Jeffrey Goldberg, WMD Expert?
When Meet the Press needed an expert to talk about Syria’s chemical weapons, they turned to Jeffrey Goldberg– who got Iraq’s WMDs spectacularly wrong.
This Time, Trust Anonymous WMD Claims—They’ve Got ‘Specific Intelligence’
The theatrics of WMD claims about Syria–satellite images, anonymous sources and so on–are obviously reminiscent of the lead up to the Iraq War. But media stress that this time–it’s different.
NYT Waves Goodbye to Three Amigos of Militarism
Not every politician gets a warm and fuzzy retirement profile in the New York Times. But not every politician is Joe Lieberman.
Roger Ailes’ Fantasy World
Fox News CEO Roger Ailes recently renewed his contract, and he gave an interview to explain why. As one might expect, given the we-only-look-biased-because-the-other-guys-are-so-biased philosophy at Fox, he’s motivated by what he sees as the outrageously partisan media everywhere else (MediaBistro, 11/16/12): Ailes was also sparked by what he experienced at a Washington journalists’ dinner. […]
Friedman Asks: Why Did Iraq Do That to George W. Bush?
Some days it’s not easy to make it through a Tom Friedman column. Take today (11/14/12), for instance. I got all the way to the second sentence: Virtually every American president since Dwight Eisenhower has had a Middle Eastern country that brought him grief. In case you’re wondering, he really means every president: For George […]
Stephen Zunes on foreign policy debate; Yifat Susskind on Iraq War’s toxic legacy
The final presidential debate, addressing international issues, managed to promote several falsehood about U.S. foreign policy. And: The toxic legacy of the Iraq War. New research, largely unreported in U.S. media, shows alarming levels of toxic lead, heavy metals and a massive increase in birth defects in the city of Fallujah, the site of two major offensives by the U.S. military.
U.S. Media Ignore Toxic Legacy of U.S. Weapons
The London Independent published a harrowing story on October 14, “Iraq Records Huge Rise in Birth Defects.” The piece focuses on the legacy of the U.S war in Iraq, in particular the two massive U.S. military invasions of the city of Fallujah in 2004. The Independent reports: High rates of miscarriage, toxic levels of lead […]
Don’t Tell O’Reilly, but His Iran Blockade Idea Already Worked
Crooks & Liars (9/26/12) notes Bill O’Reilly is proposing a naval blockade of Iraq: Says O’Reilly: We’re going to block it, nothing in, nothing out. OK? That’s what we’re going to do. And if you challenge the blockade, we’ll do what we have to do like the Cuban missile crisis, same thing—not gonna do […]
Pundit Accountability: What an Idea!
Writing in Newsweek, Peter Beinart has a pretty good idea: America’s foreign-policy debate desperately needs some measure of accountability. I’m not suggesting that politicians and pundits who got Iraq wrong be banished from public life. (This standard would leave me looking for other work.) But neither should they be able to flee the scene of […]
Chris Matthews and the Awesome Power of Cable Television
Here’s the video of MSNBC host Chris Matthews speaking at a cable industry conference this week. We noted here the odd notion that, as Matthews argues, 24-hour cable news would have stopped the Iraq War lies—despite the fact that 24-hour cable news had been around for more than 20 years at the time of the […]
Newsweek Enables Colin Powell’s Iraq War Revisionism
Right before the United States invaded Iraq, Newsweek magazine published a remarkable story. Reporter John Barry revealed that former Iraqi weapons chief Hussein Kamel had told UN inspectors in 1995 that the country had destroyed its stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons. As FAIR pointed out at the time, this was a remarkable discovery, especially […]
Matthews Remembers Mission Accomplished (Some of It)
On Wednesday (5/2/12), MSNBC host Chris Matthews played a long clip from the Daily Show, where Jon Stewart mocked Republicans who are complaining about Barack Obama’s celebration of the killing of Osama bin Laden. Stewart naturally recalls George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” photo op stunt from 2003. Stewart points out that if Republicans are angry […]
Bill Keller Remembers the Downing Street Memos (Sort Of)
Bill Keller’s New York Times column (3/19/12) begins with what might be a bit of self-deprecation: “When you’ve been wrong about something as important as war, as I have….” You might take that as a cue to stop reading right there. But Keller’s point is that people should think long and hard about signing on […]
The Iran Non-Debate, Continued…
Glenn Greenwald wrote recently of the extraordinarily limited media debate on Iran, which seems to consist of U.S. and Israeli officials making threats–attack now or attack later–alongside clinical discussions of the difficulties of bombing Iran. There is plenty missing–actual Iranians talking about what war would mean in human terms, legal experts discussing how preventive war […]
James Traub Bids a Fond Farewell to an Era of Constant Warfare
James Traub seemed a little bummed in a Sunday New York Times op-ed (“The End of American Intervention?,” 2/18/10), that military cuts and changing priorities will mean fewer humanitarian interventions in America’s future. So we must accept, if uneasily, the future which now seems to lie before us: We will do less good in the […]
Is Iraq Media Failure ‘Coloring’ Iran Coverage?
Huffington Post reporter Michael Calderone (2/17/12) has a fairly comprehensive look at the way media are covering Iran (I wish he’d cited FAIR’s long record on this; perhaps next time). The point is that Iran coverage looks a whole lot like Iraq coverage, circa 2002. Really bad, in other words. Calderone gets a pretty revealing […]
Newsweek and the ‘War on Christians’
A cover that declares a “War on Christians” is bound to get some attention. Writing in the February 12 issue of Newsweek, author Ayaan Hirsi Ali‘s argument is just as blunt. Enough with all this talk “about Muslims as victims of abuse,” because really it’s the other way around: A wholly different kind of war […]
Tom Friedman Not Sucking It on Iraq War
Today New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman (12/21/11) gives readers a sense of what the Iraq War was all about: Iraq was always a war of choice. As I never bought the argument that Saddam had nukes that had to be taken out, the decision to go to war stemmed, for me, from a different […]
In Explaining Iraq War, WMD Hoax Becomes a Footnote
The Washington Post‘s Scott Wilson has a piece (12/13/11) looking back on the Iraq War, where he writes of the “arc of the American experience in Iraq” being “from hope to barbarity, from swaggering invasion to quiet departure.” When it comes to the rationale for the entire war, things get a bit fuzzy. Like we […]
CBS Revises Iraq Death Toll
After a FAIR Action Alert (12/2/11), the CBS Evening News has changed its count of civilian deaths–citing a new figure that is roughly twice their original count. On December 1 the CBS Evening News reported: It is estimated that more than 50,000 Iraqi civilians were killed in the war. As FAIR pointed out, this was […]
