Posted on 07/15/2003 12:08:24 PM PDT by kattracks
A week after British Prime Minister Tony Blair told Parliament that he had independent intelligence to back President Bush's claim that Iraq sought uranium from Niger, the overwhelming majority of American news outlets continue to pretend that the story has been conclusively determined as false - even though U.S. officials have repeatedly contradicted that assessment.
A LexisNexis search conducted on Tuesday turned up over 1,000 print and television reports containing the words "uranium" and "false" or "erroneous" in the nine days since the story was first misreported in the New York Times.
Typical was a front page report in Friday's Wall Street Journal, which got the story wrong twice in a single sentence.
"Powell, traveling with Bush in Africa, said the president shouldn't have to apologize for making an erroneous assertion of an Iraq uranium purchase," the paper insisted.
In fact, Bush never claimed that Iraq had actually purchased uranium from Niger, saying only in his January State of the Union address that Saddam Hussein had "sought" the nuclear fuel from an African country.
And far from calling the uranium story "erroneous," the same day Powell went out of his way to make it clear that he wasn't disputing the British claim.
"I would not dispute [British intelligence] or disagree with them or say they're wrong and we're right, because intelligence is of that nature," Powell told the Washington Post. "Some people have more sources ... on a particular issue. Some people have greater confidence in their analysis."
Still, even after Tuesday, July 8, when Prime Minister Blair made it amply clear that he stood by the British intelligence finding sourced by Bush in his State of the Union address, the American press repeatedly portrayed the claim as conclusively wrong.
On Thursday, July 10, CBS Evening News introduced its fraudulant story on the African uranium flap with the teaser "President Bush's false claim about Iraqi weapons; he made it despite a CIA warning the intelligence was bad."
The same day the Dallas Morning News misreported, "Bush brushed aside new questions about whether his administration had deliberately misled the public with his State of the Union assertion - since acknowledged to be false - that Iraq had tried to buy uranium in Africa to build nuclear weapons."
"This was followed on Friday by the admission by CIA Director George J. Tenet that it was his agency's fault that the erroneous information was included in the president's speech," the Columbus Dispatch fraudulently claimed on July 14.
Newspaper headlines ballyhooed the bogus notion that the uranium story was known to be false, like this front page blast in Sunday's Los Angeles Times: "'I've got confidence in George Tenet,' Bush says amid persistent questioning over the erroneous claim about Iraq's bid for uranium."
The same day, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer outdid even the L.A. Times with its bogus headline "Democrats Turn Up Heat Over Misuse of False Report."
Some press outlets went so far as to publish patently false claims that even Mr. Blair didn't believe his own intelligence service. That's what the New York Daily News did on Friday, July 10, in the midst of an editorial defending the Bush administration.
"Saddam was not trying to buy uranium from Niger. Downing Street and the White House have now admitted as much," the paper misreported.
Not surprisingly, the media's big-lie blitzkrieg was kicked off by the granddaddy of made-up news and fabricated stories, the New York Times.
Writing on the paper's op-ed page a week ago Sunday, former acting U.S. ambassador to Iraq Joseph Wilson said his one-man investigation showed that "it was highly doubtful that any such [uranium] transaction had ever taken place."
But again, President Bush never claimed that the transaction had "taken place," only that Iraq was seeking to make the buy.
Still, Wilson's inability to confirm something Bush hadn't claimed prompted him to write: "I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat."
The next day the Washington Post got into the act, misreporting that the White House had "effectively conceded that intelligence underlying the president's statement was wrong."
In fact, the quote the Post cited to back its claim was far more ambiguous, with an anonymous White House official stating only, "Knowing all that we know now, the reference to Iraq's attempt to acquire uranium from Africa should not have been included in the State of the Union speech."
Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
Bush Administration
Media Bias
Then that'll be the approximate number of official retractions that these LW snotrags and mediawhores owe their readership and viewership regarding their false, erroneous reporting on this item, starting with the NY Slimes.
I think you're right, my lefty brother was in town the other day and didn't say a word about this, and this was before the British came out and stood by the intel. It certainly lowers the requirement for "deception", and I don't think non-politicians or non-media are interested in this new standard.
If it were not for the strength and health of the American Heartland and its ability to resist this relentless propaganda, the United States--and, with it, the rest of the world--would be doomed.
If this propaganda machine were to succeed, America would be overwhelmed and destroyed by the highly malignant form of decadence known as "Liberalism" (which has nothing to do with the word "liberalism", meaning free, loving of freedom, free thinking, and open minded; on the contrary, it is an Orwellian paradox that means its opposite, e.g. "love is hate" and "freedom is slavery").
Ari Fleischer called this a "media feeding frenzy." I think a more vulgar term is called for: this is a gangbang.
That may be what's owed, but don't hold your breath to see what's actually paid...
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