Media Bamboozled from Iraq to Barack [Updated with Joe Wilson Video]
By Larry Johnson on May 28, 2008 at 3:21 PM in Barack Obama, Current Affairs, Iraq, Media, Media Bias, Obamedia
Talk about deja vu. Today we are hearing “stunning” revelations from President Bush’s former press secretary, who admits the Administration was manipulating news to build a false case for going to war with Iraq. Excuse me if those of us who have been saying this for five years don’t care a whit about the so-called revelations from Scott McClellan. Don’t hold your breath waiting for the media to line up and do a mea culpa. The Washington Post, devoid of any keen sense of irony, NOW informs us that:
the Iraq war was sold to the American people with a sophisticated “political propaganda campaign” led by President Bush and aimed at “manipulating sources of public opinion” and “downplaying the major reason for going to war. . . .
But in a chapter titled “Selling the War,” he alleges that the administration repeatedly shaded the truth and that Bush “managed the crisis in a way that almost guaranteed that the use of force would become the only feasible option.”
“Over that summer of 2002,” he writes, “top Bush aides had outlined a strategy for carefully orchestrating the coming campaign to aggressively sell the war. . . . In the permanent campaign era, it was all about manipulating sources of public opinion to the president’s advantage.”
McClellan, once a staunch defender of the war from the podium, comes to a stark conclusion, writing, “What I do know is that war should only be waged when necessary, and the Iraq war was not necessary.”
That, boys and girls, is what I call no shit analysis. I was warning about this in May of 2003 (and Joe Wilson was doing so in 2002).
Here is what I told National Public Radio in May of 2003 (REAL AUDIO LINK || WINDOWS MEDIA LINK) :
UPDATE: V. has created a YouTube of the audio. It is immediately below.
MICHELE NORRIS, host:
As the search for weapons of mass destruction continues, a growing number of intelligence officials are stepping forward to express concerns that the Bush administration deliberately manipulated data to build support for the war. That concern has reached the point that a group has formed calling themselves Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. According to today’s New York Times, they’ve taken the extraordinary step of writing to President Bush, protesting what they call ‘a policy and intelligence fiasco of monumental proportions.’ Larry Johnson is a former CIA and State Department intelligence analyst. He believes there’s no question that intelligence was misused.
Mr. LARRY JOHNSON (Former CIA and State Department Intelligence Analyst): There are a lot of people who are still active duty inside the agency who are just completely distraught with what they view as a cooking of the books, the real genuine politicization of the intelligence that I don’t think we’ve seen since the efforts during the Contra war to try to shape some of the intelligence.
NORRIS: So was this a case where data was misinterpreted by those within the administration or were officials putting pressure on those within the intelligence community to–and I want to be careful about using the word ‘exaggerate’…
Mr. JOHNSON: Yes.
NORRIS: …so to amplify their findings in some way to turn the temperature up?
Mr. JOHNSON: It was both. They started out with an idea of what they wanted to believe. They wanted to believe that Iraq posed a threat to the United States, they wanted to believe that Iraq was backing al-Qaeda and began looking for intelligence, pieces that would fit within that picture. That’s different from combing through the information and seeing what picture comes together by looking at the whole picture.
But the other part that was taking place was the analysts at CIA, I am told, did not believe that Iraq posed a threat, particularly with weapons of mass destruction, to the United States. And I am told that their attempt to put that line of analysis out was thwarted and, in fact, that the line of analysis backed by the Department of Defense Office of Special Plans went forward without a dissent. And these are the people charged with telling the president what’s going on, and any president is not in a position to comb through all these volumes of information. You have to rely upon people to give you the truth. And it would appear in this case that President Bush is being misled deliberately.
NORRIS: But intelligence, by its very nature, is secret, it’s covert and it’s…
Mr. JOHNSON: Sure…
NORRIS: …quite possible that there’s intelligence out there that we–and that would include you, since you are a former intelligence officer–have not been privy to; that since these weapons of mass destruction have not been found, we don’t know that the White House actually manipulated this data.
Mr. JOHNSON: One thing I learned in my first week on the job at CIA starting back in 1985, when we were presented with information that was considered very highly classified, top-secret information, must protect at all costs–and I was reading it within the next day or two in The New York Times and The Washington Post. Bush administration officials would have been running to the press if they had had the proof. The one thing we did not see going into the start of this war that I’ve seen in previous situations where we had clear intelligence of misdeeds by other governments or terrorist organizations, we would put together briefing teams, go overseas, brief foreign governments who were even opposed to our position and, by showing them the actual evidence, could sway them. What did not happen in this case is that case to other governments was not made, and the reason it wasn’t made is because the evidence did not exist.
NORRIS: What the administration might say also is that because of the way they operate, where much of the power is centralized, very close to the Oval Office, that some of these sour grapes may be coming from individuals who feel like they were cut out of the inner circle, that they’re not being listened to.
Mr. JOHNSON: No. In fact, some of the people I know are not–they are not directly in the process of having their views represented or misrepresented, but they are in a position to know what the positions are, to know what the intelligence is and to have a look at it. Look, I voted Republican. I’ll lay my political credentials on the table. I find this outrageous, and I think it is incumbent upon the US Congress to do something about it. I think it’s incumbent upon President Bush to do something about it, because these individuals that have been operating out of the Office of Special Plans at the Department of Defense, I think, represent a clear and present danger to the United States.
NORRIS: Larry Johnson, thank you very much for speaking with us.
Mr. JOHNSON: Thanks, Michele.
NORRIS: Larry Johnson is a former CIA and State Department intelligence analyst.
So here we are in 2008. We are not talking about Iraq, we are talking Obama. We are talking about a fatally flawed candidate for the Democratic nomination. We are talking about the problems with Barack Obama that will become painfully evident once the media decides to do its goddamn job. I am not letting this one go without a fight. The stakes are too high to allow an incompetent like Barack in the White House. But the media, once again, is playing the role of the enabler. Tends to make me cranky.
by Ronald Scott
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