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7/25/04 NY Times' Tissue of Lies The New York Times news pages and the talking points from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) are nearly indistinguishable. Both tirelessly maintain, without a shred of actual evidence, that George W. Bush lied or misled the nation in the run-up to the Iraq war. Soothseeker has demonstrated time after time that none of the alleged "lies" put forward by the Times or by the DNC were either not even false or were not known by anyone to be false at the time they were made. Thus they do not satisfy the definition of a "lie", which is a knowing falsehood. But there is a recent attempt in the pages of the Times to revitalize the empty argument about lies by alleging (among other things) that the report of the 9/11 commission has debunked the Bush administration's argument about the connection of Al Qaeda to the regime of Saddam Hussein, "appearing to undermine a justification for the Iraq war." This was in a news story, mind you, not an editorial. The quoted phrase is, however, entirely subjective, but vouched for by the primary author of the article (according to the NYTimes.com web site, Philip Shenon). In the context of today's political climate, this is a partisan position being advocated by a supposed journalist. Furthermore, the statements summarized in the piece to bolster the supposed claim by the administration that there was some connection between Iraq under Hussein and the 9/11 attacks (a claim nowhere made, to my knowledge, by any senior member of the administration) do not portray the administration as having made any such claim, nor are any of them refuted by the 9/11 commission report. The Times reports: "In October 2002, with the invasion of Iraq only months away, President Bush said in a speech in Cincinnati that 'high-level contacts' between Iraq and Al Qaeda 'go back a decade,' and that 'we've learned that Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases.'" Bush's statements have all been vindicated in the 9/11 commission report, according to all news reports. Vice President Dick Cheney's assertion that credible intelligence put one of the hijackers in Prague with a high-level Iraqi operative has been disputed by some, but the claim is not clearly false even now (certainly it was not known to be false when he said it). Cheney insinuated a possible link to 9/11, and it is still possible that there was a link, even if the evidence we have is not sufficient to make such a conclusion reasonable. The Bush Administration never drew a definite connection between Iraq and the 9/11 attacks one of their justifications for the war, so there is no truth in the partisan statement of the Times that the information in the report "[appears] to undermine a justification for the Iraq war." As so many recent blunders by the Times and its cousin in Los Angeles (and so many other hopelessly biased large-city papers) have demonstrated, the "papers of record" maintain the presumption that the Bush Administration has lied or manipulated public opinion, in spite of the truth. All facts and claims that they think can be twisted to support the presumption are important, and all facts that would refute the presumption are either unimportant or must be false. It is not Bush who has lied, but the journalists who have fed pernicious myths about the Bush Administration and the Iraq war. It is they who supply the sustaining energy behind the Democratic hopes for a victory in November and the terrorists' hopes that they can break our resolve by capturing and torturing and mutilating more innocent people in Iraq. What they are doing is not illegal, so unfortunately we cannot arrest them. It is, however, a violation of the canons of journalism, it is a blatant attack on this nation's foreign policy, and it gives comfort to forces that everyone should agree are as close to purely evil as it is possible for them to be. Anyone who reads the Times and gives credence to their reporting on the war and 9/11 is being constantly misled. That is a hundred times worse than what they allege against the administration, since people generally expect politicians to lie or exaggerate, but many expect journalists to report the truth. Modified: 09/10/2004 |
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