Ping
Ping
You would think after being outed as a pedophile, the MSM would stop using Scott Ritter as source.
and we were welcomed with flowers and oil is paying for everything.
“It is asserted that Iraq was not supporting terrorists. Really? Documentation indicates that Iraq was training non-Iraqis at Salman Pak in terrorist techniques, including assassination and suicide bombing. In addition to Iraqis, trainees included Palestinians, Yemenis, Saudis, Lebanese, Egyptians and Sudanese.”
http://www.benadorassociates.com/article/8195
Page 8 of this report a former UNSCOM inspector Jonathan B. Tucker includes Saddams stalling tactics specifically at Salman Pak
PBS made a ridiculous retraction on the defectors used in their Gunning for Saddam report. They conveniently threw the men they interviewed in their documentary underneath the bus.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/gunning/interviews/
PBS deciding to discredit these Iraqi men and neglected to note the news conference on Salman Pak by BRIG. GEN. VINCENT BROOKS with many other dicoveries corroberated their evidence.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/gunning/interviews/
WAR NEWS UPDATE
April 6, 2003
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/middle_east/jan-june03/warupdate_04-06.html
Sic ‘em
So, PBS (Democrat house network and home of the convicted drunk, Bill Moyers), the dying (and shrinking!) Democrat house publication, the NY Times, and the disgusting pedophile, Scott Ritter, have collaborated on a lie?
Surprise, surprise. Peas in a pod.
I can’t find a place to start reading this story that makes sense to me.
Is there a link to the CNSNews article?
Funding PBS so that they can be a echo chamber for the left is just wrong.
ROTFLMAO!!! Now that's funny! I don't care who you are, that's funny right there!
SEYMOUR HERSH: “One of the things that’s overwhelming to me as a journalist was the notion that everybody believed before March of ’03 that Saddam had weapons. This is just an urban myth. The fact of the matter is that – and my personal experience — and this, I ran into Scott when? In about 1998, 1999? And in talking to people who worked on the UNSCOM and also on the International Atomic Energy Agency, which did a lot of very first-rate reporting. And you know some of the people who wrote some of the reports, former intelligence agents from Britain, among others, they were pretty much clear by 1997 that there was very little likelihood that Saddam had weapons, and there were many people in our State Department, our Department of Energy, in the C.I.A., who didn’t believe there were weapons. And I think history is going to judge the — what I can almost call almost mass hysteria we had about Saddam and weapons. And one of the questions that keeps on coming up now is: Why didn’t Saddam tell us? Did he tell us?”
History is going to show that Seymour Hersh put way too much stock in what Scott Ritter had to say leaving him looking like he had no idea what the hell he was talking about. Seymour seemed happy defending people surrounded by the U.N. oil for food scandal and because of his own personal ideological agenda turned a blind eye to Saddams weapons and terrorist connections. Simultaneously he played search and avoid with factual information becoming a useless idiot for our enemy. I thought journalists were supposed to take pride in themselves with their objectivity? It is clear that this was and currently continues to be the prevailing attitude at the NY Times and PBS.
Since Seymour is such a big name in the Mainstream media nobody challenged him.
http://cdonohoe.townhall.com/g/65f90639-bb34-4894-9c03-c6e6f698f2b5
http://article.nationalreview.com/print/?q=ZjA4Yjk5MmY4NGJjMzRhYjIwOThhMzcxNzRlYTQ0Yjg=
Bad Press
From the October 11, 2004, issue of National Review.
By Andrew C. McCarthy
Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib by Seymour Hersh (HarperCollins, 370 pp., $25.95)
T his side of Dan Rather, no one has more cause for concern about fallout from CBS’s scandalous document hoax than Seymour Hersh. For no journalist has benefited more from the decades-old jerry-rigged system of American news reporting now being razed before our eyes.
It was a cozy arrangement. A precious few titans—called the “mainstream” media, though there was little mainstream about them—anointed themselves arbiters of the “objective” and the “responsible.” Objective was a veneer of just-the-facts-ma’am rigor, hiding a supernumerary lens implacably programmed to align selected facts with certain preordained “truths”: American strength bad, European piety good, individual initiative dangerous, government social activism desirable, and so on. Responsible, in turn, was the process of bolstering this “objectivity” with analysis from dependable sources, trusted to go along with the program and transformed into superstar pundits for doing so.
Only through such an arrangement could Seymour Hersh have thrived. In lionizing this Pulitzer Prize winner, the “mainstream” has honored itself. How fitting, then, that Hersh’s new book, Chain of Command—derived from his Bush-bashing post-9/11 reports for The New Yorker—arrives just as Rather’s blogging nemeses have removed the last stitch of the emperor’s clothes.
By any truly objective standard, Hersh is a terrible reporter. Real reporting plays it straight and gets it right, and the reader simply can’t trust him to do either. Hersh is a hard-left ideologue who disdains facts that collide with his dark theories. His methodology, moreover, is a joke. As has been ably recounted by National Review’s John J. Miller and others, Hersh’s most important sources are anonymous and impossible to verify, while the few sources he does identify tend to be conmen or the transparently agenda-driven. His journalistic practices have been decried by his former New York Times editor, A. M. Rosenthal, and embarrassingly laid bare by his own admissions, in court testimony, about concocting elaborate deceptions to pry out dubious information.
More fundamentally, Hersh gets even easily verifiable details wrong. And, as long as a story-hawker is playing to his prejudices, he has proved spectacularly gullible. Indeed, were it not for some rudimentary due diligence by ABC News—the kind CBS recently eschewed—Hersh might have beaten Rather to phony-document infamy when, in the course of compiling his roundly discredited account of the Kennedy presidency (The Dark Side of Camelot), he was taken in for months by forgeries trumpeting salacious gossip about JFK and Marilyn Monroe.
Nevertheless, as long as they were the only game in town, the mainstream media could present Hersh as a respectable raconteur instead of a hyper- partisan. In fact, at The New Yorker, they still think they can: Chain of Command begins with a cloying introduction by Hersh’s current editor, David Remnick, who burnishes the legend, elides any hint of the innumerable gaffes, and conveniently explains that, of course, Hersh can’t be expected to name his sources, but you can bet the ranch on their credibility because, after all, this is The New Yorker we’re talking about.
Hersh wastes little time cashing in on this license to mutilate. In the book’s most explosive section, “Torture at Abu Ghraib,” he tries to trace knowing culpability for the degradation of Iraqi prisoners directly to President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
But his case is a house of cards. The White House made a legally unassailable decision after the 9/11 attacks that Qaeda terrorists were not entitled to Geneva Convention prisoner-of-war protections: Captives could properly be subjected to harsh interrogation methods, but not torture. This, to Hersh, appears sinister; so he cites internal memoranda in which government lawyers at the non-policy level discuss the limits of permissible interrogation in light of anti-torture laws, and finds a conspiracy to torture prisoners.
For Hersh, it is immaterial that these memos were never endorsed as policy and that the relevant administration decision-makers all insisted that torture was forbidden. Relying on an unidentified “former intelligence official,” Hersh contends there was a top-secret program that licensed the abuse of Qaeda captives for intelligence purposes, and that, in late 2003, the Pentagon shifted the program to Iraq in an effort to get tough with the thriving insurgency there. The result was the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal—which the Pentagon tried to keep a lid on, but could not, owing to Hersh’s tireless reporting.
This account is farcical. First, it was the Pentagon, which vehemently denies the existence of such a program, that first publicly revealed prisoner-abuse allegations in Iraq, months before Hersh reported them. Second, Gen. Antonio Taguba was loosed to conduct an aggressive internal investigation—which Hersh selectively praises—and expressly concluded that the abuse was not authorized. Third, former defense secretary James Schlesinger’s exhaustive independent probe similarly found neither a “policy of abuse” nor “approved procedures” for inhumane treatment. And fourth, the abuse is being vigorously prosecuted, with 45 personnel thus far referred for courts-martial, and at least one cooperating defendant denying that the heinous conduct was authorized. Hersh nonetheless plows ahead with this and other calumnies, propped up by shadowy sources.
He also reprises his contention that the U.S. was duped into invading Iraq by that root-of-all-evil, the “neocons” in the Pentagon and Vice President Cheney’s office. Prominent here is the disingenuous harangue that, to heighten fears of a revived Iraqi nuclear program, the Bush administration relied on crude forgeries suggesting Iraqi efforts to purchase yellowcake uranium from Niger. Hersh’s case, again, is a crock. The forgeries were a sideshow, and never the core of concerns about Saddam’s ambitions. Probes completed by the Senate Intelligence Committee and Lord Butler’s commission in the U.K. have concluded that the uranium allegation was consistent with years of clandestine surveillance by Western intelligence services.
Were it not perfectly obvious from the suspect fact-gathering that his purpose is a pre-election mauling of the sitting president, Hersh’s designs would be clear from his choice of identified sources, who are called on when the pretense of impartial expert analysis is in order. On prisoner abuse, for example, his go-to guys are Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch and former New York Times eminence Anthony Lewis—both scathing Bush critics at the forefront of a due-process-for-terrorists movement. On Iraq, Hersh offers up former weapons inspector and current Saddam apologist Scott Ritter, and Richard Clarke, who, after years of holding very nearly the opposite view, “evolved” into a naysayer on Iraqi ties to terror just in time to pen his own election-year bestseller. And, for the astounding claim that ostensibly successful military operations in Afghanistan were really a study in ineptitude, Hersh is accommodated by a declared Democratic partisan, retired general Wesley Clark.
This is the way the mainstream game, in which Hersh is among the most renowned winners, was always played. The game is ending, apparently unbeknownst to the storied investigative journalist, but not a moment too soon for the rest of us.
—Mr. McCarthy, who led the prosecution of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and eleven others in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, is a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, and a contributor to National Review Online.
— Andrew C. McCarthy directs the Center for Law & Counterterrorism at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
They really cant look at any other facts objectively because it would be painful for them going up against their own preconceived notions.
The minute they start looking into evidence on both sides its going to unleash misery on the their world that they cant make other people own.
I suspect many smart lefties know already but use denial as a un-penetrable coping shield. Kind of like the deflector shield in Star Trek
review