The Common Ills: Iraq snapshot

Tuesday, March 14, 2023. CNN 'cleans up' history by omitting the role of the media in selling the Iraq War while Glenneth Greenwald makes clear that the greatest journalistic crime is not inviting him to appear on your program.

Maybe CNN deserves to close shop? If it can't serve the public, why does it need to exist? To offer up garbage like this from Peter Bergen:

Two decades ago, on March 19, 2003, President George W. Bush ordered the US invasion of Iraq. Bush and senior administration officials had repeatedly told Americans that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was armed to the teeth with weapons of mass destruction and that he was in league with al Qaeda.

These claims resulted in most Americans believing that Saddam was involved in the September 11, 2001, attacks. A year after 9/11, two-thirds of Americans said that the Iraqi leader had helped the terrorists, according to Pew Research Center polling, even though there was not a shred of convincing evidence for this. Nor did he have the WMD alleged by US officials.

Does the problem with that garbage float over everyone's head?

The press. Working for CNN, Peter forgets to point the finger at the press. How pathetic and shameful. What a damn liar.

BILL MOYERS JOURNAL documented the role of the press in the documentary BUYING THE WAR. I'm not talking about anything hidden but lying whores like Bergen would prefer that it remain forgotten.

Here's the description of Moyers' BUYING THE WAR:

The story of how high officials misled the country has been told. But they couldn’t have done it on their own; they needed a compliant press, to pass on their propaganda as news and cheer them on. How did the evidence disputing the existence of weapons of mass destruction and the link between Saddam Hussein to 9-11 go largely unreported? “What the conservative media did was easy to fathom; they had been cheerleaders for the White House from the beginning and were simply continuing to rally the public behind the President — no questions asked. How mainstream journalists suspended skepticism and scrutiny remains an issue of significance that the media has not satisfactorily explored,” says Moyers. “How the administration marketed the war to the American people has been well covered, but critical questions remain: How and why did the press buy it, and what does it say about the role of journalists in helping the public sort out fact from propaganda?”

In 2004, President Bush landed on the aircraft carrier USS Lincoln wearing a flight suit and delivered a speech in front of a giant “Mission Accomplished” banner. He was hailed by media stars as a “breathtaking” example of presidential leadership in toppling Saddam Hussein. Despite profound questions over the failure to locate weapons of mass destruction and the increasing violence in Baghdad, many in the press confirmed the White House’s claim that the war was won. MSNBC’s Chris Matthews declared, “We’re all neo-cons now;” NPR’s Bob Edwards said, “The war in Iraq is essentially over;” and Fortune magazine’s Jeff Birnbaum said, “It is amazing how thorough the victory in Iraq really was in the broadest context.”

“Buying the War” includes interviews with Dan Rather, formerly of CBS; Tim Russert of Meet the Press; Bob Simon of 60 Minutes; Walter Isaacson, former president of CNN; and John Walcott, Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel of Knight Ridder newspapers, which was acquired by The McClatchy Company in 2006.

In “Buying the War” Bill Moyers and producer Kathleen Hughes document the reporting of Walcott, Landay and Strobel, the Knight Ridder team that burrowed deep into the intelligence agencies to try and determine whether there was any evidence for the Bush Administration’s case for war. “Many of the things that were said about Iraq didn’t make sense,” says Walcott. “And that really prompts you to ask, ‘Wait a minute. Is this true? Does everyone agree that this is true? Does anyone think this is not true?’”

In the run-up to war, skepticism was a rarity among journalists inside the Beltway. Journalist Bob Simon of 60 Minutes, who was based in the Middle East, questioned the reporting he was seeing and reading. “I mean we knew things or suspected things that perhaps the Washington press corps could not suspect. For example, the absurdity of putting up a connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda,” he tells Moyers. “Saddam…was a total control freak. To introduce a wild card like Al Qaeda in any sense was just something he would not do. So I just didn’t believe it for an instant.”

The program analyzes the stream of unchecked information from administration sources and Iraqi defectors to the mainstream print and broadcast press, which was then seized upon and amplified by an army of pundits. While almost all the claims would eventually prove to be false, the drumbeat of misinformation about WMDs went virtually unchallenged by the media. The New York Times reported on Iraq’s “worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb,” but according to Landay, claims by the administration about the possibility of nuclear weapons were highly questionable. Yet, his story citing the “lack of hard evidence of Iraqi weapons” got little play. In fact, throughout the media landscape, stories challenging the official view were often pushed aside while the administration’s claims were given prominence. “From August 2002 until the war was launched in March of 2003 there were about 140 front page pieces in the Washington Post making the administration’s case for war,” says Howard Kurtz, the Post’s media critic. “But there was only a handful of stories that ran on the front page that made the opposite case. Or, if not making the opposite case, raised questions.”

“Buying the War” examines the press coverage in the lead-up to the war as evidence of a paradigm shift in the role of journalists in democracy and asks, four years after the invasion, what’s changed? “More and more the media become, I think, common carriers of administration statements and critics of the administration,” says the Washington Post’s Walter Pincus. “We’ve sort of given up being independent on our own.”

The media didn't do their job -- their defined job. That wasn't an accident. They bullied people intentionally. Fall in line or the press would mow you over. It was widespread. As someone speaking out against the Iraq War since the month before it started, I heard one story after another as I visited various cities. Early on I was doing press but I gave up on that because reality didn't make it into the corporate media. But after the interview, people would want to confess. An entertainment reporter for a daily newspaper in one of the top ten (population wise) cities in the country would explain guilt felt over an attack on Sheryl Crow in print. Why did you write it? Because the editor said to. Why was Crow attacked? For the most meager stand against the war. Artists were attacked, films were attacked, music was attacked, all due to the fear that the voices against the war might break through.

There's not a paper in the country whose hands are clean, there's not a network.

Was anyone held accountable in the press?

Judith Miller. Apparently, Judy not only wrote and co-wrote bad journalism, she also ran the NYT editorial board, ran the editorial boards for all papers, anchored and produced every network and cable news program and commanded the op-ed pages of every newspaper.

Everyone else is going to keep their head down for fear being held accountable.

But now, an the 20th anniversary approaches, CNN wants to pretend the press didn't have a role? Wants to pretend the press didn't silence voices objecting to the war? Wants to pretend they didn't platform voices cheerleading war? The voices that they would go on to reward and still do?

In 2020, at CJR, Maria Bustillos noted:

In February 2003—a matter of days before the start of the war in Iraq—MSNBC axed Donahue’s primetime show, citing poor ratings. (Though it lagged behind its competitors on other networks, Donahue was then MSNBC’s highest-rated show.)

It had been only eighteen months since 9/11, and so Donahue’s vocal opposition to the war was often cited in media reports as the real reason for his firing. Evidence emerged to support this contention. An internal memo leaked to allyourscreens.com’s Rick Ellis expressed fears of MSNBC becoming “a home for the liberal antiwar agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag.”

In the months after 9/11, NBC chief executive Bob Wright had “pointedly” told MSNBC news chief Neal Shapiro to challenge Fox from the right: “We have to be more conservative than they are.” Soon, “swirling graphics of the American flag” appeared on MSNBC alongside a new tagline, “America’s NewsChannel,” as Gabriel Sherman revealed years later in New York magazine.

“I was naive,” Donahue said when reached by phone recently. “I honestly thought I might survive because I was different. Nobody was knocking Don Rumsfeld except me, at the time.” MSNBC was then owned by General Electric, a huge defense contractor, and he suspects this was not an unrelated factor.

Here's Phil discussing it on DEMOCRACY NOW! in 2013.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Phil, I’d like to bring in another subject in terms of this whole issue, the—what happened to you, directly, as a host on MSNBC in the midst of the run-up to the war, and the responsibilities of the press in America and its—the mea culpas that have rarely been uttered by the pundits and by the journalists over what the American press did in the run-up to war.

PHIL DONAHUE: Well, I think what happened to me, the biggest lesson, I think, is the—how corporate media shapes our opinions and our coverage. This was a decision—my decision—the decision to release me came from far above. This was not an assistant program director who decided to separate me from MSNBC. They were terrified of the antiwar voice. And that is not an overstatement. Antiwar voices were not popular. And if you’re General Electric, you certainly don’t want an antiwar voice on a cable channel that you own; Donald Rumsfeld is your biggest customer. So, by the way, I had to have two conservatives on for every liberal. I could have Richard Perle on alone, but I couldn’t have Dennis Kucinich on alone. I was considered two liberals. It really is funny almost, when you look back on how—how the management was just frozen by the antiwar voice. We were scolds. We weren’t patriotic. American people disagreed with us. And we weren’t good for business.

AMY GOODMAN: You know, I had this unusual experience, Phil, in July of 2006. It was the 10th anniversary of MSNBC, and I was invited on Hardball by Chris Matthews to celebrate the 10th anniversary. I think first Brian Williams was on the show, and then the Israeli ambassador, and then I was on the show. And we were standing outside 30 Rock. It was a big deal. All the execs were on the top floor of 30 Rock, and they were all about to have a big party. And we were just coming out of a commercial.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to congratulate you, Chris, on 10 years of MSNBC, but I wish standing with you was Phil Donahue. He shouldn’t have been fired for expressing an antiwar point of view on the eve of the election. His point of view and the people brought on were also important.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: I don’t know what the reasons were, but I doubt it was that.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we have the MS—the NBC memo, that was a secret memo—

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Oh, OK, good.

AMY GOODMAN: —that came out, that said they didn’t want him to be the face of this network, an antiwar face, at a time when the other networks were waving the flag.

MICHAEL SMERCONISH: Could I answer the question? I’d love to answer that question.

AMY GOODMAN: Phil Donahue is a great patriot.

AMY GOODMAN: I said there, Phil, you were a great patriot. We did have the NBC memo, the secret memo that said they didn’t want their flagship show to be you, when the other networks were waving the American flag.

PHIL DONAHUE: That’s what it said. And, by the way, that memo was written by a Republican focus group, a Republican counseling group that took the focus group and that revealed that most of the people in the focus group didn’t like me. But I saw that, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: And yet, you were the most popular show.

PHIL DONAHUE: Well, often we led the night for the—nobody burned the town down on MSNBC, including me. Fox just ran away with the ratings and continues to enjoy that success.

AMY GOODMAN: Were you watching MSNBC that night?

PHIL DONAHUE: I did. I saw it. And I called the kids. I said, “Hey!” I’m not sure I did it soon enough. But I certainly was grateful for—I mean, I needed the pat on the back at the time.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Phil, the irony that MSNBC now is supposedly this liberal—

PHIL DONAHUE: It’s amazing, really.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: —the liberal network now?

PHIL DONAHUE: Yeah.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: You wonder, though, if another—if another move to war came, how liberal it would remain.

PHIL DONAHUE: Well, you know, the coin of the realm is the size of the audience. It’s important to see this. When a broadcasting executive gets out of bed in the morning, before his foot hits the floor, his thoughts are ratings. “What are my ratings?” Not unlike Wall Street people, who get their—and CEOs, their first thought is the price of their stock. So, you know, what—and I was replaced by Michael Savage. So there was a desperate need to get numbers.

From the transcript to Bill Moyers' documentary:

WARREN STROBEL: The first rule of being an intelligence agent, or a journalist, and they're really not that different, is you're skeptical of defectors, because they have a reason to exaggerate. They want to increase their value to you. They probably want something from you. Doesn't mean they're lying, but you should be -- journalists are supposed to be skeptical, right? And I'm afraid the NEW YORK TIMES reporter in that case and a lot of other reporters were just not skeptical of what these defectors were saying. Nor was the Administration...

FOX NEWS ANCHOR (8/1/02): A former top Iraqi nuclear scientists tells congress Iraq could build three nuclear bombs by 2005.

CNN NEWS ANCHOR (12/21/01): Well, now another defector. A senior Iraqi intelligence official tells VANITY FAIR in an exclusive interview that Saddam Hussein has trained an elite fighting force in sabotage, urban warfare, hijacking and murder. David Rose wrote the story; he joins us now from London.

BILL MOYERS: IN VANITY FAIR'S DAVID ROSE, DEFECTORS FOUND ANOTHER EAGER BEAVER FOR THEIR CLAIMS. THE GLOSSY MAGAZINE, A FAVORITE OF MEDIA ELITES, GAVE HIM FOUR BIG SPREADS TO TELL DEFECTOR STORIES. THE TALK SHOWS LAPPED IT UP.

DAVID ROSE: (MSNBC 12/21/01) What the defector Al-Qurairy, a former brigadier general in the Iraqi intelligence service, told me is that these guys, there are twelve hundred in all and they've been trained to hijack trains, buses, ships and so forth...

JONATHAN LANDAY: As you track their stories, they become ever more fantastic, and they're the same people who are telling these stories, until you get to the most fantastic tales of all, which appeared in VANITY FAIR Magazine.

DAVID ROSE: The last training exercise was to blow up a full size mock up of a US destroyer in a lake in central Iraq.

JONATHAN LANDAY: Or, jumping into pits of fouled water and having to kill a dog with your bare teeth. I mean, and this was coming from people, who are appearing in all of these stories, and sometimes their rank would change.

LESLIE STAHL (60 MINUTES, CBS 3/3/02): Musawi told us that he has verified that this man was an officer in Iraq's ruthless intelligence service the Mukhabarat .

JONATHAN LANDAY: And, you're saying, "Wait a minute. There's something wrong here, because in this story he was a major, but in this story the guy's a colonel. And, in this story this was his function, but now he says in this story he was doing something else.

LESLIE STAHL: The defector is telling Musawi that in order to evade the UN inspectors Saddam Hussein put his biological weapons laboratories in trucks that the defector told us he personally bought from Renault.

LESLIE STAHL: Refrigerator trucks?

DEFECTOR: Yeah, yeah.

LESLIE STAHL: And how many?

DEFECTOR: Seven.

BILL MOYERS: LESLIE STAHL AND CBS RETRACTED THEIR STORY A YEAR AFTER THE INVASION WHEN NEARLY ALL THE EVIDENCE PRESENTED BY DEFECTORS PROVED TO BE FALSE.

VANITY FAIR'S ROSE LATER SAID HIGH GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS HAD CONFIRMED HIS STORIES. BUT THESE WERE THE VERY OFFICIALS WHO HAD BET ON CHALABI AS THEIR FAVORITE MAN O'WAR. TO THE KNIGHT RIDDER TEAM IT ALL SMELLED OF A CON GAME.

It is dishonest, all these years later, for CNN to publish garbage like what Peter wrote. The media was a willing partner in selling the illegal war. Their lies destroyed their own credibility. Their refusal, over 20 years later, to be honest about that continues to destroy their reputation.

A friend drew my attention to the great Glenneth Greenwald's put downs of Amy Goodman. I'm not an Amy Goodman fan. While Glenneth and others were whoring to get on DEMOCRACY NOW!, I was calling it out for refusing to cover Iraq. Barack was now in the White House and they didn't care about Iraq. At one point, in his first term, they brought on the idiot Raed Jarrar. From Iraq, he'd long stopped paying attention and he gave an 'update' so wrong that Ava and I pointed out that news consumers would be better off without his commentary. He was back on two weeks later because -- as Ava and I had pointed out -- things were heating up in Iraq even though he'd ignored them. Now he tried to play catch up and made a fool of himself because he clearly didn't know what he was talking about.

While a number of Green Party members who had their own sites online (longterm community members will know who I mean) stayed silent. We called Amy out on her Green Party coverage. She devoted a full week to the GOP convention and a full week to the Democratic Party's. She gave a headline to the Green Party.

We noted the influx of money into DN! and how it was corrupting. We noted that PACIFICA needed to cancel their contract with Amy because no PACIFICA show was worth the millions PACIFICA was pumping into DEMOCRACY NOW! And we noted that when PACIFICA paid the budget of a show, that show needed to belong to PACIFICA. (Amy retains ownership of all episodes of DEMOCRACY NOW!) Gal pal Leslie Cagan oversaw that robbery of PACIFICA RADIO.

As those identified on the program as "oppressed" began contacting this site, Ava and I also took on Amy's misrepresentations of fact. In one case, she had interviewed the mother of a child who had outlined what had happened. What had happened was horrific enough but Amy had to 'improve' on it and toss aside all the woman had said in an interview. Amy knew better than the mother what happened in this far from NYC story. Or maybe Amy just thought she was better able to speak to racial violence than an African-American woman? Maybe it was a bit of both?

Amy floated the lie -- with John Nichols -- that Hillary Clinton planned to overtake the 2004 DNC convention and steal the nomination. That was 2004. In 2008, she brought John Nichols on so he could lie about Hillary to pimp Barack. AP had reported on Barack's advisor telling the Canadian government that Barack's talk about repealing NAFTA wasn't for real and he was just saying it for votes. That was reality and truth. And it was hurting Barack so Amy and John presented the lie that Barack didn't do that. No, it was Hillary. And John's story on this would be in THE NATION shortly. The story never ran because it never existed.

Things get a little messy with Sally Jesse, Amy infamously once wrote. Well they got to be flat out lies with Goody.

Ava and I documented all of this. Aaron Mate was part of the show then and never mentions it. Glenn Greenwald was a regular guest and never covered it. He kissed her ass while pretending he was independent.

I don't loathe Amy. Maybe that's because I haven't whored? There's nothing she's done wrong that I haven't called out. Some are surprised that we've taken to posting her videos. If Juan's in it and I know, it'll go up. I knew Juan back in the day. Which is why little boys just out of their nappies (Aaron and Max) better check themselves before they start trashing Juan. Other than that, I'm not blindly posting any international story because she's become a war hawk. That started with Libya -- and, again, Ava and I called her out in real time. We mainly post her on domestic issues.

But Glenneth thinks he proves something by posting Norman's whine.

That would ben White man Norman Finkelstein. If you haven't already read it, Ava filled in for Trina last night with "Stacey Plaskett, the Norman Finkelstein of Congress" noting how Norman's pissing his panties over the fact that Amy Goodman prefers to have African-American voices speaking to African-American issues. Norman made clear to Jared Ball on BLACK POWER MEDIA that Norman doesn't believe African-Americans are as smart as he is on the topic of what it is to be an African-American.

Yes, Norman is that pathetic.

Ava rightly noted that he was insulting to Angela Davis. Apparently, her accomplishments don't matter. All that matters was Norman wanted to have sex with her when he was a young man.

Thanks for . . . sharing?

So Glenneth grabs a section of Norman's book and informs you that the unnamed woman Norman's writing about is Amy Goodman.

I've told you forever and a day that Glenneth is a sexist.

He proves it yet again.

Norman writes about how he was told he had harassed the woman.

"You look so young. You could be one of Michael Jackson's playmates."

That's what Norman writes in the section Glenneth pimps. That got Norman banned.

Good.

First off, we only have Norman's word for what he actually said and I've seen his interviews of late -- the mind is gone. He can't get quotes right anymore -- even stuff he's quoted for years now gets mangled.

But think about the bravado when he was talking about Angela Davis and put it into the quote above and it's not as innocent as Norman wants to pretend.

Regardless, it offended a member of Amy's staff -- the woman who felt Norman was leering at her when he said it. And she did feel he was leering at her. I didn't have a lot of time this morning but I did make a phone call to confirm the incident took place -- the actual wording of the quote is in dispute but Norman clearly leered at her.

A creepy old man is leering at a young woman and making comments about "Michael Jackson's playmates." I think she was right to be offended. And Amy? She was right to stick up for her staff. I'm not afraid to call Amy out for anything. If she deserved to be called out over this, I'd be all over it -- and loving it.

But she didn't do anything wrong. An old man who thinks he's the White savior of a people who have never asked him to represent them has clearly begun serious mental decline. (Ava's right that the voice is also going and Norman's aging at an accelerated rate -- exercise is important for all of us.)

He wasn't just banned. Amy Goodman told him he needed to apologize to her staff member that he had insulted. I have done more talk show appearances in any given year than Norman's done his entire lifetime. There were three times I was informed I had hurt a staffer's feelings. I was not threatened with expulsion. But informed, I did go to the person (all men) and state I was sorry. I didn't need to be threatened because I hadn't meant to hurt anyone's feelings and felt badly that someone had been hurt by me. (The ones I intend to hurt never complain because they know I meant it.) If Norman hadn't been harassing the woman, what was the harm in stating to her, "I'm so sorry about how that made you feel?"

He was leering and stating that a woman was a "plaything." He was offensive. Just like his repeated use of the n-word -- over and over -- and his chuckling over it -- on BLACK POWER MEDIA was offensive.

That's the problem with the Normans -- they think they're cute and funny. And, while young, maybe they are to some people. But they age out of it. And they age out of the modern world. Norman's 69 and can't be bothered with keeping up with trends as recent as twenty years ago. He's lost in this 'new' world. It's his own damn fault.

I will call Amy out for many things. I will never call her out for defending her staff. That was an honorable position for her to take. That Norman can't see that goes to the reality that he's aged out of present day. For Glenneth not to see it goes to the fact that he's a sexist pig and always has been.

Glenneth does neither himself nor Norman a favor by quoting Norman insisting that he "now fell into the same category as (Harvey) Weinstein and (Jeffrey) Epstein."

How stupid are Greenwald and Finklestein?

They're not accused of harassment, Harvey and Jeffrey were accused of rape and assault.

The Glenneth and Norman don't grasp that difference goes to their injured male egos which are so butt hurt that they can't even see reality.

Which would explain Glenneth describing her father as "rich" and referring to "all her siblings." As I understand it, Amy has two brothers. "All"? Trina is one of eight siblings, I could see someone saying "all" with regards to them. But to two? Wouldn't the term be "both"? As for rich, I understood she grew up in a well off family, not a rich one. Maybe Glenneth is wearing wrong-side-of-the-track glasses as he envies others? He's becoming a little more Bud Corliss with each passing year. Someone tell David never to get a yacht with him (or go to the top of a tall building).

Four years after Glenneth says he stopped getting invited on DEMOCRACY NOW!, he's willing to slam Amy. What a 'truth teller,' how 'independent.'

Me? I'll just keep singing Stevie Nicks, "Who in the world you think that you are fooling? Well I've already done everything that you are doing."

Glenn, for those who forgot or never knew, was a cheerleader for the Iraq War. Instead of getting honest about that, he uses his time to attack Amy Goodman not for what she said or did on air but because she doesn't invite him on as a guest anymore.

The following sites updated: