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Plame Name Blame Game |
Current rating: 0 |
by Darrin Drda
Email: d_drda (nospam) hotmail.com (unverified!) |
04 Nov 2005
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Hope y'all had a Happy Halloween. |
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Please click on the top link below if cartoon is not legible. |
See also:
http://www.zmag.org/cartoons/by_artist.cfm?artist=20
http://www.darrindrda.org
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This work licensed under a
Creative Commons license. |
Comments
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Whoops! |
by Reality without an agenda
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
16 Nov 2005
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Holy anarchist leftwing stupdity, batman! Libby ain't the guy! Woodward said it himself!
It's all part of the plot, right? Libby was the "fall guy" to take the heat off the REAL criminal, huh? Playing right into your own little world, just as you forsaw in your little progressive crystal ball of special knowledge that the rest of the world can't see... |
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Like Duh, Homer |
by Dose of Reality
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
16 Nov 2005
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Dear without an agenda (or a clue),
I believe your "point" is exactly what the cartoon implies. And being the fall guy doesn't really absolve Libby of anything.
What I've read about what Woodward said indicates there is a ring of criminals (like duh) in the White House. It does not clear Libby of guilt, but rather paints him as a co-conspirator, instead of being a lone offender. Very few people, on the right or left, think that Libby was a loose cannon on the White House deck, except those few who still believe there aren't anyone except angels working in there.
What rock have you been sleeping under or is your reading comprehension needing a tune-up? |
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Dose of acid |
by Reality without an agenda
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
16 Nov 2005
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Gee you're so smart!
Can I look at your crystal ball sometime? I'm so glad someone is watching out for my best interest who knows all and sees all. Thank GOD for Dose of Reality!
DOSE FOR KING OF AMERICA!!! |
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Dose of Acid 2 |
by Reality without an agenda
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
17 Nov 2005
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...and besides, they were all guilty of SOMETHING before there was a Libby, or an Iraq, or an Afghanistan, or a 9/11, or a Florida recount or an election, right?
But of course, you knew all that.
Must suck for you that most conspiricy theories usually don't pan out.
How's it feel to live in a world in which you know the evil future, and all things unknown to mortals, but are powerless to do anything about it? |
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Woodward: From Watergate Hero to Plamegate Goat |
by Arianna Huffington
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
18 Nov 2005
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Bob Woodward. What a career arc. From exposing a presidential cover-up in Watergate to covering up his role in Plamegate. And being forced to apologize to his own paper. And asking a colleague, Walter Pincus, not to mention Woodward’s role in the story. And failing to tell his editor that he had vital information about a major story.
And, to bottom it out, doing the TV and radio rounds, minimizing the scandal as “laughable,” “an accident”, “nothing to it” and denigrating Fitzgerald as “disgraceful” and “a junkyard dog” without ever once divulging that he was not just an observer of the CIA leak case but a recipient -- perhaps the first -- of the leak.
Hear that hissing noise? That’s the sound of the air being let out of Woodward’s reputation. Especially now that he’s decided to challenge Pincus to a round of credibility one-on-one. My money’s on Pincus, who was appropriately skeptical about the administration’s WMD claims while Woodward was writing hagiography about the brave president and his fearless aides.
It's hard to know who's happier today, Scooter Libby or Bill Keller.
I called Carl Bernstein to ask what he thought of his old partner’s behavior. He was loyal as ever but he did say something very revealing -- and unintentionally damning. “This investigation,” he told me, “has cast a constant searchlight that the White House can’t turn off the way it has succeeded in turning off the press. So their methodology and their dishonesty and their disingenuousness -- particularly about how we went to war -- as well as their willingness to attack and rough up people who don’t agree with them are now there for all to see. They can’t turn off this searchlight, which is shining on a White House that runs a media apparatus so sophisticated in discrediting its critics it makes the Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Ziegler press shop look like a small-time operation.” And these are the very thugs that Woodward was protecting while attacking the guy operating the searchlight.
The question now is: how will the Post handle the story? The first indications are mixed. Howard Kurtz is diving in, but it’s not a promising sign that in the Post article that broke the story, Executive Editor Len Downie “declined to say whether he was upset that Woodward withheld the information from him”. Or that Post eminence gris Ben Bradlee defended his former star reporter’s actions to Editor and Publisher.
Last month, Jay Rosen said that the New York Times was no longer the paper of record, having ceded that position to the Washington Post. Will the Post live up to that now or will we have to find another “great national newspaper”? Wonder how they’re doing over at the Chattanooga Times Free Press or the Bucks County Courier Times?
However the Post deals with the Woodward story, we know that bloggers won’t let it die. They are already all over it. Here is some of what’s being said:
Steve Clemons:
Woodward's celebrity-status has seriously blinded him and affected his judgment about quality journalism and his responsibilities to the public. He should never have been making such comments on television about the Plame case if he was, in fact, involved. He should have RECUSED himself in such discussion. […]
Tomorrow, the Post -- in an editorial penned by Leonard Downie -- better make clear that Bob Woodward gets no "Judy Miller"-like protection or nod of support from the reporting staff of the paper. He has violated the public trust by both withholding information he had in a key investigation, while playing pundit on Larry King, and now upending things late in the process.
Armando at DailyKos:
Sorry Bob, your credibility is shot. Walter Pincus gets the nod in a big way here.
ReddHedd at Firedoglake:
Ah, Judy. You sure set a good standard, didn't you? Poor Downie and company were left to try and pick up the journalistic pieces, and salvage something of face at the back end -- with a colleague who has been sitting on a big scoop since June of 2003 because...well, why exactly? Only Woodward knows the answer to that one, and he's hiding behind his ego.
John at Americablog:
It's also beginning to sound a lot like Bob Woodward is becoming our next Judith Miller. His repeated rants in defense of this administration, and against the special prosecutor, certainly take on a very interesting edge considering Mr. Woodward didn't bother disclosing that he was quite involved in this story, and was hardly the impartial observer his silence suggested he was. Not to mention, he knew all along that HE TOO had received the leak, suggesting that a clear pattern of multiple leaks was developing, yet he still went on TV and said that all of these repeated leaks were just a slip of the tongue?
Jane Hamsher at Firedoglake:
Bob Woodward sure as hell didn't volunteer to be a stand-up guy and give information because of his civic-mindedness. *snerk* Nope, he had his ass subpoened and he testified because his source cooperated and gave Fitz the information that he spoke with Woodward. (And I say "he" here, simply for a marker, not because I know the gender of Woodward's source.) For everyone out there who has been saying that Fitz was going to fold up shop and go home, I say, "Nuh uh." Stay tuned on this one. Fitz and his staff are still digging -- and with this Administration, there is clearly a whole hell of a lot of dirt.
Josh Marshall:
[I]t now seems that Woodward -- who has long been publicly critical of the Fitzgerald investigation -- has been part of it from the beginning. Literally, the beginning. […]
At a minimum…Woodward seems to have some explaining to do, at least for the fact that he became an aggressive commentator on the leak story without ever disclosing his own role in it, not even to his editors.
Larisa Alexandrovna and Jason Leopold at The Raw Story:
National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley was the senior administration official who told Washington Post Assistant Managing Editor Bob Woodward that Valerie Plame Wilson was a CIA officer, attorneys close to the investigation and intelligence officials tell RAW STORY.
Emptywheel at The Next Hurrah:
Well, maybe the reason Fitzgerald didn't hit Libby with the full force of the Espionage Charges that are obviously just beneath the surface of Libby's perjury indictment is because he wanted to smoke out all the journalists that Libby would produce as evidence that, either he's an idiot, or he's an idiot. Libby's probably searching his contact files for discussions about Wilson he had before the tell-tale conversation with Ari Fleischer. So perhaps former kingkiller Bob Woodward won't be the only one who we hear of learning of Wilson's wife in June?
Who said irony was dead?
Jeralyn at TalkLeft:
My bet: Woodward's source is the State Department or CIA official mentioned in Paragraph 6 or 7 (and 33)of the Indictment against Libby. If it's the State Department official, it could be David Wurmser, John Hannah or Fred Fleitz. David Wurmser seems to me to be the most likely….
Atrios:
Bobby's story just doesn't make any sense. Why would you grant confidentiality to something which is "almost gossip" and told to you in an "offhand manner." What ethical issue prevented you from telling the world that an administration source had given you that information as you could do so without revealing the identity of the source? Why could you not tell the world about this when you felt free to share the information with Pincus (denied by him).
Greg Anrig, Jr. at TPMCafe:
Woodward's peerless solicitousness toward his sources has made him rich and famous. But now that his deceit in attacking the Fitzgerald investigation without revealing his own role in the story has been unveiled, how can the Washington Post continue to assure its readers that they can trust him?
© 2005 The Huffington Post
http://www.huffingtonpost.com |
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The "Some Other Dude Did It" Defense of I. Lewis Libby |
by Elizabeth de la Vega
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
18 Nov 2005
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Shortly after Vice President Cheney's former Chief of Staff, I. Lewis ("Scooter") Libby, was indicted for obstructing justice and making false statements to a government agent and a grand jury, Libby's attorneys suggested that they would use the standard he's-a-busy-man-who-can't-remember-everything defense. But now, with Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward's revelation that a senior administration official other than Libby told him, in mid-June 2003, that Joseph Wilson's trip to Niger had been arranged by Wilson's CIA operative wife Valerie Wilson, it appears the Libby team has added another favorite, the SODDI Defense -- as in, "Some Other Dude Did It." Unfortunately for Libby, that turkey won't fly. Here's why.
According to Libby's attorney, Theodore Wells, Woodward's disclosure is a "bombshell" that "undermines the prosecution" because it disproves Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's alleged contention that Libby was the first senior administration official to reveal to a reporter that Valerie Wilson worked as a CIA analyst. Not true. For starters, a prosecutor's press conference statements are irrelevant to, and not admissible in, the trial of the case. And Fitzgerald never said Libby was the first official to have disclosed information about Valerie Wilson; he said Libby was the first official known to have disclosed such information.
More important though, it is of no help to Libby that another administration official, "some other dude," disclosed classified information about Valerie Wilson's employment in order to discredit her husband before Libby himself did so. (By the way, Woodward's impression that the disclosure by his source was "casual" proves nothing about whether the smearing official knew that the information being leaked was classified.) Despite the impression newspaper readers may carry away from the flap over Woodward, Libby is not charged with being the first to disclose Valerie Wilson's employment; he's not charged with disclosing anything at all. And in a criminal trial, it is the charges that define the issues. What, exactly, are those charges?
There are five counts. Count One charges Libby with obstructing justice by deceiving the grand jury about when and how he "acquired and subsequently disclosed to the media information concerning the employment of Valerie Wilson by the CIA." Count Two charges Libby with making false statements to the government about his conversation with NBC News reporter Tim Russert on July 10, 2003. Count Three charges him with making false statements to a government agent about a July 12 discussion with Time magazine reporter Matt Cooper. Four and Five charge him with making false statements to a grand jury about those conversations.
So, the essential questions on which a jury would have to pass judgment at a trial would be:
1. Did Libby make the statements that the indictment alleges he made?
2. Did the statements relate to an issue that was material -- that is, important to the investigation?
3. Were those statements true when Libby made them?
4. If the statements were not true, did Libby make them deliberately, knowing they were false? In other words, did he lie on purpose or did he simply make a mistake?
These, and only these, are the questions the jury would consider. As to Count Two, for example, the indictment says that Libby offered the following account to FBI agents in the fall of 2003:
"During a conversation with Tim Russert of NBC News on July 10 or 11, 2003, Russert asked Libby if Libby was aware that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA. Libby responded to Russert that he did not know that, and Russert replied that all the reporters knew it. Libby was surprised by this statement because, while speaking with Russert, Libby did not recall that he previously had learned about Wilson's wife's employment from the Vice President."
Will there be any question about whether Libby actually made that statement to FBI agents or that it related to an important matter? Probably not.
The contested issues at trial will surely be questions 3 and 4: Whether this statement was a true account of his discussion with Russert and, if not, whether Libby deliberately lied. To determine whether the statement was true, it's necessary to consider its multiple assertions, which are: (1) In a conversation on July 10 or 11, Russert asked Libby if he was aware that Wilson's wife worked for the CIA; (2) Libby said he didn't know that; (3) Russert told him that all the reporters knew it; and (4) Libby was surprised because he did not recall previously learning about Wilson's wife's employment from the Vice President.
Russert says he did not ask Libby whether Wilson's wife worked for the CIA as Libby claimed, nor did he tell him that "all the reporters knew it." The government's proof that Libby's statement was a knowing falsehood does not depend on whether the jury believes Russert over Libby, but it is worth mentioning that Russert has no easily imaginable reason for lying about this. He was a reluctant witness, not criminally at risk, and had no motive to try to incriminate Libby.
More important, however, even without factoring in additional information, Russert's account is inherently credible and Libby's is not. Even if Russert did ask whether Libby knew about Wilson's wife's employment, it is nearly impossible to believe that Libby could have been "surprised" by the information. After all, he is, by all accounts, an extremely intelligent and meticulous man who, as he admits himself in the statement, had learned about this fact from the Vice President, his boss and our second highest official. Moreover, his statement to the FBI agents can have been no passing slip or mistake, since he elaborated on it six months later. He then told the grand jury that he was "taken aback" by Russert's question about Wilson's wife because "at that point in time I did not recall that I had ever known, and I thought this is something that he was telling me that I was first learning."
Libby's eternal-sunshine-of-the-spotless-mind defense is harder yet to believe given what the prosecutor is apparently prepared to prove: that Libby had been preoccupied since May 2003 with Wilson's allegations that the administration knowingly used a false claim about Iraqi attempts to purchase uranium from Niger to make its case for war; and that, by July 10, when Libby talked with Russert, he had discussed Wilson's wife's employment not only with the Vice President, but also with at least six other officials including a senior CIA officer, an Undersecretary of State, Libby's CIA briefer, the White House Press Secretary, the Assistant to the Vice President for Public Affairs, and the Counsel to the Office of the Vice President. In addition, Libby had already talked about it twice with reporter Judith Miller.
As it stands now, Libby is on record as saying that he first learned Joseph Wilson's wife worked for the CIA from the Vice President. (That he had to admit, since he had notes reflecting the conversation.) What he now claims is that whatever the Vice President told him fled his brain and he only learned about Valerie Plame, as if anew, when Tim Russert spoke with him in July 2003. Even that encounter, Libby says, failed to jar his memory about previous conversations with the Vice President and seven other people, so that when he talked to Time's Matt Cooper about it on July 12, he was merely relaying what "other reporters," not the Vice President, had told him. Indeed, Libby specifically described his defense to the grand jury on March 24, 2004 in this improbable way: "I told a couple reporters what other reporters had told us, and I don't see that as a crime." (This statement was in itself odd, considering that he specifically told the grand jury he had learned about Wilson's wife only from Tim Russert.)
Interestingly, Libby's formulation of his defense -- that the information about Valerie Wilson's employment was the subject of reporter "chatter" and "gossip" -- is precisely the spin that Bob Woodward had been offering in appearances on Larry King Live and other talk shows (before he was revealed as the first reporter to have Plame's information leaked to him). In turn, the Woodward revelation was preceded on November 15 by a leak from "lawyers close to the defense" to the New York Times indicating that the Libby defense team planned to seek testimony from numerous journalists, not just those named in the indictment, in order to determine what the "media really knew." As Libby's lawyer put it on November 16, "Hopefully, as more information is obtained from reporters, like Bob Woodward, the real facts will come out."
Libby's defense team should be careful what it hopes for, because the real facts don't help Libby at all. Woodward's recent disclosure merely adds another senior administration official to the already large group who were obviously working with Libby to distract the public from a truth the administration had already fessed up to -- that the President had made an entirely unsubstantiated claim about an Iraqi search for uranium from Niger in his State of the Union Address. It's not that "some other dude did it" or that "some other dude did it first." The more the real facts about smearing and deception by senior administration officials come out, the more obvious it is that lots of them did it -- and Patrick Fitzgerald shows no signs of folding up his tent and departing. In the meantime, the SODDI defense is likely to prove not only unhelpful to Libby but a potential disaster for the Bush administration, sweeping yet more people into the case.
Elizabeth de la Vega is a former federal prosecutor with more than twenty years' experience. During her tenure she was a member of the Organized Crime Strike Force and chief of the San José branch of the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of California. Her pieces have appeared in the Nation magazine, the Los Angeles Times, and regularly at Tomdispatch.
© 2005 Tom Engelhardt
http://www.tomdispatch.com |
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Re: Plame Name Blame Game |
by The main idea of people who created....
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
22 Nov 2005
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The main idea of people who created this story and are pushing it further into media is to compromise as much as possible Bush administration. So, these people are doing their job, and problem of"scooter" per se is the second much less important echelon. |
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Re: Plame Name Blame Game |
by Reality without an agenda
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
22 Nov 2005
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I make a few succinct comments, and a yahoo or two repost someone else's "War and Peace." Brilliant.
Again, strait from the horse's mouth: Woodward said the manner of divulgence was "casual, not conspiritorial."
Thanks, Main Idea, for verbalizing what I've been unsuccessfully implying.
Doesn't matter, though. "Dose of Reality" is too far removed from reality to be worth attempting to bring back into the world. |
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Woodward Joins a Decadent Dance |
by Tim Rutten
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
22 Nov 2005
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Whatever impact the scandal surrounding the leak of former CIA agent Valerie Plame's identity ultimately has on the Bush administration, it continues to spread through the Washington press corps like a toxic plume.
As it does, it discredits not only individual reporters and damages their news organizations but also an entire style of reporting that has come to dominate the way Americans are informed - or misinformed - concerning their government's conduct.
This week's casualty was the Washington Post's Bob Woodward, who, as it turns out, has concealed for 17 months the fact that a Bush administration official he still refuses to name to his readers leaked Plame's identity to him before the vice president's former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby - now under indictment for perjury - named the then-covert agent to New York Times reporter Judy Miller and others.
Woodward's disclosure was motivated not by a sudden pang of conscience, as it turns out, but by the sudden necessity of testifying under oath before a federal grand jury. Along the way, he incidentally revealed not only that he had concealed this information from his editors and readers for fear of subpoena, but also that he had in the interim gone on several television shows to trash the special prosecutor investigating the affair. Moreover, it now emerges, the reporting that went into his last best-selling book, "Plan of Attack," involved the submission of written questions in advance to Vice President Dick Cheney, a fact he never bothered to share with the book's readers.
There is something singularly appropriate about the fact that the Plame affair should involve Woodward, whose skillful and courageous use of the ur-voice among confidential sources virtually created a whole genre of Washington reporting. It's a journalistic strategy style dependent on the cultivation of access to well-placed officials greased by promises of "confidentiality." It's a way of doing journalism that still serves its practitioners' career interests, but less and less often their readers or viewers because it's a game the powerful and well-connected have learned to play to their own advantage.
Whatever its self-righteous pretensions, it's a style of journalism whose signature sound is less the blowing of whistles than it is the spinning of tops.
That's why the Washington press corps, whose ranks include so many alleged commentators that you can't spit without hitting one, steadfastly refuses to put the Plame affair and its participants in the context that explains the event. That context is the Bush administration's unprecedented - and largely successful - effort to bend Washington-based news coverage to its ends. The Washington press corps doesn't want to talk about this because it basically puts some of its most admired members in a line of venal patsies. But consider:
Who can forget the administration's payment of nearly a quarter of a million dollars in federal money to the hapless pseudo-columnist and television and radio commentator Armstrong Williams, to promote the president's "no child left behind" initiative?
Then there was the distribution to local television stations across the country of federally financed, pre-packaged video reports designed to support the administration's educational and energy policy initiatives. The videos were tricked up to look like regular news feeds and apparently ran on numerous small stations whose viewers never were informed that they were watching government propaganda.
This week, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's inspector general reported that PBS' former chairman, Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, appears to have violated federal law by trying to force a political slant onto the network's programming. The inspector's report alluded to e-mails between Tomlinson and a White House official. On Thursday, Bloomberg.com reported that "Presidential advisor Karl Rove" and Tomlinson "discussed creating a 'conservative talk show and adding it to the public television lineup.' " According to Kenneth Konz, PBS' inspector general, Tomlinson and Rove, President Bush's chief political advisor, also corresponded about "shaking up the agency" and "adding Republican staff."
Placed in this context, Woodward, Miller, Time magazine's Matthew Cooper and NBC's Tim Russert are less tragic figures in a grand journalistic drama than they are sad - but willing - bit players in somebody else's rather sorry little charade.
This is hardly the first administration intent on managing the press for its own convenience and advantage. Abraham Lincoln had no more compunction about shutting down Copperhead newspapers than he did about suspending habeas corpus. During World War I, Woodrow Wilson's Justice Department was ruthless in its treatment of our then-vast and vigorous foreign-language press and publishing houses.
The preternaturally charming Franklin Roosevelt found it easy to play the White House press corps like a violin, since most of its members - unlike their papers' proprietors - were favorably disposed toward the New Deal. Roosevelt, moreover, consciously used the new mass medium of radio to speak around the country's generally hostile editorial pages and directly to the people.
John Kennedy, who genuinely liked reporters and was fascinated by journalism, made famous and effective use of his warm friendships with White House correspondents, including Benjamin C. Bradlee, who would go on to be Woodward's editor. Richard Nixon - for whom charm was not an option - plotted to use the IRS against reporters, editors and cartoonists who irritated him. (An ill-advised digression into burglary short-circuited the plan.) Bill Clinton, who always thought he could sweet talk the chrome off a trailer hitch, was fond of making personal calls to reporters' homes. (This writer was the recipient of a couple of those, and found them - like cheap champagne - a mildly heady, if ultimately unconvincing, experience.)
Two things have distinguished this Bush administration's efforts at press manipulation from those that have gone before.
One is their sweep and consistency. There has been bribery - as in the egregious case of the wretched Williams. There has been deception - as in the planting of phony news videos. There have been alleged violations of federal laws and regulations - as in Tomlinson's and Rove's efforts to subvert public television. There has been stealth - as in the whispering campaign to discredit Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson.
And, of course, there has been good old-fashioned bullying, as in the president's and vice-president's assertions that raising questions about their push to war or the torture of U.S. captives is somehow "reprehensible" and unpatriotic. It's a melancholy comment on the state of the American press that it takes a former director of Central Intelligence, Adm. Stansfield Turner, to identify Dick Cheney for what he has become - "vice president for torture" - and that he had to do it in a foreign forum, on Britain's ITV news, as he did Thursday.
The other reason all this has more or less succeeded and gone all but unremarked upon is that the administration has adroitly availed itself of the cultural complicity that prevails in a fin de siècle Washington press corps living out the decadence of an increasingly discredited reporting style. As the Valerie Plame scandal and its spreading taint have made all too clear, the trade in confidentiality and access that has made stars of reporters like Bob Woodward and Judy Miller now is utterly bankrupt.
It still may call itself investigative journalism - and so it once was - but now it's really just a glittering and carefully choreographed waltz in which all the dancers share the unspoken agreement that the one unpardonable faux pas is to ask who's calling the tune.
© Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com |
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Was US Press in "Coma" During Drive to War with Iraq? |
by AFP
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
22 Nov 2005
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US media organisations are now skewering President George W. Bush over his case for ousting Saddam Hussein, but few questioned the pro-war juggernaut in the run-up to battle.
Now, with the White House's once feared public relations machine misfiring, Bush's approval ratings plumbing their lowest depths, and US troops still dying in foreign fields, many commentators and journalists are piling on.
As the White House and suddenly bold Democratic rivals trade bilious charges over Iraq, a new book by award-winning journalist Kristina Borjesson demands an accounting from the media on its own pre-war errors.
In "Feet to the Fire, the media after 9/11", 21 reporters reflect on the Bush administration's case for the preemptive invasion of Iraq in 2003, on the grounds Saddam could offer weapons of mass destruction to terrorists.
Many of those interviewed penned questioning reports before the war, but were muffled by a drumbeat of bombastic television and newspaper coverage.
"The bottom line is that in this era of twenty-four hour cable news, there is less hard news and real information than ever on television about what is going on in this nation's arena of power and around the world," Borjesson writes.
"There is propaganda and fake news masquerading as real news courtesy of the US government," she wrote of a media establishment in which many luminaries seemed as keen to wage war as anyone in the White House.
"Feet to the Fire" features a roll-call of Washington reporters and war correspondents, including veterans Peter Arnett, Walter Pincus, and ABC News correspondent Ted Koppel.
It prompts questions over whether the US media was duped by the White House, was negligent or complicit in the rush to war, and whether senior reporters were too close to government sources.
"With few exceptions, both print and television provided very poor coverage," said independent intelligence expert and reporter James Bamford, in the book, exempting the Washington Post's Pincus and the Knight Ridder operation which feeds regional US papers.
"The problem was, these people were fighting an entrenched mind-set that was accepting the Bush administration's rationales for going to war, when they should have been doubting."
Helen Thomas, grande dame of the White House press corps, argues in the book the media was cowed by the fallout from the September 11 strikes in 2001.
"From 9/11, the American press suddenly had to be the superpatriots," she said. "The press went into a coma."
As the administration began to argue for war with Iraq, the country was still wallowing in wounded patriotism.
But that was no excuse for journalists not to ask awkward questions about the expansion of the 'war on terror' to Iraq, said John MacArthur, president and publisher of Harper's Magazine.
"It was just pathetic, it was the worst it's been since before Vietnam," Borjesson quotes him as saying.
Debate over the roots of the Iraq war has been fanned by the indictment last month of senior White House aide I. Lewis 'Scooter' Libby in a CIA leak case.
Several top reporters, including former New York Times correspondent Judith Miller, stand accused of allowing themselves to be used by top officials peddling now discredited intelligence.
The Times and some other newspapers have published reviews and clarifications of their coverage, following the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Some observers believe the US press, its freedoms enshrined in the US constitution, is less inclined to challenge power than more adversarial colleagues abroad.
"Nobody wants to be isolated socially," said MacArthur, drawing a comparison between modern day Washington and the court of France's King Louis XIV.
"Everybody wants to be at Versailles. Versailles is Washington ... they want to be part of the power structure, and if taking the leak from the official source gets you credit within your news organisation ... getting close to Cheney, getting close to Rumsfeld ... if that brings you credit and gets you more promotions, it's a great way to live."
Borjesson argued in an interview with AFP that the lessons of the last few years show the media needs to change.
"Official source reporting needs to be given less emphasis, reporting from first hand sources who are lower down than official sources is the way to go."
Copyright © 2005 Agence France Presse
http://www.afp.com |
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