief of (then) Knight-Ritter, the basic trick of Chalabi and the neocons was to provide the same story simultaneously to a paper like the New York Times and to receptive neocons high up in the administration. They would then use each other to 'confirm' their story, even though there was only one dubious 'source' behind it all. This happened to Tim Russert of Meet The Press on 8 September 2002, when guest Vice President Cheney quoted a story about aluminum tubes, allegedly part of an Iraqi nuclear WMD program, that had come out that morning in the New York Times. Now such information would be Top Secret, which the veep could never reveal, unless it had first been leaked to the press. What a coincidence! Would one be a conspiracy theorist to suggest a possible coordinated effort here? When pressed by Moyers, poor Russert blurted that his concern was that some government officials were contradicting the alleged evidence for WMD. Unfortunately, Russert's staff is on such a shoestring budget that a few phone calls were out of the question. Bob Simon, on the other hand, must have had some spare change to generously donate towards preventing an unnecessary war, since he simply dialed up some actual experts and discovered that the aluminum tubes could not be used as part of a WMD program. For some strange reason, the press failed to run with his story, and the aluminum tubes became a major piece of evidence in the run-up to the war.

The truth was there for all to see

Back at Knight-Ritter, similar efforts at contacting actual experts were bearing equally scant interest from the establishment press. As Landay relates, all the evidence one needed was right there, in public view, on the website of the IAEA! 'Tons of it', as Landay puts it, which 'got into everything'. Prior to 1998, there was ample evidence that Saddam's nuclear program had been uprooted by the victors. In 1998, Saddam kicked out the inspectors, but Landay assures us that one could not rebuild a nuclear weapons program without being detected by satellite. Saddam's approach was through the enrichment of uranium, which takes a vast apparatus of thousands of centrifuges consuming huge amounts of power. This simply could not be implemented without being detected. Of course, nuclear WMD was our primary concern. (Chemical and biological WMD are far less devastating under most circumstances, and could be built cheaply by almost anybody who was sufficiently determined.) Needless to say, the Knight-Ritter story had hardly any more impact than that of Bob Simon. The beltway crowd were simply not interested. Don't confuse us with the facts, please!

The basic tactic of all propaganda

As Bob Simon says, the basic tactic of all propagandists is to 'repeat, repeat, repeat'. Goebbels knew this well and said as much. Surely enough, the vast majority of Americans thought that Saddam was behind 911, long after the story had been fully discredited by the few journalists who behaved like professionals. And given the public tide, ambitious Democrats with presidential aspirations, like John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, were only too eager to jump on the bandwagon. So much for an opposition party! Only a few Democratic stalwarts, like Senators Robert Byrd and Ted Kennedy continued to protest that there was insufficient evidence. Kennedy gave an impassioned and outspoken speech preceding the invasion, which got only 36 words in the Washington Post, compared to scores of prowar frontpage articles leading up to the war, which did their part to amplify the martial drumbeat. Walter Pincus of the Washington Post points proudly to one dissenting columnist, but neglects to tell us that that story was buried on page 18! The evidence is simply overwhelming that the establishment media fell flat on its face and served as little more than a megaphone for the administration. I would call this treason, from a moral if not legal point of view. War is the most serious decision a government can make. Many thousands of innocent lives were lost, and many more have been ruined. The respected British medical journal The Lancet puts the death toll in the hundreds of thousands.

Colin Powell gets used by his masters

Another sad chapter of the whole WMD fiasco is when the seemingly honorable Colin Powell was railroaded into perjuring himself in his critical speech before the UN on February 6, 2003, right before the invasion. His close lifelong colleague Lawrence Wilkerson has spoken with indignation of the deception. For example, Powell pointed to pictures of some building that he alleged could be a WMD factory, without mentioning that the UN inspectors had been in that very building and found nothing! Indeed, in early 2003, before the invasion, the UN inspectors were back in Iraq and inspecting wherever they pleased and were turning up nothing. That should have put the brakes on the war then and there, but the administration apparently decided that they'd better attack, before more negative evidence was turned up. I would call that treason too. Powell was a general who had seen the horror of war close up in Vietnam. How tragic that his career should end with this blemish on his reputation, but mere human beings are expendable to the neocons and their projects.

Summing it up

But it was not just the neocons. The omnipresent slime machine of Fox News, O'Reilly, Hannity, and so on played a major part in whooping up war hysteria. Were the American people total dupes, or do they rather like war, especially when it seems that they don't have to pay a price? (There is ample evidence in our culture that war is a favorite topic.) You may say that it is unfair to neglect the influence of 911, but perhaps if the public had been better informed, then they would have realized that 911, horrible as it was, was only a drop in the bucket compared to what we have done to others to pursue our 'foreign policy interests'. Is the media mostly to blame for this general ignorance? Practically speaking, the public must rely on the media. But Moyers' point is that some regular Americans at Knight-Ritter were getting the story right, after all. The problem is that the establishment power brokers listen only to the establishment media. And the latter has every interest in sucking up to the establishment power brokers, assuming, of course, that the pundits in question have no professional and ethical scruples, which they don't. To be sure, patriotism and anger over 911 are powerful emotions that arise spontaneously, but our leaders share a major responsibility for fanning the flames with lies and deception. Haven't we seen this already in Germany, sometime during the last century? Seems to ring a bell. (And let's not let the upper-class Brits off the hook either. Blair and the conservative British press gave President Bush much support, helping to reinforce the dimwit's feeling that he was the new Churchill — who wasn't such a wonderful man in his own right.)

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