AP Explores Media's Role in Popular Belief in Iraq WMD

[DeepModem Mom]

Editor&Publisher: AP Explores Media's Role in Popular Belief in Iraq WMD
Published: August 06, 2006

NEW YORK -- Do you believe in Iraqi "WMD"? Did Saddam Hussein's government have weapons of mass destruction in 2003?

Half of America apparently still thinks so, a new poll finds, and experts see a raft of reasons why: a drumbeat of voices from talk radio to die-hard bloggers to the Oval Office, a surprise headline here or there, a rallying around a partisan flag, and a growing need for people, in their own minds, to justify the war in Iraq.

People tend to become "independent of reality" in these circumstances, says opinion analyst Steven Kull.

The reality in this case is that after a 16-month, $900-million-plus investigation, the U.S. weapons hunters known as the Iraq Survey Group declared that Iraq had dismantled its chemical, biological and nuclear arms programs in 1991 under U.N. oversight. That finding in 2004 reaffirmed the work of U.N. inspectors who in 2002-03 found no trace of banned arsenals in Iraq.

Despite this, a Harris Poll released July 21 found that a full 50 percent of U.S. respondents — up from 36 percent last year — said they believe Iraq did have the forbidden arms when U.S. troops invaded in March 2003, an attack whose stated purpose was elimination of supposed WMD. Other polls also have found an enduring American faith in the WMD story....

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002950994

[Captain Hilts]

1. GREAT article!!! nt

[JAYJDF]

2. Looked up the "Iraq Survey Group" report. It says it in plain

English.

Maybe DNC needs to buy newspaper space on front pages across the nation with the one paragraph.

Miscalculation (2002-2003)

In the year prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF), MIC undertook improvements to technology in several areas that could have been applied to a renewed centrifuge program for uranium enrichment. These dual-use technologies included projects to acquire a magnet production line at Al Tahadi, carbon fiber filament winding equipment for missile fabrication at al Karama, and the creation of a new Department of Rotating Machinery at Ibn Yunis. All of these projects were created to improve specific military or commercial products, but the technologies could have help support a centrifuge development project. ISG, however, has uncovered no indication that Iraq had resumed fissile material or nuclear weapon research and development activities since 1991.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/library/report/2004/isg-final-report/isg-final-report_vol2_nuclear-01.htm

[Briar]

3. "The creative "morphing" goes on.

"The creative "morphing" goes on.

"As Israeli troops and Hezbollah guerrillas battled in Lebanon on July 21, a Fox News segment suggested, with no evidence, yet another destination for the supposed doomsday arms.

"ARE SADDAM HUSSEIN'S WMDS NOW IN HEZBOLLAH'S HANDS?" asked the headline, lingering for long minutes on TV screens in a million American homes."

I am reminded of Adam Curtis's "Century of the Self":

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article12642.htm

which exposed the extent to which cynical manipulation of Public Relation techniques undermined and subverted democracy. The fact is, the truth won't save us. Not when lies are sold so persuasively.

[HongKonger]

4. The Fifty-Percent Solution: Catastrophe by the Numbers

Two telling stories came over the transom this week – seemingly unrelated, except tangentially, as both deal with different aspects of the fiasco in Iraq. Yet together they provide an illuminating glimpse – like a discarded corpse revealed by a lightning flash – of the moral horror that George W. Bush and his sycophants have wrought both in Iraq and the United States.

First, from the Catholic News Service: "Half of All Christians Have Fled Iraq Since 2003, Says Baghdad Bishop." Excerpt:

Chaldean Catholic Auxiliary Bishop Andreos Abouna of Baghdad said that before the invasion there were about 1.2 million Christians in the predominantly Shiite Muslim state. Since then the overall number has dropped to about 600,000, he said. "What we are hearing now is the alarm bell for Christianity in Iraq," the bishop said. "When so many are leaving from a small community like ours, you know that it is dangerous -- dangerous for the future of the church in Iraq."

…About 97 percent of the country's total 27 million Iraqis are Shiite and Sunni Muslims; Christians make up the majority of the remaining 3 percent. The Chaldean Catholics speak Aramaic, the language of Jesus.

….Many people were unnerved by the lack of security and confidence in the political process that was supposed to usher in a new era of peace, democracy and rule of law following the removal of President Saddam Hussein by coalition forces, Bishop Abouna said.

……Bishop Abouna said he thought it was unlikely that many of those who had emigrated would return.

The destruction of Iraq's Christian community – one of the oldest in the world – is no mean feat. The religion took root in the land in the first generation after the Romans executed the troublesome of Nazareth, and has flourished there for almost 2,000 years. Now it is being wiped out before our eyes. Half gone already, it will certainly disappear altogether in the next few years, as civil war consumes the nation, and sects devoted to the most fanatic and retrograde distortions of Islam – empowered beyond measure by the Bush Faction's war of aggression – impose their draconian rule. Surely the oh-so-Christian Coalition of Bush and Blair will record this with their many high and worthy deeds. As the story notes, Iraq's Christians still speak the language that Jesus spoke, a fragment of which is preserved in the English Bible that we're told Bush reads every day – the cry from the cross: "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?" My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? It's a lament of utter existential despair that is no doubt echoed every day by his followers in the "liberated" land.

But of course Bush doesn't speak the language of Jesus, literally or metaphorically. (With the possible exception of the world-devouring Pantocrator portrayed in the Book of Revelation, a work of genocidal frenzy well-described by Martin Luther: "Christ is neither taught nor known in it." Naturally, this Grand Guignol is a great favorite among the sects devoted to the most fanatic and retrograde distortions of Christianity – i.e., Bush's loyal "base.") No, the itinerant preacher who denounced the rich and served the poor is incomprehensible to the Crawford Caligula. Bush speaks only the language of Caesar: brute force, adorned with preening, self-serving lies. This imperial mendacity undergirds the second story in our lightning flash. This is an AP report – an excellent piece of work by Charles Hanley -- on the alarming poll showing that fully 50 percent of all Americans now believe that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction at the time of the Bush invasion. This number represents a hefty increase in credulity from the 36 percent of Ostrich-Americans who held this same false belief just last year.

As Hanley notes, one major factor in this higher heaping of horseshit was the codswallop disgorged last month by a pair of greasy pols: the swiftly sinking, sex-obsessed, K Street corruptocract Sen. Rick "Saneless" Santorum and his House-mate, Rep. Pete "Huckster" Hoekstra. With great, Fox-fueled fanfare, the dimbulb duo released an "intelligence report" claiming that WMD had indeed been found in Iraq – fully "justifying" Bush's Babylonian conquest. What they had "unearthed," of course, was the decidedly unsecret fact that over the course of three years, Iraq's occupiers had come across a few old chemical weapon shells scattered here and there around the country. These were remnants of the once-great arsenal of deadly toxins that Saddam had amassed with the direct and ample aid of a U.S. president named George Bush, who explicitly ordered American agencies to approve the shipment of weaponizable poisons and other "dual-use technologies" for WMD to his favorite tough guy, Saddam. But Saneless and Huckster were trumpeting was not a noble casus belli but simply the fetid leavings of a former Bush Family crime.

SNIP

link to rest of article

[niallmac]

5. Another good question; "What took so long?"

Very encouraging that someone in the media is asking what we here have been
screaming our heads off about since the beginning of the war.

Next I want to see CNN explain their Pravda like relationship with the White House.

CNN= C omplicity? N o N ever!

[underpants]

6. "This president may even have convinced himself it's true, she said. "

TRUTHINESS!!