Moyers lays it on the line: Bush lied and the media helped him do it.

Atman

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Wed Apr-18-07 04:27 PM
Original message

Moyers lays it on the line: Bush lied and the media helped him do it.

Edited on Wed Apr-18-07 04:27 PM by Atman

This is a fascinating and painful story. And all of us on DU knew it was happening, but we were all ignored/laughed at/derided while Bush put on his dog and pony show and the media helped him sell it. I think this article is more important for the freepers and CUers to read than anyone else.

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Buying the War

Bill Moyers' New Documentary Exposes How The Government, The New York Times And The Mainstream Press Sold Us The War.

April 19, 2007
By Alistair Highet

"I bet you didn�t know this. On March 6, 2003, President George Bush held a press conference at the White House. In that press conference the president said that Saddam Hussein and his weapons were �a direct threat to this country.�

More than 24 times during the press conference the president reflected on Al Qaeda and 9/11 and a connection between Saddam Hussein, all of which we know now was untrue. Bad enough. But here�s the chilling part, as revealed in Bill Moyers� upcoming Buying the War (which will air on PBS on Wednesday, April 25 at 9 p.m.): after the president�s speech the White House press corps, those highly paid and highly visible big shots from CBS, CNN, the New York Times , The Washington Post and so on, started rasing their hands. But certain reporters had been pre-selected by the administration to be chosen by the president, something that everybody in the room was aware of. At one point, the president is shown to say, �This is scripted� and he makes a little laugh. Among the tough questions thrown to the president, or should we say, pre-selected, were �How is your faith guiding you?� to which the president responded, �My faith sustains me because I pray daily.� Media critic Eric Boehlert, reflecting on this piece of theater notes that there is a lot of nervous giggling going on. �I don�t now if it is out of embarrassment for him or embarrassment for them because they still continued to play along,� he says. �After a question was done. They all shot up their hands and pretended they had a chance of being called on.�

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The heart of the game that was played involved Ahmed Chalabi, an Iraqi con-man who had been on the payroll of the CIA. By the mid 1990s the CIA realized that Chalabi was a fraud and dropped him. But Chalabi�s friends in the government kept supporting him and the fictional Iraqi National Congress, a group that had no legitimacy or standing or independent existence. Suddenly, Iraqi �defectors� started to turn up in the New York Times , Vanity Fair , and 60 Minutes among other places, talking about hidden chemical weapons factories and mobile chemical weapons labs and so on. Chalabi arranged for Judith Miller of the Times to meet with such a defector, which began a series of stories in the Times supporting the government�s claims. The whole thing was a campaign of false information kicked off by the government, filtered through Chalabi to the press, who then fed it back to us.

Not everyone bought it. The Knight-Ridder newspaper group quickly made contacts with intelligence sources who told them that the case against Iraq was bogus. But the Knight-Ridder papers don�t have a lot of clout, and even some of their own newspapers refused to run their stories because they were out of step with the pro-war climate."

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http://www.ctnow.com/custom/nmm/hartfordadvocate/hce-hta-0419-ht17observer17.artapr19,0,2332889.story?coll=hce-utility-ha-advocate