DETROIT -- President George W. Bush keeps the lies flowing with the comfortable assurance that, even when he's caught red-handed with documented evidence of his deceptions, he can just shrug, lie again, and most in the American media will let him get away with it.
On a recent 18-day overseas trip, I sought to keep up with the important issues of our times, the progress of the Detroit Pistons topping my list of "I've got to know" matters. With the invaluable Internet, the cable news networks and the Turkish love of basketball, the critical scores got my way. For other news of the world, the BBC -- the "Old Gray Lady" of responsible broadcasting -- provided the basics.
An aside: The Pistons are one of the finest and most professional organizations in all of sports. When they're on, Pistons-style defense and team play is a joy to watch. But even after annihilating the Los Angeles Lakers last year and literally destroying the franchise, then returning to the finals this year after overcoming a 3-2 deficit with the Miami Heat in the Eastern Division Finals, the Pistons don't get the national attention they've so nobly earned.
First, it's fashionable to dismiss Detroit. If the same team played in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago or Boston, the national media would be hailing the Pistons as a revolutionary concept for the NBA -- a highly successful team whose success is built on just that, being a team. No single star. No Kobe. No Shaq. No Michael Jordon. No Larry Bird.
The Pistons' work ethic and commitment to team effort rather than individual flash makes them brilliant on the court, but not in the mold preferred by NBA marketers looking for brand names, not brand teams. Members of the media also like the simplicity of a marquee star instead of the complex dynamics of team play. They tend to choose style over substance, and most possess the attention span found in the infant rat.
But the shortcomings of sports reporters are insignificant compared to the monumental and ongoing failures of most in the mainstream media in covering George W. Bush's serial lying. Bush glibly declares fabricated reality and the lap dogs in the media lick it up and dare not challenge his assertions. Nowhere was this pattern more obvious than in the president's dismissal of questions about the damning "Downing Street Memo." On May 1, the Sunday Times of London published the secret British government document showing the Bush administration had made the decision to wage war on Iraq nearly one year before the U.S. invasion.
In the memo's most revealing passage, Sir Richard Dearlove, head of Britain's MI6 intelligence service, reported to Prime Minister Blair on his recent trip to Washington and discussions with top members of the Bush administration about Iraq.
"Military action was now seen as inevitable," he wrote. "Bush wanted to remove Saddam through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were fixed around that policy."
The memo exposes Bush's repeated lies that he was seeking peace and that war was a "last resort." It is the first documentary evidence revealing the great deception.
The British government never tried to deny the authenticity of the memo, yet the story was given scant attention in the American media.
Finally, five weeks after it was published, a reporter found the nerve to question Bush about the "smoking gun" memo. Last Tuesday, as members of the White House press corps sat on their hands, a reporter from British news agency Reuters dropped the question on Bush.
The president denied he planned war while pretending to pursue peace, saying, "There's nothing farther from the truth." With Tony Blair alongside him, Bush scoffed at the notion the decision to attack Iraq came a year before bombs were dropped on Baghdad. "Both of us didn't want to use our military. It was our last resort," Bush told the reporter.
It is a self-evident truth that Bush was hell-bent for war and regime change in Iraq, and the reasons were concocted to achieve those ends. We have the eyewitness accounts of former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and former National Security Council aide and terrorism specialist Richard Clarke. They both say Bush used the horrors of 9/11 to shift focus to Iraq, which had nothing to do with the attacks.
How can the mainstream American media sit back so cynically and say so little about a report that proves Bush fixed intelligence to justify pre-emptive war? The issue reaches to the heart of government credibility and integrity. It deserves the utmost public attention.
USA Today, the nation's largest-circulation daily newspaper, finally got around to mentioning the memo last Wednesday, following the Bush-Blair joint news conference. The headline read "'Downing Street Memo' Gets Fresh Attention." How about any attention at all?
In the article, reporter Mark Memmott wrote, "A simmering controversy over whether American media have ignored a secret British memo about how President Bush built his case for war with Iraq bubbled over into the White House on Tuesday." What controversy?
There is no question the American media ignored the report. Memmott notes that only Knight-Ridder, on May 6, mentioned the story in a fairly timely fashion, and that the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post and New York Times got on the bandwagon about a week later. Justifying the slow response to a major story by spreading collective guilt, Memmott wrote, "None of the stories appeared on the newspapers' front pages. Several other major media outlets, including the evening news programs on ABC, CBS and NBC, had not said a word about the document before Tuesday. Today marks USA Today's first mention."
When it comes to "American Idol," rich details of the Michael Jackson case, Paris Hilton's underwear preferences, "Star Wars" box office figures and any new diet fad, you can count on USA Today being way out in front on those earth-shattering issues. But a fabricated reason for a war that has cost thousands of lives just doesn't merit much, if any, play.
Jim Cox, USA Today's senior assignment editor for foreign news, offered a lame excuse. "We could not obtain the memo or a copy of it from a reliable source," Cox claimed. "There was no explicit confirmation of the authenticity from (Blair's office). And it was disclosed four days before the British elections, raising concerns about the timing."
So we're being asked to accept USA Today's explanation that the paper couldn't nail down the story for five weeks, but when a gutsy British reporter brought it up at a White House news conference, the memo catapulted into the headlines. What pure crap.
I wrote about the memo in this space on May 10 and described it as "dynamite." At the time, I felt I was late and behind on the story. I guess not.
The U.S. media wallow in the sludge of the scandal they've created in ignoring the story. It's not Rush Limbaugh, talk-radio thugs and the Fox News Channel that have propagandized the American people into a nation of lockstepping political zombies. It's the mainstream media that have done the most damage.
A recent cover of the conservative "National Review" magazine depicts a toilet with "Insert Mainstream Media Credibility Here" written on the seat with an arrow pointing into the bowl. The editors are right for all the wrong reasons.
They blasted "Newsweek" for its story that a U.S. interrogator had flushed a Koran down the toilet at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. "Newsweek" later retracted the story over a sourcing issue.
But a couple of weeks later, the Pentagon acknowledged there had been verified incidents of military personnel disrespecting the Muslim holy book. Several former detainees have offered eyewitness accounts of guards tossing pages of the Koran into toilets. "Newsweek" made mistakes, but the substance of its report was accurate, a point missed in the media frenzy over the retraction.
The ongoing abuses at the detention camp don't get nearly the media attention the "Newsweek" story did. Amnesty International recently released a 308-page report offering stinging criticism of U.S. treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo. The report describes 10 documented cases of abuse and mistreatment. The human rights organization found that U.S. word games result in a dilution of the absolute ban on torture and the creation of "a new lexicon for abuse and torture." Amnesty International Secretary General Irene Khan said, "Guantanamo has become the gulag of our time."
President Bush howled over the abuse charges, saying, "It's an absurd allegation." He failed to note the FBI and Red Cross International also found similar incidents of abuse.
Amnesty International Executive Director William Schultz struck right back. "What is 'absurd' and indeed outrageous is President Bush's attempt to deny the deliberate policies of his administration. What is 'absurd' and indeed outrageous is the administration's failure to undertake a full, independent investigation," he said.
As with the "Downing Street Memo," the Guantanamo scandal gets scant attention from the stenographers in the Washington press corps.
A new Gallup poll shows public confidence in newspapers and TV news has fallen to an all-time low.
It is a richly deserved distinction for the people who helped Bush sell his lies, and who fail in their fundamental role in a free society.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | June 14 2005 |