Saturday, October 02, 2004

The - ahem - New York Times manages to cough up a sixteen page article ( http://www.uruknet.info/?p=6059&hd=0&size=1&l=x )on the lies told by the Bush Administration on the Iraqi nuclear program centered around the infamous aluminum tubes without once mentioning the name of the main instigator of the whole aluminum tubes story, their own reporter, Judith Miller. They do, however, mention her article ( http://www.realdemocracy.com/abomb.htm ):

"A few days later, on Sept. 8., the lead article on Page 1 of The New York Times gave the first detailed account of the aluminum tubes. The article cited unidentified senior administration officials who insisted that the dimensions, specifications and numbers of tubes sought showed that they were intended for a nuclear weapons program.

'The closer he gets to a nuclear capability, the more credible is his threat to use chemical and biological weapons,' a senior administration official was quoted as saying. 'Nuclear weapons are his hole card.'

The article gave no hint of a debate over the tubes.

The White House did much to increase the impact of The Times' article. The morning it was published, Mr. Cheney went on the NBC News program 'Meet the Press' and confirmed when asked that the tubes were the most alarming evidence behind the administration's view that Iraq had resumed its nuclear weapons program. The tubes, he said, had 'raised our level of concern.' Ms. Rice, the national security adviser, went on CNN and said the tubes 'are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs.'

Neither official mentioned that the nation's top nuclear design experts believed overwhelmingly that the tubes were poorly suited for centrifuges."

Of course, a more cynical and realistic person would add some nuance to this report. Referring to Cheney's interview, here is Bob Simon of CBS News as quoted by Charles Layton in an article in the American Journalism Review
( http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=3057 ):

"When Bob Simon heard about this interview, he told me, he smelled a rat. 'You leak a story to the New York Times,' he says, 'and the New York Times prints it, and then you go on the Sunday shows quoting the New York Times and corroborating your own information. You've got to hand it to them. That takes, as we say here in New York, chutzpah.'"

Given the fact that this whole mess was part of a larger Israeli intelligence operation, 'chutzpah' is probably a good word for it (and I wonder if CBS was the victim of the Texas document deception as a pay back for Simon's remarks). The ongoing inability of the New York Times to admit that its star reporter Judith Miller was working hand-in-hand with the Bush White House to create a basis of lies to fool the American people into an immoral and illegal war that has turned into a complete disaster for the United States is not just embarrassing for the Times. It also proves that Miller has support up to the highest levels of the Times, meaning that this deception was part of a deliberate plan approved by the paper. Who benefited? The American military-industrial complex and Israeli Likudniks. That's who the Times lies for. Since they can't admit the truth, we get to read sixteen page articles in which they makes fools of themselves trying to write around the simple fact that they didn't just report on this story, they made it up, and were an integral part in tricking the American people into war. Speaking of fools, the White House is still writing about 'Saddam Hussein's Development of Weapons of Mass Destruction' ( http://www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/iraq/decade/sect3.html ) using the same words as appear in the first two paragraphs of Miller's article (someone should save the page before it falls into the memory hole).

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