MediaBloodhound

Special Report: NYT Iraq War Timeline Whitewashes History (Part II: Record Day of Global Protest Disappeared)

To mark the recent fifth anniversary of the Iraq War, The New York Times published an interactive timeline. This is the second in a series of posts exploring the most misleading statements and glaring omissions from its Iraq War history (read Part I here).

Timeline Entry: DC Antiwar Protest

This entry reads in full: "Jan. 18, 2003, Antiwar Demonstration: Tens of thousands of demonstrators converge on Washington to protest the threatened use of force in Iraq."

FACT: First of all, a demonstration of equal or greater size (according to varying estimates) occurred in San Francisco on the same day. The Times did report the San Francisco protest in its corresponding 2003 article (a link is provided beneath the timeline). So, to put it mildly, it's a peculiar omission. Additionally, employing terminology such as "tens of thousands" rather than, say, 200,000 - the estimated number of participants in both DC and San Francisco on Jan. 18, 2003 - is patently misleading. (The San Francisco police department's original calculations, by the way, were 40,000 before it altered its count several times, from 55,000 to 100,000-125,000 a few days later, to then stating 150,000 a "safe estimate," while also conceding it could've been closer to 200,000.) The mainstream media, led by The Times, has regularly used such language to describe the number of Iraq War protesters. Such statistically blunting nomenclature has been a gift to the Bush White House and an assault on the most American of activities: peaceful dissent.

As the Jan. 26, 2003 editorial in the Santa Rosa Press Democrat noted: "A demonstration of 40,000 is newsworthy. A protest of 150,000 to 200,000 is historic."

Yet even more egregious than this entry was the timeline's failure to mention what was arguably the single largest day of protest in recorded human history: February 15, 2003, in which up to 30 million people in over 600 towns and cities across the globe protested the imminent invasion of Iraq. Roughly half a million people gathered in New York City alone. The 3 million who protested in Rome entered the Guinness World Records as the "Largest Anti-War Rally" ever.

What's more, in a February 17, 2003 front-page news analysis by reporter Patrick Tyler, The Times itself printed:

The fracturing of the Western alliance over Iraq and the huge antiwar demonstrations around the world this weekend are reminders that there may still be two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion.

In his campaign to disarm Iraq, by war if necessary, President Bush appears to be eyeball to eyeball with a tenacious new adversary: millions of people who flooded the streets of New York and dozens of other world cities to say they are against war based on the evidence at hand.

[...]

For the moment, an exceptional phenomenon has appeared on the streets of world cities. It may not be as profound as the people's revolutions across Eastern Europe in 1989 or in Europe's class struggles of 1848, but politicians and leaders are unlikely to ignore it.

Of course our politicians and leaders - the ones with the power to prevent this war - did ignore this. Five years later, so has The New York Times.

In other words, our paper of record presents an Iraq War timeline in which it includes one mention of one protest in one city, yet fails to record the largest coordinated global protest in the history of the human race.

Not Fox News. Not the Bush administration up on its White House website. The New York Times. This is ineptitude or censorship on a truly staggering level.

Special Report: President Bush Mourns Every Loss?

In the last line of "The Unfeeling President," novelist E.L. Doctorow’s masterful 2004 essay on President Bush, he wrote: "He cannot mourn but is a figure of such moral vacancy as to make us mourn for ourselves."

Many Americans would have agreed with Doctorow's assessment four years ago. Today, far more have accepted this reality about the man who sends our sons and daughters off to die in his never-ending war of choice. Yet, by and large, our national press corps still covers President Bush as if he were a king, treating him with a deference and submissiveness equal to the contempt and belligerence he affords its members, the American people, world opinion and the rule of law. 

In a telling prelude to the grim milestone of 4,000 American dead in Iraq (of which 97% were killed after the president, with his "Mission Accomplished" banner aloft, declared major combat operations over), Mr. Bush, less than two weeks ago, gushed about how "romantic" it would be to fight right now on the "front lines" in Afghanistan. You know, trudging through clouds of depleted uranium while sniper bullets whiz by your head, wondering if the next roadside bomb has your name on it. On March 13, in a videoconference with U.S. military and civilian personnel stationed in Afghanistan, our president spoke of war as if it were a videogame (to date, roughly 482 US troops have died in Afghanistan):

"I must say, I'm a little envious," Bush said. "If I were slightly younger and not employed here, I think it would be a fantastic experience to be on the front lines of helping this young democracy succeed.

"It must be exciting for you ... in some ways romantic, in some ways, you know, confronting danger. You're really making history, and thanks," Bush said.

Adding insult to injury, on that very same day, March 13, the Pentagon released an exhaustive study confirming that there was no connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda.

Meanwhile, our uber chickenhawk of a president - who, along with his multiple draft-deferring vice president, avoided serving in Vietnam - had expressed a similar callous, G.I. Joe vision of warfare in September 2007. Writing for the Washington Post, Dan Froomkin reported on Bush's "misguided sense of bravado":

President Bush wishes that he could be alongside the troops in Iraq -- except that he's too old. At least that's what he reportedly told a blogger embedded with U.S. troops in Iraq...."N.Z. Bear," one of the eight guests sitting around a table with Bush at the White House, reported: "Responding to one of the bloggers in Iraq he expressed envy that they could be there, and said he'd like to be there but 'One, I'm too old to be out there, and two, they would notice me.'"

Froomkin also noted that since declaring an end to major combat missions operations on May 1, 2003, Bush, through September 2007, had only visited Iraq three times, for a total of fewer than 15 hours. Here's the courageous breakdown:

Bush's first trip was a two-and-a-half-hour visit to the Baghdad airport on Thanksgiving 2003, where he teared up at the sight of the soldiers and was famously photographed posing with a prop turkey.

In June 2006, Bush spent five hours visiting Iraqi political leaders in Baghdad, although he didn't let the prime minister know he was coming.

During his most recent trip, two weeks ago, Bush was on the ground for seven hours, never leaving the confines of a military base known as Camp Cupcake, a heavily fortified American outpost for 10,000 troops with a 13-mile perimeter.

And how does Bush's vice president soften the oncoming blow of 4,000 American dead? In response to ABC's Martha Raddich pointing out that two-thirds of Americans think the war was a mistake, Dick Cheney replied, "So?"

And so, now this: 4,000 Americans have fallen in Iraq but nothing changes. President Bush and Vice President Cheney can say and do anything with seeming impunity. The blood of 4,000 American men and women is spilled and the press corps' questions - in context to this administration's seven-and-a-half years of death, destruction and brazen criminality - still aren't much tougher than they were on the eve of the invasion, when one of their sharpest inquiries was: "Mr. President, as the nation is at odds over war, with many organizations like the Congressional Black Caucus pushing for continued diplomacy through the U.N., how is your faith guiding you?" During that same press conference, President Bush himself, in a bizarre and now forgotten meta-gaffe, admitted the question and answer session was a farce. The White House press corps reacted by chuckling along in complicity:

PRESIDENT BUSH: The risk of doing nothing, the risk of hoping that Saddam Hussein changes his mind and becomes a gentle soul, the risk that somehow -- that inaction will make the world safer, is a risk I'm not willing to take for the American people. We'll be there in a minute. King, John King. This is a scripted -- (laughter.)

Flash forward five years later from that press conference and here's how the Associated Press frames Mr. Bush's handling of the 4,000 American soldiers, in an article titled "Bush Sympathetic As War Toll Hits 4,000":

Grim milestones such as new death toll often go unremarked by Bush. But he chose on this occasion to note the losses, albeit briefly and without taking questions from reporters.

As always, his message was determination.

Special Report: NYT Iraq War Timeline Whitewashes History (Part I: Hans Blix Security Council Presentation)

To mark the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War yesterday, The New York Times published an interactive timeline. Yet even after the paper's mea culpa about its deficient reporting leading up to the invasion, The Times repeats similar journalistic malpractice in this stroll down memory lane.

This is the first in a series of posts exploring the most misleading statements and glaring omissions from its Iraq War history:

Timeline Entry: Hans Blix's Report to Security Council

This entry reads in full: "Jan. 27, 2003, Weapons Inspector Reports: Hans Blix, a chief U.N. weapons inspector, reports that Iraq has not cooperated during two months of inspections."

The corresponding Times report filed back in 2003 (to which there's a link beneath the timeline) is titled "Inspector Says Iraq Falls Short," with the lede, "Hans Blix, one of the chief United Nations weapons inspectors, gave a broadly negative report today on Iraq's cooperation with two months of inspections, providing support to the Bush administration's campaign to disarm Iraq by force if necessary."

FACT: First, the statement in the timeline that Blix "reports that Iraq has not cooperated during two months of inspections" fails miserably to encompass not only the complexity of what Blix related to the Security Council but the intended purpose of his report.

Hans Blix saw his presentation before the Security Council as a report card with which to force Iraq's hand to be more forthcoming with his team of weapons inspectors. In the end, his dedication to the facts, of painting an exhaustive view of Iraq's cooperation up to that point, over a mere two-month period, left his findings vulnerable to cherry-picking by those, in the Bush administration and the media, who were beating the war drums. Blix related that Iraq had, as of Jan. 27, 2003, not cooperated as fully as he would have liked, but not that it had refused to cooperate altogether, as the timeline deceptively implies.

In fact, this timeline entry is even more misleading than that Times report filed on Blix's presentation. That report's framing certainly bolstered the Bush administration's argument for invasion, claiming, foremost, that Blix's findings "support the Bush administration's campaign to disarm Iraq by force if necessary" while wholly omitting Blix's points that progress had been made and his weapons inspectors needed more time to do their jobs. As opposed to this timeline entry, however, even the report refrained from implying Iraq had totally failed to cooperate. (Yet the article does give the false impression that Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, the chief inspector for atomic weapons, held an extremely divergent view from Blix: "[ElBaradei] was less critical of Iraq today, reporting that his team had found no evidence so far that Iraq had tried to revive its nuclear arms program and appealing to the Security Council for a 'few months' more to complete his work." ElBaradei - who the Bush administration fought to remove from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), going so far as to tap his phone, and who, along with the IAEA, was later awarded the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize - would soon be roundly criticized by Vice President Dick Cheney, US United Nations ambassador John Bolton and other administration surrogates.)

Contrary to the 2003 administration narrative that is repeated in this 2008 timeline, years after it was first echoed by The Times and the mainstream media at large, Blix also told the Security Council that day:

HANS BLIX: While the inspection is not built on the premise of confidence, but may lead to confidence if it is successful, there must nevertheless be a measure of mutual confidence from the very beginning in running the operation of inspection. Iraq has, on the whole, cooperated rather well so far with UNMOVIC [U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission] in this field.

The most important point to make is that access has been provided to all sites we have wanted to inspect. And with one exception, it has been [without] problems.

What's more, in closing his presentation, Blix painstakingly detailed how the weapons inspectors' capacity to perform their jobs was growing more effective by the day, progress had been made and much work remained:

HANS BLIX: Mr. President, I must not conclude this update without some notes on the growing capability of UNMOVIC. In the past two months, UNMOVIC has built up its capabilities in Iraq from nothing to 260 staff members from 60 countries. This includes approximately 100 UNMOVIC inspectors, 60 air operations staff, as well as security personnel, communication, translation and interpretation staff, medical support and other services at our Baghdad office and also Mosul field office.

All serve the United Nations and report to no one else.

Furthermore, our roster of inspectors will continue to grow as our training program continues. Even at this moment, we have a training course in session in Vienna. At the end of that course, we should have a roster of about 350 qualified experts from which to draw inspectors.

The team supplied by the Swiss government is refurbishing our office in Baghdad which had been empty for four years. The government in New Zealand has contributed both a medical team and a communications team. The German government will contribute unmanned aerial vehicles for surveillance and a group of specialists to operate them for us within Iraq. And the government of Cyprus has kindly allowed us to set up a field office in Larnaca.

All of these contributions have an assistance in quickly starting up our inspections and enhancing our capabilities, so has help from the U.N. in New York and from sister organizations in Baghdad.

In the past two months, during which we have built up our presence in Iraq, we have conducted about 300 inspections to more than 230 different sites. Of these, more than 20 were sites that had not been inspected before.

By the end of December, UNMOVIC began using helicopters, both for the transport of inspectors and for actual inspection work. We now have eight helicopters. They have already proved invaluable in helping to freeze large sites by observing the movement of traffic in and around the area.

Setting up the field office in Mosul has facilitated rapid inspections of sites in northern Iraq. We plan to establish soon a second field office in the Basra area where we have already inspected a number of sites.

Mr. President, we now have an inspection apparatus that permits us to send multiple inspections teams every day all over Iraq by road or by air. Let me end by simply noting that that capability, which has been built up in a short time and which is now operating, is at the disposal of the Security Council.

Following Blix's Jan. 27 presentation before the Security Council, Iraq became more compliant to inspections while, simultaneously, the inspectors were expanding the coverage and effectiveness of their searches. But it didn't matter. The Bush administration had already made up its mind and began an effort to discredit Blix.

Blix revealed in an April 2003 interview: "When on January 27, I denounced Iraq in the Security Council of the UN for not cooperating in an immediate, complete and unconditional way to fulfill the terms of resolution 1441, the American Government, including the hawks, applauded me. However, it was a great paradox, because from then on, the Government of Iraq began to cooperate actively. And then the Americans began to criticize me." He also disclosed, "There is evidence that this war was planned well in advance. Sometimes this raises doubts about their attitude to the (weapons) inspections," adding, "I now believe that finding weapons of mass destruction has been relegated, I would say, to fourth place, which is why the United States and Britain are now waging war on Iraq."

And just today in The Guardian, Blix writes:

The elimination of weapons of mass destruction was the declared main aim of the war. It is improbable that the governments of the alliance could have sold the war to their parliaments on any other grounds. That they believed in the weapons' existence in the autumn of 2002 is understandable. Why had the Iraqis stopped UN inspectors during the 90s if they had nothing to hide? Responsibility for the war must rest, though, on what those launching it knew by March 2003.

By then, Unmovic inspectors had carried out some 700 inspections at 500 sites without finding prohibited weapons. The contract that George Bush held up before Congress to show that Iraq was purchasing uranium oxide was proved to be a forgery. The allied powers were on thin ice, but they preferred to replace question marks with exclamation marks.

They could not succeed in eliminating WMDs because they did not exist.

This timeline entry on Blix's Jan. 27 presentation to the Security Council is a sharp reminder of how the media, led by our paper of record, helped to sell the war in Iraq by almost invariably shaping information to fit the Bush administration's narrative. 

Op-Ed Column: The Facts, Keith Olbermann and Rabid Hillary Shills

Leading into the Texas and Ohio primaries, The New York Times reported that "the campaign of Sen. Hillary Clinton is unleashing what one Clinton aide called a 'kitchen sink' fusillade against Obama." Meanwhile, the Clinton camp was busy working the refs: leveraging a Saturday Night Live sketch that ridiculed the media for alleged favoritism of Sen. Obama, Hillary Clinton cried foul as she and her campaign were simultaneously in the process of heaving said sink.

Clinton and her inner circle fueled the worst kind of xenophobia: "No, there is nothing to base that on. As far as I know," Clinton told 60 Minute's Steve Kroft, when asked if she thought Obama was a Muslim. And while the source of The Drudge Report's well-timed photo of Obama in traditional Somali garb (flaming those Muslim rumors) officially remains unconfirmed, the Clinton camp's history of leaking information to Drudge has been documented. To this day, the campaign has never issued a flat, unequivocal denial that the photo was sent by one of its members. (Mission accomplished: a December 2007 Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll showed that 8% of Americans thought Obama was a Muslim; a new WSJ/NBC poll reveals that the number of Americans who believe this falsehood has risen to 13%.) Concurrently, as the media failed to effectively challenge Clinton on her refusal to release her tax forms, it featured story after story on Clinton's unrelated and obfuscating counter-punch to any inquire into her tax records: Obama's connection to indicted businessman Antoin Rezko, about which after extensive digging by every major media outlet, not one has confirmed any legal wrongdoing on the part of Sen. Obama. (Welcome to Obama's Whitewater.)

The strategy worked like a charm. The Clinton camp is nothing if not schooled in such politics. With a cowed media focusing lopsided scrutiny on Obama days before the March 4 primary, Clinton's camp landed one shot below the belt after another. Effective and politically shrewd? Sure. Cheap, cynical and sleazy? You bet.

Since the March 4 primaries alone, Clinton press secretary Howard Wolfson has absurdly compared Obama to Ken Starr; Sen. Clinton has done Sen. McCain's bidding, breaking an unofficial rule among same-party candidates by asserting she and Sen. McCain have crossed the "commander-in-chief threshold" while Obama has not; and, of course, this past week one of Clinton's chief fundraisers, Geraldine Ferraro, said, "If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position," then claimed reverse racism when people objected to her racist or, at bare minimum, intentionally racially divisive and factually ignorant comments. And if anyone thinks Ferraro's statements weren't tactical salvos - part of Hillary's "Archie Bunker strategy for PA," to quote my consistently straight-shooting friend, Will Bunch - then they're not paying attention or are willfully ignorant of her campaign's modus operandi.

The worst you can say for the Obama camp during the same period is that then foreign policy advisor, Samantha Power, jet-lagged and upset right after the results in Ohio and having witnessed firsthand how Clinton won the state, called her a "monster" during an interview, screwing up by then attempting to keep the comment off the record without having stated that request beforehand. She resigned immediately, publicly and profusely apologizing to Sen. Clinton. Moreover, the media failed to address what drove Power's comment: Clinton's self-evident willingness to do anything to win in Ohio, but also, taking into account Power's expertise on foreign policy and human rights, quite likely her knowledge of Clinton's egregious record on war and innocent civilian lives as well.

Meanwhile, Sen. Clinton initially offered only a tepid and - make no mistake about it - calculated response, saying she "did not agree" with Ferraro's comment and found it "regrettable." Clinton later finally denounced Ferraro's statements in clearer terms: "I rejected what she said and I certainly do repudiate it." But where did she happen to utter this delayed reaction? Before a gathering of black newspaper publishers at the National Newspapers Association meeting. Just another example of Clinton's track record of the most cynical political expediency. Moreover, when Ferraro's comments first made news, Clinton campaign manager Maggie Williams had the Orwellian chutzpah to insinuate that it was somehow Obama who was playing the race card in this instance. But this tactic shouldn't have surprised anyone because it's exactly what Williams had done during the Drudge/Obama-in-African-garb photo flap.

Op-Ed Column: NYT Dangerously Downplays Bush's Anti-Torture Veto

When historians look back and try to understand how the George W. Bush administration managed to trample the Constitution and transgress the Geneva Conventions with near impunity, our mainstream media will stand out as one of the primary culprits.

Case in point: Sunday's New York Times report on President Bush's veto of a bill that sought to prohibit the CIA from using torture techniques such as waterboarding. Here's the lede:

President Bush on Saturday further cemented his legacy of fighting for strong executive powers, using his veto to shut down a Congressional effort to limit the Central Intelligence Agency's latitude to subject terrorism suspects to harsh interrogation techniques.

There you have it. According to The Times, Bush's legacy of gutting and subverting our Constitution in a patently authoritarian, fascistic manner is defined as merely "fighting for strong executive powers." Such reporting is as absurd as summing up a man's inclination to beat his wife as an act that depicts a strong male role in marriage. During the Bush years, this kind of intellectually dishonest, apologetic journalism has done grave damage to our country and the rest of the world. The smattering of begrudging mea culpas aside, such reportorial distillations in our mainstream media, in which reality is jettisoned for unmitigated transcription of White House talking points, has not, as conventional wisdom keeps telling us, subsided much, if at all, since the earliest drumbeats to invade Iraq. (Ask yourself as well, for example, how a study released nearly six months ago that an estimated 1 million Iraqis have died as a result of the US invasion of Iraq received virtually no coverage; the Los Angeles Times was the only major US newspaper to report on it; US network news completely ignored the study.)

This particular Times article (which only gets worse) underscores the disingenuous depths to which our paper of record is willing to sink. President Bush vetoes a bill intended to stop the CIA from using torture techniques, including waterboarding - which dates back to the Spanish Inquisition, was a favorite practice of the Gestapo, and for which the US tried and hanged Japanese soldiers after WWII - and The Times boils down the entire veto to politics and a factually inaccurate, Bush-approved narrative of his legacy.

This is a disgraceful piece of reporting, as damaging, or more damaging because of The Times' stature and influence on the rest of the media, than any yellow journalism disseminated by Fox News and its minions. If The Times is portraying Bush's despotic desire to continue torturing as nothing more than an effort to retain "strong executive powers," then it sets the bar lower for not only the rest of the media but especially those outlets, like a Fox News, that portray the Bush administration and its actions in a positive light no matter what the situation.

The Times article, written by Steven Lee Myers, continues with a veritable lexicon of Bush-era, media-transcribed talking points, disingenuous frames and deficient-by-omission details:

Mr. Bush vetoed a bill that would have explicitly prohibited the agency from using interrogation methods like waterboarding, a technique in which restrained prisoners are threatened with drowning and that has been the subject of intense criticism at home and abroad. Many such techniques are prohibited by the military and law enforcement agencies.

First, waterboarding is not an interrogation technique but an historically known torture technique. Second, as Malcolm Nance, a former master instructor and chief of training at the U.S. Navy Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape School (SERE) who applied waterboarding to US soldiers to prepare them in the case of capture, has attested to time and again, an individual administered waterboarding is in the process of drowning. It is not "simulated drowning" as it has so often been described in the media. Nor are they being "threatened with drowning," as The Times misleadingly states here. To paraphrase Nance, one is either drowning or has drowned; there is no in between. During waterboarding, water fills your lungs and you can't breathe. You're drowning. Nothing is being simulated.

Moreover, techniques like waterboarding are not only prohibited by the military and law enforcement agencies but also by international law, as stated in the Geneva Conventions. Additionally, a US president's executive decision to carry out torture is also a breach of our Constitution, on which President Bush swore to uphold upon taking office. So how does The Times justify omitting that Bush's past torture, his veto to continue torturing and any future torture directed by him are all explicit acts in direct violation of these two guiding statutes of US domestic and international law? This isn't a question of point of view; it is a question of reporting the facts or omitting them, of giving the public sufficient substantive details to assess what's actually at issue or obfuscating them.

The veto deepens his battle with increasingly assertive Democrats in Congress over issues at the heart of his legacy. As his presidency winds down, he has made it clear he does not intend to bend in this or other confrontations on issues from the war in Iraq to contempt charges against his chief of staff, Joshua B. Bolten, and former counsel, Harriet E. Miers.

Mr. Bush announced the veto in the usual format of his weekly radio address, which is distributed to stations across the country each Saturday. He unflinchingly defended an interrogation program that has prompted critics to accuse him not only of authorizing torture previously but also of refusing to ban it in the future. "Because the danger remains, we need to ensure our intelligence officials have all the tools they need to stop the terrorists," he said.

Editor's Note: A Lengthier Than Expected Absence

Though I don't write here daily, I didn't intend to be away as long as I have. I've been working on an article that should be published later today or early next week in one of my favorite national news magazines. New pieces should be flowing here again soon (as early as tomorrow) and I'll certainly send an alert when that forthcoming article is published. Thanks for your patience.

In the meantime, Lee Stranahan hilariously answers Hillary's 3 a.m. ad: