It's been a while; I apologize to my audience of zero. But all the noise in the press about these so-called memos from the British government and their revelations... well who couldn't chime in on that? Well, nearly the entire American press corps. So we have damning proof that Bush the Lesser was planning the Iraqi quagmire-to-be behind the scenes, looking for a political context to justify it, as we've long suspected. Now, we have official documents, spelling it out nice and neat. But our press hounds aren't impressed. Yawn, we knew that all before. Nothing new there. But Times reporter Michael Smith - a rah-rah Iraqi invasion supporter -- maybe put it best in a recent on-line chat at the Washington Post website.
"It is one thing for the New York Times or The Washington Post to say that we were being told that the intelligence was being fixed by sources inside the CIA or Pentagon or the NSC and quite another to have documentary confirmation in the form of the minutes of a key meeting with the Prime Minister's office. Think of it this way, all the key players were there. This was the equivalent of an NSC [National Security Council] meeting, with the President, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Condi Rice, George Tenet, and Tommy Franks all there. They say the evidence against Saddam Hussein is thin, the Brits think regime change is illegal under international law so we are going to have to go to the U.N. to get an ultimatum, not as a way of averting war but as an excuse to make the war legal, and oh by the way we aren't preparing for what happens after and no-one has the faintest idea what Iraq will be like after a war. Not reportable, are you kidding me?"
It's truly eerie the mindset that has swept the American press corps. Yes, there never truly was a time when journalists, the bulk of them anyway, operated outside the parameters of interpreting events as set by power. But today, they have sunk to a frightening new Orwellian low.
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