Sunday, August 07, 2005
Breaking!: Bush lied! 21 months late, the news.
The New York Times has probably perfected the art form of systematicall decieving its readers about some American misdeed and then doing a retrospective to set the record straight after the perpetrators have left town. Reporting on the dirty wars of Central America was often done that way. The NYT famously demoted the reporter, Ray Bonner, who exposed the mass murders of the Salvadoran death squads. Bob Parry was likewise hounded out of mainstream journalism by Reagan and Bush.
Michael Hirsh of Newsweek has finally reported that Bush allowed bin Laden to slip away at Tora Bora. Admittedly, this is only official confirmation and depended on the CIA commander talking.
But go back to the presidential debates and assess this line from Hirsh:
"Bush asserted that U.S. commanders on the ground did not know if bin Laden was at the mountain hideaway along the Afghan border."
It would have mattered a lot if the media had simply reported what all of us knew at the time, namely that Bush lied in the debates. We knew because the story had long before emerged in the pages of places like the Independent and the Guardian. Unlike the American press, they weren't actively lying to us.
Over to you, ladies and gentlemen of the press.
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