krebscycle

Friday September 6, the supposedly liberal New York Times ran a front page story about the public’s lack of enthusiasm for President Obama’s proposal to take military action against the Sarin Gas using Assad Regime in Syria. This article has been widely reproduced in newspapers across the country. Reporter Michael Wines explains that  residents of a little slice of the heartland in Pennsylvania are skeptical or hostile to Mr. Obama’s proposed intervention. And this even though the area “wears its patriotism on its sleeve, shirttail, and pockets” and had overwhelmingly supported President Bush’s invasion of Iraq. 

Some say they now believe that domestic needs neglected during a decade of war override foreign imperatives. Some, reviewing years of pitched struggle in Afghanistan and Iraq, see the Middle East as quicksand that must be avoided at all costs. Some say Syria’s civil war is Syria’s problem, and that the United States is not the Mr. Fix-it for all of the world’s crises.

And here, at least, more than a few see military action against Syria as unacceptable simply because it is Obama’s idea.

Poor beleagured and ineffective “Obama” (not “President Obama”). 

• Patriotism led people to support Mr. Bush’s catastrophic war in Iraq not the lies of the Administration or of media like the New York Times.  In their evasive and dishonest apology for their reporting in the run-up to the war, even the Times editor had to admit “Articles based on dire claims about Iraq tended to get prominent display, while follow-up articles that called the original ones into question were sometimes buried. In some cases, there was no follow-up at all."  But now we are told  that residents of Greene County were so patriotic that they supported that war although they now doubt  Mr. Obama’s war. I guess people who opposed the Iraq war lacked the patriotism to swallow Judy Miller’s front page lies from the New York Times and call them delicious. And people who are uncertain about the Syria war are patriotic enough to be influenced by the Times negative "reporting”.
• Hostility to Mr. Obama in a 97% white town (there are apparently 30 black people in Waynesberg), in a district that voted 60/40 for Romney (none of which the reporter bothers to tell his readers) is  due to war weariness or something.  These people are salt-of-earth – you know, um, Tea Party members as the reporter notes way down towards the end of the article.  
• 86% of voters in the area supported Mr. Bush’s war according to a Quinnipac poll but a random sample of 6 people chosen by Mr. Wine, like some guy sitting at a bar at a Barbecue joint who still thinks Saddam Hussien had chemical weapons and the opinions of a Republican Congressman, indicates that most oppose the President on Syria.

It’s particularly enraging that the Times does not even suggest to readers that the skeptical and hostile coverage in media centers like the New York Times may have made people skeptical about Obama’s proposal while their relentless cheerleading and out and out lying to promote Bush’s war would might have deceived voters. Here’s more from what the Times themselves admitted about their Iraq war coverage

On Oct. 26 and Nov. 8, 2001, for example, Page 1 articles cited Iraqi defectors who described a secret Iraqi camp where Islamic terrorists were trained and biological weapons produced. These accounts have never been independently verified.

On Dec. 20, 2001, another front-page article began, “An Iraqi defector who described himself as a civil engineer said he personally worked on renovations of secret facilities for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons in underground wells, private villas and under the Saddam Hussein Hospital in Baghdad as recently as a year ago.” Knight Ridder Newspapers reported last week that American officials took that defector — his name is Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri — to Iraq earlier this year to point out the sites where he claimed to have worked, and that the officials failed to find evidence of their use for weapons programs. It is still possible that chemical or biological weapons will be unearthed in Iraq, but in this case it looks as if we, along with the administration, were taken in. And until now we have not reported that to our readers.

On Sept. 8, 2002, the lead article of the paper was headlined “U.S. Says Hussein Intensified Quest for A-Bomb Parts.” That report concerned the aluminum tubes that the administration advertised insistently as components for the manufacture of nuclear weapons fuel. The claim came not from defectors but from the best American intelligence sources available at the time. Still, it should have been presented more cautiously. There were hints that the usefulness of the tubes in making nuclear fuel was not a sure thing, but the hints were buried deep, 1,700 words into a 3,600-word article. Administration officials were allowed to hold forth at length on why this evidence of Iraq’s nuclear intentions demanded that Saddam Hussein be dislodged from power: “The first sign of a `smoking gun,’ they argue, may be a mushroom cloud.”

Five days later, The Times reporters learned that the tubes were in fact a subject of debate among intelligence agencies. The misgivings appeared deep in an article on Page A13, under a headline that gave no inkling that we were revising our earlier view (“White House Lists Iraq Steps to Build Banned Weapons”). The Times gave voice to skeptics of the tubes on Jan. 9, when the key piece of evidence was challenged by the International Atomic Energy Agency. That challenge was reported on Page A10; it might well have belonged on Page A1.

On April 21, 2003, as American weapons-hunters followed American troops into Iraq, another front-page article declared, “Illicit Arms Kept Till Eve of War, an Iraqi Scientist Is Said to Assert.” It began this way: “A scientist who claims to have worked in Iraq’s chemical weapons program for more than a decade has told an American military team that Iraq destroyed chemical weapons and biological warfare equipment only days before the war began, members of the team said.”

The informant also claimed that Iraq had sent unconventional weapons to Syria and had been cooperating with Al Qaeda — two claims that were then, and remain, highly controversial. But the tone of the article suggested that this Iraqi “scientist” — who in a later article described himself as an official of military intelligence — had provided the justification the Americans had been seeking for the invasion.

The Times never followed up on the veracity of this source or the attempts to verify his claims.

 
And that is putting the best possible face on it.  The lies justifying Bush’s fiasco were relentlessly marketed on the front page of the New York Times by Judy Miller, who now works for Fox. And now the Times is writing articles like

On Thursday, the Times piece “Brutality of Syrian Rebels Posing Dilemma in West” went viral with the help of a gruesome execution video showing Syrian rebels reciting a macabre poem before executing seven unarmed regime soldiers. The video dominated cable news broadcasts and proliferated on social media websites and the Drudge Report [Financial Times] 

The article claimed that these rebels received arms from the SMC, the Syrian rebels backed by the US government. It did not mention that the SMC  denied any support for this rebel group – and a later correction

Sometime after the SSG issued this statement to The Cable, the Times posted a correction to its article noting that the execution video was not from this year. In fact, it was “made in the spring of 2012,” according to a correction at the bottom of the article. In a statement to The Cable, the SSG’s media director Dan Layman said the correction further vindicated the group’s point. “The Times just corrected their article to show the time stamp on the video was the spring of 2012. Before the SMC even existed,” said Layman [FT]

Ooops! A front page story said the group receiving arms from the US government committed a brutal atrocity, didn’t bother to check sources or see if there was contradictory evidence, and then a later correction buried at the end of the article admits that the incident took place before the US funded group existed! Good thing that the Times cleaned up its reporting practices after years puffing GOP lies during Whitewater, I mean during the run-up to the Iraq war.