Free Republic

The Media's Skewed Nuclear Priorities By Notra Trulock, III January 9, 2003 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- How predictable was it that just as the Bush administration is closing in on Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction programs, the national media would suddenly "discover" nuclear programs popping up like mushrooms around the world. Most of the media’s nuclear coverage has been devoted to North Korea’s covert nuclear program, its threats to restart its nuclear production reactor, and debates over how long it will take Kim Jong II to construct a nuclear arsenal. There has also been "news" about Iran’s efforts to build nuclear weapons...

DERELICTION OF DUTY Senator Bob Graham and his colleagues have pinned the blame for the September 11 disaster squarely on the Clinton administration. Graham said Clinton lacked the political will to strike Al Qaeda at its roots in the 1990s. According to Graham, we knew where the camps were, we knew they were turning out freshly trained terrorists every month, and we knew that a significant number of these were coming to the United States of America. We had the capability to eliminate those camps, Graham said, but we didn’t use it. Treating terrorism as a law enforcement issue failed...

BOB SIMON MARKETS HIS ANTI-WAR BIAS CBS News correspondent Bob Simon is against a war on Iraq. He has said so publicly, and on 60 Minutes recently, he resorted to some of the same Madison Avenue tricks to promote his views that he accuses the Bush administration of using to sell the American people on such a war. Like Madison Avenue, Simon claimed President Bush is not above “hyping” his product, a war on Saddam Hussein, and issuing “misleading statements” about the character the threat posed by Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. But it was Simon who relied on misleading...

Everybody in Washington knows the risks of speaking truth to power. I would be reminded of those risks over and over again during what still remains the most alarming and least understood scandal of the Clinton era.