Posted on 01/27/2004 5:59:32 PM PST by OESY
Vice President Dick Cheney continued to insist last week that Iraq had been trying to make weapons of mass destruction, apparently oblivious to the findings of the administration's own chief weapons inspector that Iraq had possessed only rudimentary capabilities and unrealized intentions. The vice president's myopia suggests a breathtaking unwillingness to accept a reality that conflicts with the administration's preconceived notions. This kind of rigid thinking helped propel us into an invasion without broad international support and, if Mr. Cheney is as influential as many say, could propel us into further misadventures down the road.
Mr. Cheney has long been the administration's most alarmist proponent of the view that Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons ready for use at any time and an active nuclear program. He gave little ground in an interview on National Public Radio on Thursday. He described two flatbed trailers found in Iraq months ago as mobile biological weapons labs and claimed they were "conclusive evidence" of Iraqi programs to make weapons of mass destruction. The very next day, David Kay, who had just stepped down as the top weapons inspector, told Reuters that he now thought the much-feared stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons had not existed on the eve of the war. They were eliminated in the mid-1990's by United Nations inspectors and by Iraq's own decisions, he said, and no significant efforts to make new ones followed.
As for those trailers cited by Mr. Cheney, the consensus view, Mr. Kay told The Times, is that they were intended to produce hydrogen or perhaps rocket fuel, not biological weapons. Mr. Kay had earlier called the trailer assertions an embarrassing fiasco. So, too, with Iraq's nuclear weapons program. Mr. Cheney once famously declared that it had been reconstituted, but Mr. Kay called it rudimentary — hardly capable of producing a bomb in a year or two, as the administration had implied.
Although administration officials cling to the hope of finding some evidence of terror weapons in a cubbyhole somewhere in Iraq, surely it is time to focus on how the intelligence could have been so wrong and perhaps avoid making the same mistakes with the next secretive dictator to come along. Mr. Kay largely exonerates President Bush and blames the global intelligence community. He believes the C.I.A. became so reliant on the much-maligned United Nations weapons inspectors that their withdrawal left it without spies of its own.
Mr. Kay also believes that intelligence analysts failed to realize that Mr. Hussein became increasingly isolated and fantasy-driven in the late 1990's, a condition that enabled scientists to hoodwink him into approving fanciful weapons plans that turned into corrupt moneymaking schemes. That seems hard to believe in a land where people supposedly lived in terror of a brutal dictator. But if it is true that Mr. Hussein wrote novels while the American-led force geared up for war, then perhaps both sides of this conflict were divorced from reality.
The Times also neglects to mention, presumably by design, the following suspicious items: Saddam's inability to account for WMD destruction, the traces of chemical weapons found dumped in the Euphrates River, provision of laboratory equipment to rapidly reconstitute WMD once international pressure had subsided, a record of prior use against his enemies foreign and domestic, an order to deploy WMD against US forces within the Baghdad "red zone" and all accessory equipment to support such an assault, and the purposeful destruction of WMD-related documentation as well as scientists after the war was lost.
I further note the Times scrupulously avoided all mention of Saddam's propensity to conceal weapons such as fleets of fighter planes, illegal SCUD missiles and nuclear weapon components. In street parlance, many would contend it is the gun that is the weapon, not the bullet -- if one is to rely on past Times editorials.
More importantly, the Times fails to explain one of the chief weapons inspector's most significant concerns: that the loss of central control enabled freelancing scientists to engage in "moneymaking schemes" which most would conclude would mean selling the WMD and production capabilities to visiting al Qaeda personnel, clearly a "grave and gathering" development that had serious repercussions for the US.
It would seem that the converse of Times' editorial is true: The Times is oblivious to the findings of Mr. Kay or, more probably, chose not to disclose portions of the findings that do not serve its agenda to defeat President Bush. The Times has become an anachronism, a Democrat Party propaganda organ, trapped in the body of the former newspaper of national record.
A perceptive observation. We're back to Clintonian parsing.
Does that give anyone any ideas? Wishes? Fantasies?
Please allow my belated response. I wish what you wrote was true. My experience tells me there is more malfeasance than misfeasance at the Times. I live in Manhattan and have met several reporters and editors of the Times.
Almost 20 years ago, one did a story on my wife and her partner who had recently begun to meet regularly in a church basement to play basketball. However, the fact that there were only nine players wasn't suitable to the "minions" at the Times, so they upped it to 16 and suggested an informal league had been created. This presumably fit their agenda to promote women's issues including sports and thus attract new readers to the Times and eventually to the Democrat Party. Moreover, they didn't want to leave in the original story that the women went beer drinking afterwards, since that was to be reserved for negative associations, preferring instead that they sipped wine, but eventually relented.
About the same time an author-friend was selected to do an article on how airlines were gouging the public, but his research showed the airlines quoted better fares, mostly because they had more instantaneous information and could quote the latest discounts. The Times decided against running his story because it didn't fit their anti-big business agenda.
My selection of only two items would seem limited if it were not bolstered by the Times description of press conferences, Pentagon briefings and more recently the Iraq-WMD testimony where they have clearly omitted significant points made, claiming conclusions different than those warranted by Dr. Kay's findings -- stated and written, i.e., that Saddam's Iraq was even more dangerous than our intelligence had suspected, given that much of it derived from assertions by defectors and Iraqi generals -- in which case our intelligence community performed far better than our journalist community in getting their stories straight. After all, the sloppiest intelligence work was done by Joe Wilson who sipped tea with some officials and reported back what they told him -- without verification but clearly with a political motive -- according to his July 2003 op ed in the Times. Many of us have had the experience of watching an event on C-SPAN and seriously disagreed with the description published in a newspaper the next day.
When Times reporters see their editors change reported facts, insert standard/approved wording (e.g., as during the Bosnian campaign), spin the details or withhold key information to make a story more logical, more dramatic, more compelling or more appealing -- to promote either expanded readership or their political agenda, is there any wonder that the Jayson Blair, Rick Bragg, Janet Cooke or James Gilligan episodes occur at their respective media? Rarely are the top level media executives responsible for creating the culture that tolerates taking liberties with the truth forced out, as were Howell Raines of the Times or Gavyn Davies of the BBC.
Were not 100-130 million killed during the twentieth century to serve the greater "beneficence" that communism promised? Not only was Walter Duranty a Times reporter who won the Pulitzer Prize for writing propaganda about Joseph Stalin, a prize the Times refuses to return, but even a casual reader of the Times cannot fail to notice its nostalgic sympathy for communism, its leaders and their disdain for accurate renditions of important, and sometimes -- not so important, events.
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