Fair and Balanced

June 6, 2003 1:49 PM

BBC "Fresh doubts over Iraq's arsenal". CNN "Pentagon: WMD report consistent with U.S. case" Google News lists many other sources on this topic, with varying titles depending on who you read.
posted by CrazyJub (29 comments total)

Really?

I hadn't heard.
posted by xmutex at 1:52 PM on June 6, 2003

So this Meta, it Filters?!
posted by Shadowkeeper at 2:01 PM on June 6, 2003

Boy, it's rare for me to want to take a comment back as much as I'd like to retract that one. I have become the snarky catch-phrase-using bastard that I hate. My apologies.
posted by Shadowkeeper at 2:16 PM on June 6, 2003

Well Shadow, you can make up for it by posting this for me, I can't seem to post any more today.
posted by CrazyJub at 2:18 PM on June 6, 2003

Personally, I'm shocked that Fox News, the bastion of pro-Bush-rhetoric/drivel has a strong title of "DIA Had No Evidence of Chemical Weapons in Iraq Last September" I really am impressed that it would pass the FoxNews censors. (I'm sure Bill O'Reilly will now call for the person who wrote the title's resignation for being a "traitor" to the nation. )
posted by aacheson at 2:25 PM on June 6, 2003

sky's blue round here. how is it across there?

whoa! 2+2=5. ah, no. pressed the wrong key.

tum ti tum.

anyone else noticed how google's default ads for mefi are to sites making fun of george bush?
posted by andrew cooke at 2:27 PM on June 6, 2003

Robert Byrd weighs in, and now even USA Today is asking the tough questions. Surely, lying about war is an impeachable offense...?
posted by muckster at 2:31 PM on June 6, 2003

pancakes
posted by Outlawyr at 2:47 PM on June 6, 2003

My cat is very soft.
posted by Spacelegoman at 2:48 PM on June 6, 2003

Anyone who was even semi-conscious knew that the WMD excuse was horseshit for the past year or so. Sadly though...

A surprising 41 percent of Americans either believed that the United States had already found WMDs or were not sure. Bush and his top aides may have spurred this confusion with statements that the discovery of two mobile biological weapons laboratories proved Saddam’s guilt.

It's just politics as usual, coming out of the deep freeze of the WTC Attacks.

Coming at a time when the Bush administration is starting to face mounting criticism on a number of fronts--Iraq, economic policy, the Federal Communications Commission's railroading through of a massive media deregulation plan, and the Justice Department's abuse of immigrants and its undercutting of civil liberties--it looks like the monolithic consensus within the power structure which has characterized the post 9-11 political environment has begun to fracture.

posted by meehawl at 2:58 PM on June 6, 2003

"I'm an obtuse man so I'll try to be oblique." -- Principal Onyx Blackman, Strangers with Candy
posted by dhoyt at 3:04 PM on June 6, 2003

the monolithic consensus within the power structure which has characterized the post 9-11 political environment has begun to fracture.

About bloody time.
posted by Mars Saxman at 3:21 PM on June 6, 2003

In retrospect, Powell may have saved himself from being the fall guy by having Tenet at his side during the UN speech. Shame on them both. In retrospect, it's interesting to read how apparently accurate some people were last February.

CIA officer on the agency's days of shame.

Gas masks, so insiders joke bitterly, were issued this week to analysts at CIA headquarters in Langley. Not because of Code Orange, but to help staunch the stench. The analysts have been holding their noses ever since CIA Director George Tenet's February 11 testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Tenet caved in to administration pressure to establish a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda. Equally important, he retracted key intelligence judgments of barely four months ago on Iraq.
posted by madamjujujive at 3:25 PM on June 6, 2003

Today Salon's Jake Tapper became one of the first major pundits in the (mainstream?) media to use the "L-word."

I'm starting to feel good about the prospects of this story properly blowing up, but it is still depressing to think about the fact that Americans basically swindled themselves. Anyone willing to expend an iota of energy to do research of free, publically-available information should have known that this was bullshit from day one (it appears as if Powell himself knew that). Why it was that damn-near nobody from the "opposition party" bothered to do so is beyond me. They even supported this war!

One of the hardest things to get someone to do is admit that they were fooled. This case points out that maybe part of the reason for that is that people want to be fooled sometimes.
posted by Ignatius J. Reilly at 4:28 PM on June 6, 2003

aacheson: foxnews.com has updated that headline to "DIA: Intelligence Report Supports WMD Claims". Did anyone print off the page with the original hed?
posted by nicwolff at 4:34 PM on June 6, 2003

foxnews.com has updated that headline to "DIA: Intelligence Report Supports WMD Claims". Did anyone print off the page with the original hed?

Holy shit. Hi-fuckin'-larious.

Which is to say that I surely did not print the page, but man I hope somebody did. Faux News indeed.
posted by Ignatius J. Reilly at 4:42 PM on June 6, 2003

What was the original heading?
posted by kickingtheground at 4:49 PM on June 6, 2003

It is time for an impeachment.

But, can you impeach a President who was never elected?
posted by the fire you left me at 4:49 PM on June 6, 2003

"Because I'm a polite man, I'll put it this way: it was all just a show for the US audience."

--UN Inspector Franck in Der Spiegel.
posted by muckster at 5:16 PM on June 6, 2003

Can't impeach a President for bad intelligence. Only bad ethics.
posted by stbalbach at 5:17 PM on June 6, 2003

If this were a sporting event, and Bush and the neocons were the officials, the slow, doubly-accented chant of "BULL SHIT BULL SHIT" would now become audible. From where I'm sittin', it looks like that shirtless guy over there is about to throw his beer bottle.
posted by Ignatius J. Reilly at 5:23 PM on June 6, 2003

Is Lying About The Reason For War An Impeachable Offense?
posted by homunculus at 5:26 PM on June 6, 2003

I didn't print the Fox story earlier, but I did read it and see the headline. You can still do a search at Google News and the original headline is listed there though.

I'd laugh, except it isn't funny.
posted by Orb at 5:57 PM on June 6, 2003

This Fox News switcheroo would be a great case for the distributed journalism app/site we talked about a few months ago (and Matt and Rusty are working on [self-link]), if I ever saw one. Someone ought to tell the Memory Hole.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 7:10 PM on June 6, 2003

That FOX news switch is a stitch. Incredible.

If anyone thinks they were lied to before the start of the war, they either a) were not paying attention or b) watching FOX. Rooting about for news of why we should wage war on Iraq was nothing more than, er, rooting about. The people wanted reasons. Ask and you shall receive.
posted by Dick Paris at 7:44 PM on June 6, 2003

That Fox headline thing is fascinating. Good catch, nicwolff. But does anyone actually have the original article? I wonder if these two paragraphs were in it, which are the only part that would even allow such a new headline (never mind that a headline is supposed to give you the key to the story as a whole, which this one blatantly fails to do):

Officials say the text of the report is not regarded as controversial and will support U.S. contentions that a body of evidence existed supporting U.S. assertions that Iraq's chemical and biological weapons programs were real. "We want to get it out because it will show there was plenty of evidence to suggest they had weapons," a senior official told Fox News. "It refers to intelligence evidence that the Iraqis were moving things around in preparation for a coming war. You don't move things around and disperse them if you don't have them."

This passage seems to be shoehorned in. If I were editing this piece, I'd stop the writer and say, "whaa? Wait, how could they say it would support contentions that evidence existed when we just said it didn't exist? We need to clarify that somehow."

And it's ever so convenient that an unnamed "official" told this particular stuff only to Fox News, who can't bother to straighten out which department the "official" is from. The implication is the DOD, but the headline could only apply if it was the DIA. I'm guessing this was added afterward, either by Fox's own initiative or in collusion with Rumsfeld's pals. After all, if we can change the headline, we've changed the whole story for the vast majority of Americans who are just skimming headlines, right? Don't worry, everything's fine, go back to sleep... sleep...
posted by soyjoy at 8:20 PM on June 6, 2003

Someone ought to tell the Memory Hole.

I've taken my own advice and sent an email to Russ at the Memory Hole.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 8:31 PM on June 6, 2003

Here's a link to my expanded 2 cents on this matter (self-link action). Here's a link to a screenshot of the google search that is linked to above, which has now changed on the web.
posted by Ignatius J. Reilly at 12:38 AM on June 7, 2003

chalabi's puppet files a report ... one might ask if it is an attempt to regain some semblance of credibility?



"It's not built and designed as a standard fermenter," he said of the central tank. "Certainly, if you modify it enough you could use it. But that's true of any tin can."
posted by specialk420 at 12:52 AM on June 7, 2003