By David Swanson
Bill Moyers has put together an amazing 90-minute video do***enting
the lies that the Bush administration told to sell the Iraq War to the
American public, with a special focus on how the media led the charge.
I've watched an advance copy and read a transcript, and the most
im****tant thing I can say about it is: Watch PBS from 9 to 10:30 p.m.
on Wednesday, April 25. Spending that 90 minutes on this will actually
save you time, because you'll never watch television news again - not
even on PBS, which comes in for its share of criticism.
While a great many pundits, not to mention presidents, look remarkably
stupid or dishonest in the four-year-old clips included in "Buying the
War," it's hard to take any spiteful pleasure in holding them to
account, and not just because the killing and dying they facilitated
is ongoing, but also because of what this video reveals about the
mindset of members of the DC media. Moyers interviews media
personalities, including Dan Rather, who clearly both understand what
the media did wrong and are unable to really see it as having been
wrong or avoidable.
It's great to see an American media outlet tell this story so well,
but it leads one to ask: When will Congress tell it? While the
Democrats were in the minority, they clamored for hearings and
investigations, they pushed Resolutions of Inquiry into the White
House Iraq Group and the Downing Street Minutes. Now, in the majority,
they've gone largely silent. The chief exception is the House
Judiciary Committee's effort to question Condoleezza Rice next week
about the forged Niger do***ents.
But what comes out of watching this show is a powerful realization
that no investigation is needed by Congress, just as no hidden
information was needed for the media to get the story right in the
first place. The claims that the White House made were not honest
mistakes. But neither were they deceptions. They were transparent and
laughably absurd falsehoods. And they were high crimes and
misdemeanors.
The program opens with video of President Bush saying "Iraq is part of
a war on terror. It's a country that trains terrorists, it's a country
that can arm terrorists. Saddam Hussein and his weapons are a direct
threat to this country."
Was that believable or did the media play along? The next shot is of a
press conference at which Bush announces that he has a script telling
him which re****ters to call on in what order. Yet the re****ters play
along, raising their hands after each comment, pretending that they
might be called on despite the script.
Video shows Richard Perle claiming that Saddam Hussein worked with al
Qaeda and that Iraqis would greet American occupiers as liberators.
Here are the Weekly Standard, the Wall Street Journal, William Safire
at the New York Times, Charles Krauthammer and Jim Hoagland at the
Wa****ngton Post all demanding an overthrow of Iraq's government.
George Will is seen saying that Hussein "has anthrax, he loves
biological weapons, he has terrorist training camps, including 747s to
practice on."
But was that even plausible? Bob Simon of "60 Minutes" tells Moyers he
wasn't buying it. He says he saw the idea of a connection between
Hussein and al Qaeda as an absurdity: "Saddam, as most tyrants, was a
total control freak. He wanted total control of his regime. Total
control of the country. And to introduce a wild card like al Qaeda in
any sense was just something he would not do. So I just didn't believe
it for an instant."
Knight Ridder Bureau Chief John Walcott didn't buy it either. He
assigned Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landay to do the re****ting, and
they found the Bush claims to be quite apparently false. For example,
when the Iraqi National Congress (INC) fed the New York Times' Judith
Miller a story through an Iraqi defector claiming that Hussein had
chemical and biological weapons labs under his house, Landay noticed
that the source was a Kurd, making it very unlikely he would have
learned such secrets. But Landay also noticed that it was absurd to
imagine someone putting a biological weapons lab under his house.
But absurd announcements were the order of the day. A video clip shows
a Fox anchor saying "A former top Iraqi nuclear scientist tells
Congress Iraq could build three nuclear bombs by 2005." And the most
fantastic stories of all were fed to David Rose at Vanity Fair
Magazine. We see a clip of him saying "The last training exercise was
to blow up a full size mock up of a US destroyer in a lake in central
Iraq."
Landay comments: "Or jumping into pits of fouled water and having to
kill a dog with your bare teeth. I mean, this was coming from people,
who are appearing in all of these stories, and sometimes their rank
would change."
Forged do***ents from Niger could not have gotten noticed in this stew
of lies. Had there been some real do***ents honestly showing
something, that might have stood out and caught more eyes. Walcott
describes the way the INC would feed the same info to the Vice
President and Secretary of Defense that it fed to a re****ter, and the
re****ter would then get the claims confirmed by calling the White
House or the Pentagon. Landay adds: "And let's not forget how close
these people were to this administration, which raises the question,
was there coordination? I can't tell you that there was, but it sure
looked like it."
Simon from 60 Minutes tells Moyers that when the White House claimed a
9-11 hijacker had met with a representative of the Iraqi government in
Prague, 60 Minutes was easily able to make a few calls and find out
that there was no evidence for the claim. "If we had combed Prague,"
he says, "and found out that there was absolutely no evidence for a
meeting between Mohammad Atta and the Iraqi intelligence figure. If we
knew that, you had to figure the administration knew it. And yet they
were selling the connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam."
Moyers questions a number of people about their awful work, including
Dan Rather, Peter Beinart, and then Chairman and CEO of CNN Walter
Isaacson. And he questions Simon, who soft-pedaled the story and
avoided re****ting that there was no evidence.
Landay at Knight Ridder did re****t the facts when it counted, but not
enough people paid attention. He tells Moyers that all he had to do
was read the UN weapons inspectors re****ts online to know the White
House was lying to us. When Cheney said that Hussein was close to
acquiring nuclear weapons, Landay knew he was lying: "You need tens of
thousands of machines called 'centrifuges' to produce highly enriched
uranium for a nuclear weapon. You've got to house those in a fairly
big place, and you've got to provide a huge amount of power to this
facility."
Moyers also hits Tim Russert with a couple of tough questions. Russert
expressed regret for not having included any skeptical voices by
saying he wished his phone had rung. So, Moyers begins the next
segment by saying "Bob Simon didn't wait for the phone to ring," and
describing Simon's re****ting. Simon says he knew the claims about
aluminum tubes were false because 60 Minutes called up some scientists
and researchers and asked them. Howard Kurtz of the Wa****ngton Post
says that skeptical stories did not get placed on the front page
because they are not "definitive."
Moyers shows brief segments of an Oprah show in which she has on only
pro-war guests and silences a caller who questions some of the White
House claims. Just in time for the eternal election season, Moyers
includes clips of Hillary Clinton and John Kerry backing the war on
the basis of Bush and Cheney's lies. But we also see clips of Robert
Byrd and Ted Kennedy getting it right.
The Wa****ngton Post editorialized in favor of the war 27 times, and
published in 2002 about 1,000 articles and columns on the war. But the
Post gave a huge anti-war march a total of 36 words. "What got even
less ink," Moyers says, "was the release of the National Intelligence
Estimate." Even the misleading partial version that the media received
failed to fool a careful eye.
Landay recalls: "It said that the majority of analysts believed that
those tubes were for the nuclear weapons program. It turns out,
though, that the majority of intelligence analysts had no background
in nuclear weapons." Was Landay the only one capable of noticing this
detail?
Colin Powell's UN presentation comes in for similar quick debunking.
We watch a video clip of Powell complaining that Iraq has covered a
test stand with a roof. But AP re****ter Charles Hanley comments: "What
he neglected to mention was that the inspectors were underneath
watching what was going on."
Powell cited a UK paper, but it very quickly came out that the paper
had been plagiarized from a college student's work found online. The
British press pointed that out. The US let it slide. But anyone
looking for the facts found it quickly.
Moyers' wonderful movie is marred by a single line, the next to the
last sentence, in which he says: "The number of Iraqis killed, over
35,000 last year alone, is hard to pin down." A far more accurate
figure could have been found very easily.
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I can't wait to see Bush's tantrum and demonizing PBS after this one.
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