Month: April 2007

Bill Moyers Journal  episode on “Buying the War” on PBS is a great expose on how media groveling to Bush administration falsehoods and absurdities helped lead to the Iraq war.

The program focuss on the villains and bootlickers in the press.  It also contained interviews with some of the courageous reporters – such as Warren Stroebel and Jonathan Landay of Knight Ridder – who saw through & reported the Bush administration’s frauds months before the war began.   Charles Hanley, an Associated Press reporter who went with the UN inspection teams in Iraq in late 2002 and early 2003, talked about how editors would delete his comments about how the Bush administration’s claims on WMDs were being proven wrong.   Norman Solomon, the author of War Made Easy,  made excellent comments on the institutional cowardice and groveling of the mainstream media.   Unfortunately, the program did not include any reference to Antiwar.com’s truth-telling long before “Shock and Awe” hit Baghdad.

Dan Rather told Moyers that in every newsroom in the country, there is fear of getting “the reputation of being a troublemaker” – thus making journalists and editors shy away from challenging the honesty of the White House.

Dan Rather at least had the gumption to be interviewed, despite some disgraceful things he said on the air after 9/11 about kowtowing to Bush.  Almost all  the chickenhawk columnists and pundits chickened out – didn’t even have the gumption to sit down in front of  Moyers and defend themselves.

If you get a chance to see the program (it airs at a different time in various PBS markets), it is definitely worth catching.   The transcript is already online here. 

Comments on this topic are welcome at my blog here.

At last, the Democrats are moving on the let’s-investigate-how-they-lied-us-into-war front, with Rep. Henry Waxman (D-California) homing in on what Waxman describes as a “fabricated claim that Iraq sought uranium in Niger.” Waxman’s Government Oversight Committee has issued a subpoena to Condi Rice: apparently the California congressman isn’t just grandstanding — he means business.

The Niger uranium mystery has always seemed to me to be the Achilles heel of the War Party: here we have the President of the United States uttering those fateful 16 words based on a cache of documents that turned out to be forgeries. And not even good forgeries, but pathetically crude renditions of purported “correspondence” between Saddam Hussein and the President of Niger. A simple Google search, plus a modicum of common sense, would have convinced the most eager-to-believe to dump this “intelligence” in the trash. Yet, somehow, it passed muster — in spite of George Tenet’s militant misgivings — and went into Bush’s 2003 state of the union speech to buttress the claim that Iraq was actively pursuing the acquisition of nuclear weapons.

Some questions:

Who was pushing this phony “intelligence”?

How did they manage to get around the vetting process?

And, most intriguingly: who forged the documents?

We’ve been asking these questions at Antiwar.com for some time now, and come up with some tentative answers, while calling for a congressional investigation. It will be interesting to see if the Waxman committee digs as deep as it needs to in order to get at the truth.

UPDATE: This just in:

“Condoleezza Rice said Thursday she has already answered the questions she has been subpoenaed to answer before a U.S. congressional committee and suggested she is not inclined to comply with the order.”

This is a mistake, but then again this administration never learns. The last time she tried to pull this, she wound up relenting. Now she is “hinting” once again that she’s going to go into her diva act. Stay tuned ….

I see America’s Mussolini Mayor is giving us a preview of the Republican strategy in 2008:

“Rudy Giuliani said if a Democrat is elected president in 2008, America will be at risk for another terrorist attack on the scale of Sept. 11, 2001. But if a Republican is elected, he said, especially if it is him, terrorist attacks can be anticipated and stopped.

“‘If any Republican is elected president —- and I think obviously I would be the best at this —- we will remain on offense and will anticipate what [the terrorists] will do and try to stop them before they do it,’ Giuliani said.”

Yeah, Rudy — just like you did last time, eh? Remember how you insisted on putting the command-and-control headquarters of New York City’s anti-terrorist squad in … the World Trade Center — even though it had already been attacked once before, in 1993? Smart move.

Well, anticipate this, Senor Giiuliani: While your platform of making the trains run on time is probably a good reflection of the red-state fascist mentality rampant in what used to be the Republican party, others may be more willing to look at your actual record. not to mention your, uh, unusual personal life. And i wouldn’t count on shameless fear-mongering to divert attention from other issues important to Republican primary voters. After all, you’re hardly a fiscal conservative, and you have some other positions that Republicans of the more traditional sort might find horrifying.

In a wider context, I find it hard to believe that Giuliani’s campaign will survive a closer examination of his character and personality. Here, after all, is someone who ridiculed a man with Parkinson ‘s disease, and looks lovely in a party frock. Scandal has stalked his political career, and the myth of “America’s mayor” is likely to be fatally subverted by close scrutiny.

There’s a new documentary, “Giuliani Time,” that looks interesting. And go here for the real dirt. A leaked Giuliani campaign strategy paper bemoans the “weirdness factor” as an obstacle on the road to the White House, and you can see on it on full display about 3 minutes into this Youtube video of the candidate’s appearance at a meeting of the Churchill Club.

We’ve had a lot of people asking why we would run this article from the New York Times on Somalia. Well, we’re not ones to crush news, and quotes like this:

Omar Hussein Ahmed, an olive oil exporter in Mogadishu, the capital, said he and a group of fellow traders recently bought some missiles to shoot at government soldiers.

“Taxes are annoying,” he explained.

are news.

Jeffrey Gettleman’s slimy, repulsive smear-style writing doesn’t need a rebuttal (here’s one anyway) — you all figured it out yourselves, and that’s why you wrote, outraged. When this brazen propaganda popped onto the internet yesterday, we were all laughing at the sheer ridiculousness of this piece. We thought we’d share it with you.

I don’t need to school anyone on the priorities of world bureaucrats. They want a state in Somalia — the idea of millions of people making their own choices and their own connections scares the crap out of them. How are they supposed to, say, get the loans they lent the Somali dictator in the 80s back if there is no way to tax his victims? They consider a sitting government in Mogadishu to be the definition of “peace.” It doesn’t matter that hundreds are dying and hundreds of thousands are fleeing. They at least now have one guy to call when they want to hear someone grovel. And that makes international types very happy.

The great libertarian author James Bovard discusses his new article for The American Conservative, “Working for the Clampdown,” about the new martial law powers in the John Warner National Defense Authorization Act.

MP3 here. (30: 26)

James Bovard is the author of Attention Deficit Democracy (St. Martin’s/Palgrave, January 2006), and eight other books. He has written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New Republic, Reader’s Digest, and many other publications. His books have been translated into Spanish, Arabic, Japanese, and Korean.

The Wall Street Journal called Bovard “the roving inspector general of the modern state,” and Washington Post columnist George Will called him a “one-man truth squad.” His 1994 book Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty received the Free Press Association’s Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His Terrorism and Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner Award for the Best Book on Liberty in 2003. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought, and the Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association.

His writings have been been publicly denounced by the chief of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the Postmaster General, and the chiefs of the U.S. International Trade Commission, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as well as by many congressmen and other malcontents.

History professor David Beito discusses the history of America’s empire and some of the movements that have opposed it.

MP3 here. (42: 32)

David T. Beito is Associate Professor at the University of Alabama. He received his Ph.D. in history at the University of Wisconsin in 1986. Professor Beito is the author of Taxpayers in Revolt: Tax Resistance during the Great Depression and From Mutual Aid to the Welfare state: Fraternal Societies and Social Services, 1890-1967. An urban and social historian, he has published in the Journal of Southern History, and the Journal of Urban History, among other scholarly journals. He is currently writing a biography of Dr. T. R. M. Howard, a black civil rights pioneer, entrepreneur, and mutual-aid leader.