Lies and Misdemeanors
One byproduct of the Internet age is that news circulates much faster than the prevailing distribution system (TV and print) is set up to handle. Consequently, news junkies like myself often have the facts on a current story well ahead of time, and the real drama provided by media accounts becomes the game of how the various “official” news sources choose to spin it.
This is certainly the case with the Niger uranium situation, which ran rampant on the Net (particularly in places like Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo) for the last week and is just now poking through on the mass media radar. The facts of the case are pretty clear. The intelligence suggesting that Saddam Hussein tried to buy fissionable material from Niger – a state in West Africa – was false. Government analysts knew it was false more than a year ago. They told members of the Administration, notably Vice President Cheney, that it was false sometime last fall. And yet, the President referred to this story as if it were true in his State of the Union speech in January.
To any disinterested observer, there is a prima facie case that the Administration deliberately ignored its own intelligence and repeated a known lie as if it were the truth. The charge that Saddam was building nuclear weapons was especially incendiary at the time that the war was still being debated. Very few people – not even me – would dispute the contention that a nuclear-armed Saddam posed an imminent and unacceptable risk to the United States, maybe even enough to justify unilateral war. But it’s an “if-then” argument: a lot of support was contingent on the question of whether or not Saddam actually possessed, or tried to obtain, nuclear material.
So again, we have the bogus intelligence, which not even the White House claims is credible; we have the plausible and, to my knowledge, undisputed contention that intelligence officials briefed the Vice President about the information being false; we have the extremely persuasive nature of the argument, were it to have been true; and we have the Administration clearly bent on war, regardless of arguments to the contrary. This seems to be a pretty clear case that President simply could not resist tossing this argument into his speech, even though he knew at the time it was not true.
In other words, he knowingly lied to the country and the world in order to build support for an aggressive and – barring any evidence to the contrary – completely unprovoked war against Iraq.
This is a hell of a story. You’d think someone in the mainstream press would take this an run. Amazingly, the mainstream networks are steadfastly refusing to connect the dots. Yes, the story was false. Yes, somebody knew it was false. Yes, the President said it anyway. But here are the spins we’re getting from our press:
- Why was the intelligence false? (um, someone made it up? In any case, it’s beside the point if the question is about the Administration’s credibility)
- What does this say about communications within the White House? (Possibly the least interesting part of the story. What sensible journalist would take this angle when it’s pretty clear there was deceit and misdirection involved?)
- Isn’t it interesting that people don’t seem to care? (yes, it is, but report the story itself first – don’t skip ahead to the meta-analysis without giving people the facts)
- How are the Democrats planning to take partisan advantage? (again, not the point. If the President lied us into a war, all Americans should be concerned, not just Democrats. Or is there simply no national interest anymore – just competing versions from the different party HQs?)
In other words, it’s being reported as an inside-process story, or a standard partisan dust-up – and in either case, the tone being adopted by the anchors and reporters is that normal people don’t have to worry themselves with it, it’s just one of those Washington things.
There’s a lot of theorizing right now that people are happy about how the war turned out and don’t want to hear that the President lied to us, so there’s no profit in reporting it. Maybe so, but you’d think that someone might try, just to see what would happen? But no, that only happens when you have a free press.
4:20:37 PM 
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