Reply #1: Too Bad What They Reported Will Likely Go Down the Memory Hole...

[Robert Murphy]

An admirable performance by Knight-Ridder indeed. (Note that they received some 'unfriendly' phone calls from Administration officials for said coverage, on several occasions.)

What has astonished me--and I had previously thought the U.S. media could get no worse--is that all of pre-war skepticism about W. Admin. claims of Iraqi WMDs seems ENTIRELY forgotten. I clearly remember reading (having long since given up on the TV news media) a score of articles regarding the the mulititude of significant qualifications and reservations attached to U.S. intelligence reports on Iraqi WMDs, which the Bush Administration was willfully ignoring in its selling of the war. Granted, one had to read the back pages of the Washington Post or (much more rarely--thanks Judy Miller!) the NY Times to find such stories, but they were there. (Even the AP syndicated a few articles voicing these uncertainties.) Add to this the fact that NO OTHER country, save the UK--who was doing some serious fudging of their own--was backing up the Administrations claims. (Ditto for the U.N. inspectors on the ground in Iraq, whose efforts were deliberately hampered by false intelligence fed to them by the U.S.)

But now--Oh no!! It was all the @%%^$%@# CIA's fault! The poor Bush Administration was innocently misled!!

I am not privy (surprise!!) to Top Secret information, nor do I claim to be any expert on foreign affairs. But in the lead-up to the war, the Administration's claims sounded like utter horse excrement to even to my layman's ear. Yet nowhere in the (at least the TV) news media have I seen a single report even suggesting that the Bushies might have, um, 'exaggerated' the threat posed by Iraq. The slimes are set to get away with lying us into a war--perhaps they have already...

Cheers,

Robert