Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Seaver
I
If Bush lied then everyone is everyone else just as guilty? It was bad information that snowballed and became fact (remember memogate?). What needs to happen is a true change in the information community, which is admittedly slow, but is happening. What we dont need is a witchhunt for a scapegoat based solely on party lines.
|
No, Seaver, IMO, you are just repeating the misinformation that you have been fed by this administration, it's rigged "factfinidng" commisiions that were selected and restricted by Bush, and prohibited from taking sworn testimony from administration officials.
You may be sick of all of this, and point your finger at past administrations, but it is telling that you avoid debating or debunking the specifics of the ever emerging new reports of what Bush and Blair knew, when they knew it, vs. what they were communicating to their contituencies. Bush bestowed the highest civilian award, the medal of freedom, on the director of the intelligence failure that you cite as the explanation for the mistake of launching a war. That does not make much sense.
This does:
Quote:
http://www.yesmagazine.com/article.asp?ID=1187
Spring 2005 Issue: Media That Set Us Free
by Bill Moyers
There’s a reason journalism is the only occupation protected by the U.S. Constitution. To govern ourselves, we the people need the truth, not what is politically expedient................
......Ideology and secrecy
Journalists who try to tell these stories, connect these dots, and examine these links are demeaned, disparaged, and dismissed.
For one thing, you’ll get in trouble with the public. The Chicago Tribune recently conducted a national poll in which about half of those surveyed said there should be some kind of restraint on reporting about the prison abuse scandal in Iraq; I suggest those people don’t want the facts to disturb their belief system about American exceptionalism.
The poll also found that five or six of every 10 Americans “would embrace government controls of some kind on free speech, especially if it is found unpatriotic.” No wonder scoundrels find refuge in patriotism; it offers them immunity from criticism.
If raging ideologies are difficult to penetrate, so is secrecy. Secrecy is hardly new. But never has there been an administration like the one in power today—so disciplined in secrecy, so precisely in lockstep in keeping information from the people at large and, in defiance of the Constitution, from their representatives in Congress. The litany is long:
• The president’s chief of staff orders a review that leads to at least 6,000 documents being pulled from government websites.
• The Defense Department bans photos of military caskets being returned to the U.S.
• To hide the influence of Kenneth Lay, Enron, and other energy moguls, the vice president stonewalls his energy task force records.
• The CIA adds a new question to its standard employee polygraph exam, asking, “Do you have friends in the media?”
• There have been more than 1,200 presumably terrorist-related arrests and 750 people deported, and no one outside the government knows their names, or how many court docket entries have been erased or never entered.
• Secret federal court hearings are held with no public record of when or where or who is being tried.
Secrecy is contagious. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has announced that “certain security information included in the reactor oversight process” will no longer be publicly available. New controls are being imposed on space surveillance data once found on NASA’s web site.
Secrecy is contagious—and scandalous. The Washington Post reports that nearly 600 times in recent years, a judicial committee has stripped information from reports intended to alert the public to conflicts of interest involving federal judges.
This “zeal for secrecy” I am talking about—and I have barely touched the surface—adds up to a victory for the terrorists. When they plunged those hijacked planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, they were out to hijack our Gross National Psychology.
By pillaging and plundering our peace of mind they could panic us into abandoning those unique freedoms—freedom of speech, freedom of the press—that constitute the ability of democracy to self-correct and turn the ship of state before it hits the iceberg.
As deplorable as was the betrayal of their craft by Jayson Blair, Stephen Glass, and Jim Kelly, <h3>the greater offense was the seduction of mainstream media into helping the government dupe the public to support a war to disarm a dictator who was already disarmed.</h3> Now we are buying into the very paradigm of a “war on terror” that our government—with staggering banality, soaring hubris, and stunning bravado—employs to elicit public acquiescence while offering no criterion of success or failure, no knowledge of the cost, and no measure of democratic accountability.
<h3>
I am reminded of the answer the veteran journalist Richard Reeves gave when asked by a college student to define “real news.” “Real news,” said Richard Reeves “is the news you and I need to keep our freedoms.”</h3> I am reminded of the line from the news photographer in Tom Stoppard’s play “Night and Day:” “People do terrible things to each other, but it’s worse in places where everybody is kept in the dark.”
|
More than 1500 American troops are dead, Seaver, thousand more are seriously wounded, and the low estimate is that 20,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed. More than $200 billion from the US treasury has been spent. Why are you sick of hearing the questions? Without the questions, how do we learn what happened and avoid making similar mistakes?
How did we get from these sentiments, to a war about Saddam's WMD?
So far, the explanations from the Bush and Blair administrations are contradicted by news reports that are still coming in.
Quote:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/...in575469.shtml http://www.state.gov/secretary/forme...s/2001/933.htm
on Feb. 24, 2001, while meeting at Cairo's Ittihadiya Palace with Egyptian Foreign Minister Amr Moussa.
Asked about the sanctions placed on Iraq, which were then under review at the Security Council, Powell said the measures were working. In fact, he added, "(Saddam Hussein) has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors."
|