Buying the War – Bill Moyers

How did the mainstream press get it so wrong about Iraq?

This may be the most “important” video you will see this year.
It’s a special program from Bill Moyers Journal on PBS.

Buying the War is a careful, thorough, chilling expose of how the American, and in fact almost the entire Western, mainstream media lost their scepticism, their perspective and their judgment along with all their highly-trained journalistic principles, swallowed whole the Bush administration’s predigested Iraq scam and palmed it off onto a gullible, frightened and sometimes hysterical public.

It is particularly urgent because the men who took us there are still in power and still in denial, still refusing to admit they made a mistake despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary – in stark contrast to the almost total lack of factual evidence which could support the pre-emptive invasion of Iraq in the first place.

John Howard stakes his career and his credibility on the assertion that he made a wise and well-informed decision. How excited he was that Australia had been part of providing solid evidence – the aluminium tubes, remember? – of Iraq’s nuclear program. Except they weren’t for a nuclear anything. He has never apologised for that. Never admitted it was a mistake. He will never apologise to the families (what is left of them) of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis whose death he is by collusion responsible for, or the 2 million Iraqi refugees, or the 2 million Iraqis internally displaced. Or to the thousands of coalition soldiers and civilians killed and maimed in Iraq.

But he made a big, big mistake.

Either he was a willing co-conspirator in the Iraq catastrophe or he was duped. In either case that is not good enough to be Prime Minister of Australia.

The same is true of John Howard’s echo-chamber, the right-wing commentariat of people like Albrechtsen, Ackerman, Bolt, Devine all the other friends of Rupert – apologists for the Groveller General who nevertheless will never (like him) apologise for the egregious errors of judgment and fact that they have made and propagated for so long.

[One of the arguments given by those who supported the war, including Howard and his sycophantic media cheer-squad, and current US Presidential candidates like Clinton, is that “everyone believed Iraq did have WMDs”. That is not true.

Values Australia didn’t believe it for a minute, not just because we are a government-certified political clairvoyant but because we studied the political context, we looked at the so-called evidence and the way it was presented, the people who were presenting it and their probable motives, along with the evidence against it and the credibility of the people who presented that.

Values Australia was not alone. Millions of people around the world agreed. The difference is that these people are not afraid of the US Administration, or Murdoch, or the electorate. The difference is that we did not think the deaths of others and the carnage which we predicted would be a fair price for others to pay to protect our careers.

Moyers talks to the most senior journalists, including those who bought the Administration’s line, like Dan Rather, and those who didn’t, like Knight Ridder and those who claim to be pawns, like Tim Russert.

He shows how the propaganda was manufactured. For example, the White House needed to “prove” that Saddam Hussein had an atomic weapons program. There were those intercepted aluminium tubes, but that was top, top secret. Even Cheney couldn’t talk about them. So what he did was to leak the story to the New York Times who, of course, published it and Cheney was then able to comment on the story the next day on Meet the Press with Tim Russert.

“    It is now public that he has been seeking to acquire … the kinds of tubes that are necessary … in order to build a bomb.”

The guy has balls. But they’re huge bags of bullshit. What he doesn’t have is a conscience or morality. He is a professional liar who has forgotten, if he ever knew, how to tell the truth. And he is one of John Howard’s greatest mates.

What is especially chilling is the masterful way in which the Bush administration, probably under the guidance of Karl Rove, manipulated a willing, compliant media and engineered the stories. Remember the “smoking gun” that was about to turn into a “mushroom cloud” – the urgency in that which supposedly justified the pre-emptive invasion? Over and over again. Al Qaeda/Iraq/al Qaeda/Iraq/al Qaeda/Iraq repeated and repeated until with no evidence whatever, and after any link had been soundly disproven, most Americans still believed (as many still do, and as Cheney to this day suggests) that Iraq was responsible for 9/11.

Watch the video here.

Perhaps the most telling moment is Dan Rather‘s admission of:

“  …the fear that if you don’t go along, you get the reputation for being a troublemaker. There’s also the fear that, particularly in networks, they’ve become huge international conglomerates. They have big needs, legislative needs, regulatory needs, in Washington. Nobody has to send you a memo to tell you that that’s the case. You know. And that puts a seed in your mind of, well, if you stick your neck out, if you take the risk of going against the grain with your reporting is anybody gong to back you up?”

Or to put it another way, you can’t trust the mainstream media, whether so-called “liberal” or not, because everyone is looking out for their own career. Doing your job honourably, by practising actual journalism and telling the public what you discover, comes a distant second. What you are always going to get is the administration’s line. And it’s exactly the same in Australia. (I know.)

Here’s part of the transcript of the program:

“  Four years ago this spring the Bush administration took leave of reality and plunged our country into a war so poorly planned it soon turned into a disaster. 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.

 

Since then thousands of people have died, and many are dying to this day. Yet the story of how the media bought what the White House was selling has not been told in depth on television. As the war rages into its fifth year, we look back at those months leading up to the invasion, when our press largely surrendered its independence and skepticism to join with our government in marching to war.

 

How did the mainstream press get it so wrong? How did the evidence disputing the existence of weapons of mass destruction and the link between Saddam Hussein to 9-11 continue to 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.