HOW DID I KNOW?
This week I had an interesting exchange with a Washington journalist who would not reveal to me the name of the newspaper for which he works. Perhaps unfairly - since I have not read any of his own reporting - I seized the opportunity to take him to task for the collective crimes of the U.S. mainstream press in supporting the Bush administration's invasion of Iraq. His retort was that 'everybody' got it wrong on Iraq's alleged WMDs. (Curiously enough, this is the line currently being pushed by Judith Miller, the Zionist shill who still has not been fired by the New York Times. See piece by Arianna Huffington and relevant comments here.) He says that belief in Colin Powell's United Nations presentation was nigh universal. I pointed out that I knew all along that Iraq possessed no WMDs, and wasn't fazed in the least by Powell's presentation. He demanded to know how I could possibly have known better than the average U.S. journo. Here is a list of the points I made:
1) I was able to establish fairly quickly who the most authoritative and objective experts were in this field (e.g, Hans Blix, Mohamed ElBaradei, Scott Ritter, Robert Fisk). Once I had worked out who they were, I trusted them above those who seemed to be either inexpert or to have already made their minds up in favour of invasion.
2) I treated the blogs as more objective sources of analysis than corporate-controlled mainstream newspapers. In the best blogs, one found sceptical commentary about the relevant matters that was almost wholly absent from major media organs like the Los Angeles Times which seemed to consider it their patriotic responsibility to put the best possible face on the Bush administration's unsubstantiated allegations.
3) I never fell for the myth that Colin Powell was a man of exceptional integrity (a myth which continues to pervade American websites of all political complexions). My reasoning is that if Powell had really been a man of exceptional integrity he would never have been serving in the Bush administration in the first place.
4) I realized that the twin scandals over the Niger yellowcake uranium papers and Tony Blair's 'dodgy dossier' amply betrayed the extent of the difficulties that were being faced by those wishing to persuade the public that sufficient reason existed to invade Iraq. The mainstream media, on the other hand, treated those affairs as if they did not undermine the case for war itself. But they did: if there was a sufficient case for war, those documents would never have had to have been concocted.
5) The Iraqi government's 12,000-page declaration on its chemical, biological and nuclear activities - which aspired to prove that the country had no WMDs - was confiscated from Hans Blix's offices in the United Nations and subsequently issued in a censored form by the U.S. government. (Those who have forgotten about this scandalous event can brush up on it here.) This act indicated clearly that it was the U.S. government, not the Iraqi government, which had something to hide from the civilized world. This fostered in me a degree of healthy cynicism towards the motives of Bush administration which was conspicuously absent from the mainstream press.
6) The burden of responsibility lies upon those who assert the existence of something (e.g., God) to furnish proof of its existence. Those who deny that something exists are not under a similar obligation because, except in highly specific circumstances, it is all but impossible to prove a negative. Yet during the lead up to the Iraq war the onus was placed effectively on those who denied the existence of Iraq's WMDs (above all, the Iraqi government itself) to prove that they did not exist. It looked extremely suspicious to me that the case for war came to rest on the Iraqi government's inability to prove that it did not possess WMD. But if there was a case for war, it depended not on the Iraqi government proving that it did not possess WMD - which it could not reasonably be expected to do - but rather on the advocates of war proving that Iraq did possess them. This the advocates of war were unable to do, meaning that the argument for the war was really that Iraq might possess them. However, I did not regard the possibility that Iraq possessed WMD as a sufficient reason to invade the country, particularly when the available evidence was that there was only a very remote possibility that it did. However, following Bush's and Blair's lead, many people in the U.S. (and international) media chose to treat even the slightest possibility that Iraq possessed WMDs as sufficient grounds for invasion.
7) If Iraq really had possessed WMD, the U.S. would never have even contemplated invasion. The fact that the U.S. was extremely keen to invade the country implied that the U.S. leadership knew perfectly well that neither its forces, those of its allies, Israel, nor anyone else, would pay a price after the invasion.
I believe that I am not the only person in the world with a functioning brain, and that anyone who possessed the ability to reason would have been able to draw the same conclusions I did. The problem, essentially, is that there are a lot of people working for the mainstream media whose brains apparently do not function. There has to be a reason why so many apparently clueless individuals are earning high salaries working for some of the most prestigious media organizations in the world. Could a precondition of such employment be the inability to smell a rat? Perhaps reporters who possess the ability to spot lies and deceptions are weeded out by means of psychological profiling, leaving the plum jobs for the obtuse?
QUOTE OF THE DAY: '“I’m not sure the State Department even exists anymore,” Col. Larry Wilkerson, [former Secretary of State Colin] Powell’s chief of staff, told the audience of journalists and scholars. “It, like so many others things, have been destroyed by George W. Bush’s ‘cowboyism.’” Wilkerson dismisses the Administration’s attempts to improve America’s image abroad. “You can’t sell shit,” he said.' (SOURCE)
GOOD DEED OF THE DAY: Send an email to 'support the people of the Americas in their rejection of the policies, pushed forward by the Bush Administration, that fuel wars, environmental destruction and human-rights violations.' Form here.
1) I was able to establish fairly quickly who the most authoritative and objective experts were in this field (e.g, Hans Blix, Mohamed ElBaradei, Scott Ritter, Robert Fisk). Once I had worked out who they were, I trusted them above those who seemed to be either inexpert or to have already made their minds up in favour of invasion.
2) I treated the blogs as more objective sources of analysis than corporate-controlled mainstream newspapers. In the best blogs, one found sceptical commentary about the relevant matters that was almost wholly absent from major media organs like the Los Angeles Times which seemed to consider it their patriotic responsibility to put the best possible face on the Bush administration's unsubstantiated allegations.
3) I never fell for the myth that Colin Powell was a man of exceptional integrity (a myth which continues to pervade American websites of all political complexions). My reasoning is that if Powell had really been a man of exceptional integrity he would never have been serving in the Bush administration in the first place.
4) I realized that the twin scandals over the Niger yellowcake uranium papers and Tony Blair's 'dodgy dossier' amply betrayed the extent of the difficulties that were being faced by those wishing to persuade the public that sufficient reason existed to invade Iraq. The mainstream media, on the other hand, treated those affairs as if they did not undermine the case for war itself. But they did: if there was a sufficient case for war, those documents would never have had to have been concocted.
5) The Iraqi government's 12,000-page declaration on its chemical, biological and nuclear activities - which aspired to prove that the country had no WMDs - was confiscated from Hans Blix's offices in the United Nations and subsequently issued in a censored form by the U.S. government. (Those who have forgotten about this scandalous event can brush up on it here.) This act indicated clearly that it was the U.S. government, not the Iraqi government, which had something to hide from the civilized world. This fostered in me a degree of healthy cynicism towards the motives of Bush administration which was conspicuously absent from the mainstream press.
6) The burden of responsibility lies upon those who assert the existence of something (e.g., God) to furnish proof of its existence. Those who deny that something exists are not under a similar obligation because, except in highly specific circumstances, it is all but impossible to prove a negative. Yet during the lead up to the Iraq war the onus was placed effectively on those who denied the existence of Iraq's WMDs (above all, the Iraqi government itself) to prove that they did not exist. It looked extremely suspicious to me that the case for war came to rest on the Iraqi government's inability to prove that it did not possess WMD. But if there was a case for war, it depended not on the Iraqi government proving that it did not possess WMD - which it could not reasonably be expected to do - but rather on the advocates of war proving that Iraq did possess them. This the advocates of war were unable to do, meaning that the argument for the war was really that Iraq might possess them. However, I did not regard the possibility that Iraq possessed WMD as a sufficient reason to invade the country, particularly when the available evidence was that there was only a very remote possibility that it did. However, following Bush's and Blair's lead, many people in the U.S. (and international) media chose to treat even the slightest possibility that Iraq possessed WMDs as sufficient grounds for invasion.
7) If Iraq really had possessed WMD, the U.S. would never have even contemplated invasion. The fact that the U.S. was extremely keen to invade the country implied that the U.S. leadership knew perfectly well that neither its forces, those of its allies, Israel, nor anyone else, would pay a price after the invasion.
I believe that I am not the only person in the world with a functioning brain, and that anyone who possessed the ability to reason would have been able to draw the same conclusions I did. The problem, essentially, is that there are a lot of people working for the mainstream media whose brains apparently do not function. There has to be a reason why so many apparently clueless individuals are earning high salaries working for some of the most prestigious media organizations in the world. Could a precondition of such employment be the inability to smell a rat? Perhaps reporters who possess the ability to spot lies and deceptions are weeded out by means of psychological profiling, leaving the plum jobs for the obtuse?
QUOTE OF THE DAY: '“I’m not sure the State Department even exists anymore,” Col. Larry Wilkerson, [former Secretary of State Colin] Powell’s chief of staff, told the audience of journalists and scholars. “It, like so many others things, have been destroyed by George W. Bush’s ‘cowboyism.’” Wilkerson dismisses the Administration’s attempts to improve America’s image abroad. “You can’t sell shit,” he said.' (SOURCE)
GOOD DEED OF THE DAY: Send an email to 'support the people of the Americas in their rejection of the policies, pushed forward by the Bush Administration, that fuel wars, environmental destruction and human-rights violations.' Form here.
