We should all be grateful to the Honorable Lamar Smith (R-Texas) and his fair and balanced committee of Republicans for their willingness to investigate liberal media such as the New York Times, ABC, NBC, CBS.
We can only hope that they will discover why the liberal New York Times would not permit its writers to say George Bush lied when he said there were no warnings of a terrorist attack before 9/11 and that no one imagined using airliners as bombs. At least 12 other nations and a Taliban official warned the Bush administration of a planned attack on the US. US intelligence had known since 1998 of a plan to use hijacked airliners to attack the World Trade Center, and since 1999 of a similar plan to attack the Pentagon and other federal buildings in the capital the same way. Nevertheless, the Times and the other liberal complicit enablers allowed Bush to repeat the lie until at least 2004.
â—why the Times and the other liberal complicit enablers assiduously beat the drums for war ignoring better informed UN inspectors, and US military and intelligence personnel. Conservative Knight-Ridder fact-checked the administrations claims and found they were all unsupported by facts. At least the Times had the grace to apologize to its readers for parroting the administration’s talking points.
â—why the Times and other enablers refused to report for a month leaked British documents revealing that the facts about the threat of Iraq were fixed around the policy. American citizens who wanted to be informed had to read British newspapers on the internet.
â—why news of a leaked British memo of an emergency meeting between Bush and Blair to find a new excuse for a war on Iraq was not reported by the liberal enablers. The memo written by Blair’s foreign policy adviser, Sir David Manning, revealed that on January 31, 2001, almost two months before war on Iraq, both Bush and Blair agreed that Weapons of Mass Destruction would not be found in Iraq because UN inspectors had found none. Bush declared he was going to attack Iraq anyway but they needed a better pretext. Bush proposed that they provoke Saddam Hussein into defending his country as an excuse to start the war.
One proposal was to increase bombing of Iraq, then US airplanes painted in UN colors would be used to provoke nervous Iraqi gunners into shooting at them. Another plan was to fly a small group of Iraqi exiles into Iraq by helicopter. With US air cover, they would seize an isolated military base near the Saudi border and announce a coup. US forces could then be deployed to support them. A plan that may not have been discussed at the meeting was to torture POWs into lying that Saddam was behind 9/11.
After their meeting, Bush and Blair gave a press briefing--they had not decided on war, they were working for peace, they were terrified of Saddam’s threat to the US, and they had UN authorization for war on Iraq. Those were lies. They had decided on war, they believed Saddam did not have WMD, the UN had not authorized war on Iraq. Like Bush’s other lies they have been forgiven and forgotten by the liberal media allowing Bush and others in the Bush administration to lie that “everyone” believed Saddam had WMD when not even Bush and Blair believed it.
The memo was first mentioned in 2005 in the book, Lawless World: America and the Making and Breaking of Global Rules, by Philippe Sands, a British attorney. February 2007, former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski read part of the document to a Senate Foreign Relations Committee. That news was buried in the middle of a paragraph on an inside page by the Times and was ignored by the other liberal enablers. Mannings’ notes forced Blair out of office. In the US it is a secret closely guarded by the liberal media although it is a major part of an investigation of the war by the British parliament.
â—why the Times would not permit its own reporter to write that Bush had violated the Constitution by illegally spying on US citizens. The Times kept that secret for more than a year during a presidential election permitting voters to unknowingly vote for Big Brother. The Times eventually revealed the illegal spying because they were going to be scooped by their own reporter. He had written a book about a story that he was not allowed to report in the newspaper for which he worked.
â—why the Times and other complicit enablers reported the Bush party line--prisoners of war were tortured by only a few “bad apple” enlisted personnel who were punished by public humiliation and were sent to prison for following orders. The bad apples in the White House have been whitewashed although both Bush and Cheney publicly confessed (boasted?) that they not only knew about the torture they authorized it.
Of course the liberal media also do not refer to the prisoners as POWs although they were captured in what Bush insisted be called a war. He even compared it to World War Two, but without the rules. If you control the language you control thought and it is clear who controls the language of the liberal media. Bush insisted that POWs not be called POWs because as Alberto Gonzales informed him, hooding, walling, sleep deprivation, stress positions, enforced standing, extreme temperatures would be crimes if the POWs were called POWs.
For the same reason, the Times does not permit its writers to use torture when writing about interrogation. As the NPR ombudsman explained, the liberal media can’t write or say “torture” about what the UN Charter, US Constitution, Geneva Convention, Convention against Torture, and the Army Field Manual call torture because “torture is illegal under US law and international treaties the United States has signed.” More than a hundred POWs in the “War on Terror” have died under enhanced interrogation but that can’t be called murder because murder is a crime. Let’s call it “enhanced discipline.”
The conservative Germans who after World War Two were tried and found guilty of enhanced patriotism for trying to protect their country were subjected to enhanced discipline. Doesn’t that sound better? Less pejorative?
In 1983, four years before the Convention Against Torture, a Texas sheriff received a 10-year prison sentence and three deputies received four-year sentences for waterboarding a suspect because the Justice Department called it a crime. However, August 1, 2002, Jay Bybee assistant attorney general, said it was not a crime if done to “detainees.” See how flexible the law is. You don’t have to change the act, just change the name. Outing a CIA agent isn’t treason, it’s political retaliation.
We can hope that Lamar Smith’s Committee can discover how could that happen with a liberal media in a nation with “freedom of the press.”
Lamar Smith’s Committee should attempt to discover why the Times and other complicit enablers have not called for a special prosecutor to examine the administration’s violation of the Geneva Convention, US Military Law, the Convention against Torture and the Constitution and how that could happen with a liberal media in a nation with “freedom of the press?”
We can expect the committee to call for a special prosecutor to prosecute Bush, Cheney and others in the administration or openly declare why they have not done so since they are determined to discover what used to be called “truth.”
If not, we will know that Lamar Smith’s committee is but another cowardly brown shirt attempt to silence what no honest or honorable person can call the “free press” in order to further cover up crimes that the liberal media feared to call crimes.
TIP:
Enter the amount, and click "Tip" to submit!
old new lefty
RickyB
Robert Becker
scanner
David Sirota
Charles Foster Johnson
Salon.com
Comments
I wonder if the NYT would have the courage to publish this as an op-ed?
Lamar Smith should secure you as a consultant. You are a constituent of his, aren't you?
however, studies have shown that most of the mainstream media types self-indentify as liberal when asked
personally I have noticed that they are liberal on social issues, but when it comes to worker rights and worker welfare they are as conservative as anyone
Publishers are usually pleased when they are attacked for being "liberal" because they have one or two "liberal" columnists. That provides them for ammunition to use against their employees. Six media corporations own more than half of all media outlets in the US. None of them are "liberal" corporations. All of them want friends in high places in the government to feed them information, give them tax breaks and protection from those they harm. It must be terrifying for a corporation to defy a president, VP, or other high placed figure who can punish them with charges, investigations, and personal attacks. The Bush administration threatened to investigate the Times and pursue charges against them for reporting information that Bush wanted kept secret. The Lamar Smith Committee is more of the same.