Network Viewers Still in the Dark on "Smoking Gun Memo" (FAIR Alert!)

Following FAIR's call for more mainstream coverage of the "smoking gun memo"—the secret British document containing new evidence that the Bush administration manipulated intelligence to justify its plan to invade Iraq—a steady trickle of news reports have appeared. But that coverage has been downplayed in general and is still completely absent from the nightly news.

The Los Angeles Times published a page 3 story on the memo on May 12, and the Washington Post ran a page 18 story the following day. More than two weeks after the story broke in the Sunday Times of London (5/1/05), it finally made the front page of a major U.S. newspaper, the Chicago Tribune (5/17/05).

After referring to the memo (5/2/05) in a story on the British electoral campaign, the New York Times failed to report on the document's implications about the Bush administration until today (5/20/05); the one-column story didn't mention the manipulation of intelligence until the eighth paragraph. (Times columnist Paul Krugman also discussed the memo on the paper's opinion page on May 16.)

The Washington Post's ombudsman, Michael Getler, who the previous week (5/8/05) had mentioned reader complaints about the Post's lack of memo coverage without evaluating their substance, revisited the issue with a much more critical eye in his most recent column (5/15/05). (The ombud gave back-handed credit to FAIR and the group Media Matters for America—both "self-described media watchdog organizations"—for prompting him to delve into the story.) Getler wrote that Post editors initially told him they didn't pursue the story because they were "tied up with election coverage"—this despite the fact that the leaked memo became a major election story in Britain and likely contributed to Tony Blair's weak returns. When he questioned them again after the email campaign, Getler wrote, "editors agreed that this story should be covered and said they were going to go back and do that"; the Post's May 13 story followed.

Getler called investigation of the memo's conclusions "journalistically mandatory" and suggested that the Post story should have been placed on the front page.

While the memo has begun to get wider coverage in print, broadcasters have maintained a near silence on the issue. The story has turned up in a few short CNN segments (Crossfire, 5/13/05; Live Sunday, 5/15/05; Wolf Blitzer Reports, 5/16/05), but the only mention of the memo FAIR found on the major broadcast networks came on ABC's Sunday morning show This Week (5/15/05), in which host George Stephanopoulos questioned Sen. John McCain about its contents. When McCain declared that he didn't "agree with it" and defended the Bush administration's decision to go to war, Stephanopoulos didn't question him further. A look at the nightly news reveals not a single story aired about the memo and its implications.

When finally questioned by CNN (5/16/05), White House press secretary Scott McClellan claimed he hadn't seen the memo, but that "the reports" about it were "flat-out wrong." British government officials, however, did not dispute the contents of the memo—which can be read in full online at http://downingstreetmemo.com/ —and a former senior American official called it "an absolutely accurate description of what transpired" (Knight Ridder, 5/6/05).

The Chicago Tribune (5/17/05) named several factors that had caused a "less than robust discussion" of the British memo: Aside from the White House's denials, and the media's slow reaction, the paper asserted that "the public generally seems indifferent to the issue or unwilling to rehash the bitter prewar debate over the reasons for the war." Of course, it's hard to judge the public's interest in a story the media have largely shielded them from.

ACTION: Please contact the nightly news programs and ask them to investigate and report on the new evidence that the Bush administration manipulated intelligence to support its plan to invade Iraq.

http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/apostolou200407141524.asp

Sounds like the Butler report was supportive of the move two invade Iraq to me finding that

"from the evidence which has been found and de-briefing of Iraqi personnel it appears that prior to the war the Iraqi regime:
a. Had the strategic intention of resuming the pursuit of prohibited weapons ....
b. In support of that goal, was carrying out illicit research and development, and procurement, activities.
c. Was developing ballistic missiles with a range longer than permitted under relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions.
d. Did not, however, have significant — if any — stocks of chemical or biological weapons in a state fit for deployment, or developed plans for using them.

b and c were violations of UN resolutions.
July 14, 2004, 3:24 p.m.
Biters Bit
The liberators did not lie.

By Andrew Apostolou

During the last week, the myth that the British and American governments took their countries to war in Iraq on the basis of lies has been comprehensively demolished. Those who accused the British and American governments of distorting intelligence, of cooking evidence to justify the toppling of Saddam, have themselves been exposed as peddling falsehoods. A key allegation, that President George W. Bush had lied to the American people in his January 2003 State of the Union address, has been thoroughly disproved.

There are remarkable parallels between the false scandals created by those who have accused the two governments of distorting intelligence. In Britain, Andrew Gilligan, a BBC journalist, claimed in May 2003 that the British government had "sexed up" (i.e. "exaggerated") the evidence in its September 2002 dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The clear implication was that Tony Blair's government had knowingly misled the British public.

In the U.S., retired ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV wrote an op-ed for The New York Times on July 6, 2003, in which he wrote that "some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat." Wilson's barely hidden insinuation was that President Bush had hoodwinked the American people in his January 2003 State of the Union address in which he said that "The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Thanks to Wilson, the supposedly false claim of these "16 words" became a rallying cry of those opposed to the war in Iraq.

The BBC allegations were discredited by an independent inquiry led by Lord Hutton, a leading judge, in January 2004. Hutton concluded that the claim that the dossier had been exaggerated was "unfounded." In the resulting furor, Gavyn Davies, the chairman of the BBC, and Greg Dyke, the BBC director general, along with the journalist responsible for the report, Andrew Gilligan, resigned.

On Wednesday, the latest British inquiry, under Lord Butler, has come to similar conclusions. Butler has "found no evidence of deliberate distortion or of culpable negligence." The intelligence was not stretched to fit a political agenda, although judgments were at the "outer limits" of what the intelligence would support. According to Lord Butler, some of the intelligence was poor, and intelligence claims that Iraq had resumed biological-weapons production were "seriously flawed."

Lord Butler's sensible conclusions stand in stark contrast to the tabloid journalism of the BBC. Unable to admit that it has again been proved wrong for a second time, the BBC and its friends in the British media have responded by attacking Butler for being an archetypal civil servant, just as they pilloried Lord Hutton for being an establishment judge. Reuters has today called Lord Butler "a man of the establishment."

More important are Lord Butler's overall conclusions on Iraq, statements that reinforce the case for war. The British and American claim was always that Saddam was in gross violation of his U.N. obligations. Indeed, the U.N. Security Council had unanimously found Iraq to be in "material breach" of its U.N. obligations in Security Council Resolution 1441 on November 8, 2002. Today, Lord Butler wrote that:

For the reasons given above, even now it is premature to reach conclusions about Iraq's prohibited weapons. But from the evidence which has been found and de-briefing of Iraqi personnel it appears that prior to the war the Iraqi regime: a. Had the strategic intention of resuming the pursuit of prohibited weapons programmes, including if possible its nuclear weapons programme, when United Nations inspection regimes were relaxed and sanctions were eroded or lifted. b. In support of that goal, was carrying out illicit research and development, and procurement, activities. c. Was developing ballistic missiles with a range longer than permitted under relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions. d. Did not, however, have significant — if any — stocks of chemical or biological weapons in a state fit for deployment, or developed plans for using them.

Saddam may not have had WMD stocks, but he certainly wanted to retain the ability to recreate them and use them. His nuclear program was more limited than it had been in the past, but Saddam was looking to revive it and the shopping expeditions to Africa were indications of his malign intent. It was Saddam and his henchmen who were the liars, men and women who repeatedly claimed that Iraq had fully disarmed but had, in a fit of absence of mind, forgotten to keep any evidence of this disarmament.

There was no need to forge evidence against Saddam to prove either his guilt or that toppling his criminal regime was legally justified and morally sound. Seventeen U.N. resolutions had demanded full and verifiable disarmament of stocks "and all related subsystems and components and all research, development, support and manufacturing facilities." Saddam was also required to renounce terrorism. It was precisely because Iraq was already guilty of using WMDs for external aggression and domestic oppression, of genocide against the Kurds and the Shia Arabs and war crimes against Iran, of repeatedly sponsoring terrorism, that the U.N. imposed upon Iraq its most stringent economic sanctions ever.

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