Just some more news that Fox News et.al doesn't
report.
A Spurious 'Smoking Gun'
Why has the news media ignored a
Congressman's assertion that White House
officials used evidence they knew to
be false to build their case for war?
by Chris Smith
March 25, 2003
It was one of the White House's strongest arguments for
war.
For months, administration officials had been touting a series
of
letters purporting to show Iraqi efforts to buy uranium from
the
African country of Niger. If the letters weren't exactly a
smoking
gun, Washington hawks contended, they were at least irrefutable
proof
that Iraq still had nuclear ambitions.
Then, two weeks ago, it all
came crashing down. The letters, it was
revealed, were hoaxes -- crude
forgeries discredited by nuclear
weapons experts and disowned by the Central
Intelligence Agency.
Further, the Agency asserted that it made its concerns
known to
administration officials in late 2001, shortly after sending
the
letters to the White House. For more than a year, Washington had
used
evidence repudiated by its own intelligence advisors to build a
case
for war.
The revelations could have delivered a damaging blow to the
White
House's political and diplomatic push for invasion. But the
national
media rapidly moved off the story, swept up in the
administration's
rush to war. And it all might have ended there, but for
Congressman
Henry Waxman. In a scathing letter sent to President Bush last
week,
the California Democrat demands an investigation into what Bush
knew
about the Niger forgeries and when he knew it. Waxman, who voted
last
year to give the administration authority to wage a war in Iraq,
says
there is reason to believe that he and other members of Congress
have
been misled.
"It is unfathomable how we could be in a situation where
the CIA knew
information was not reliable but yet it was cited by the
President in
the State of the Union and by other leading Administration
officials,"
he says. "Either this is knowing deception or utter incompetence
and
an explanation is urgently needed."
Waxman, who says he signed on to
Bush's war initiative in part because
he was concerned about Iraq's nuclear
aims, wonders how the forgeries
could have been used as evidence of Iraqi
malfeasance for so many
months after they were officially debunked. At the
very least, he
writes, the recent revelations have created a perception that
facts
were withheld to bolster the President's case for war.
"It appears
that at the same time that you, Secretary Rumsfeld, and
State Department
officials were citing Iraq's efforts to obtain
uranium from Africa as a
crucial part of the case against Iraq, U.S.
intelligence officials regarded
this very same evidence as
unreliable," he writes in his letter to the
president. "If true, this
is deeply disturbing: it would mean that your
Administration asked the
U.N. Security Council, the Congress, and the
American people to rely
on information that your own experts knew was not
credible."
So far, however, neither the White House nor the national media
seem
inclined to give Waxman's questions serious consideration.
The
administration's response has been a deafening silence, and
mainstream media
outlets have all but ignored Waxman's missive. While
the congressman's
charges garnered a brief mention on ABC News, it was
left to Tom Engelhardt
to break the news in his web log, Tom
Dispatch.com. Engelhardt, an editor,
historian, teaching fellow at
Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism, and
regular contributor to
MotherJones.com, says that he is "staggered" by the
media's silence --
especially given the prominence of Waxman, the House's
Ranking
Minority Member of the Committee on Government Reform.
"You might
think that when, in the midst of war, a significant member
of the minority
party in Congress challenges the administration's
explanation for why we
acted, it might merit the odd line or two,
somewhere or other," he
wrote.
Waxman spokesperson Karen Lightfoot acknowledges the congressman
has
been disappointed by the indifferent reception.
"It definitely
deserves more attention than it has received," she
said.
Over the weekend,
Waxman's letter finally made an appearance in the
Washington Post, but only
as a small item buried within a larger story
on the CIA's handling of the
Niger letters.
Norman Solomon argues that the mainstream media's
treatment of the
story fits an established pattern. Noting that the forged
letters are
just the latest in a string of discredited White House claims,
he
argues that the mainstream media has frequently been "behind the
curve"
in reporting on the administration's shortcomings. Solomon, a
fellow at the
media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting
and author of "The
Habits of Highly Deceptive Media", faults the press
for "waiting to be tossed
perspectives and critiques from the
administration."
The last few months
have witnessed a "slow motion Gulf of Tonkin," he
says, "and with very few
exceptions, the press is swallowing it."
Eric Alterman agrees. The media
critic and author of "What Liberal
Media?" says he isn't
surprised by the dearth of coverage.
"It's important, but not to the White
House," he said. "That's not the
kind of thing they care about. And if the
White House doesn't care,
then most of the media doesn't care
either."
@2003 The Foundation for National Progress
Read the
article online:
http://www.motherjones.com/news/update/2003/13/we_338_01.html
