03.20.13

Fraud anniversary

Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, War On Terror at 4:04 pm by George Smith

I don’t have much to say for the anniversary week of the Iraq War. For 99 percent of America it’s been all downhill ever since, including me.
The GWB administration and the mainstream media broke everything.

No news agency ever really recovered from the role played in supporting the frauds of the American government. They’re worse now in that they’ve almost entirely given up on doing any critical reporting on national security issues.

As I’ve written recently, almost all the people I knew who actually did opposition work either quit or blew away in the intervening period. Being on the outside got old, people got old. I got old.

Today Ezra Klein does an “I’m sorry” piece at Bloomberg that isn’t much of one.

Klein admits he was a flack for the war as a college student and believed the say-so of a man almost no Americans can remember, Ken Pollack, a “liberal hawk” who had written a book that became a bestseller for the cause of war.

Pollack’s Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq sells sells for a penny a copy, used. The third party sellers make their small profit on charging you a bit extra for mailing.

Because he’s aggrieved Klein spends an overlong column digging up Pollack for an interview. The only good part, one Klein doesn’t mention, is that Pollack and his colleague, Michael O’Hanlon, another now infamous think-tank “expert” ubiquitous in the news before the tanks rolled, did suffer as a result of the Iraq debacle.

While they remained in the “community” of national security experts, they were thoroughly discredited. The only other person this happened to was Judy Miller of the New York Times who was run out of the profession for the frauds on Saddam’s alleged WMDs published in that newspaper.

Klein wants to know what Pollack thinks now. It’s another exercise in excuse making.

Ezra Klein is a product of our culture of lickspittle. He has a reputation because he’s young, published everywhere that’s liberal and is on MSNBC. He does a mea culpa so he has a clear conscience going forward.

When it was obvious war in Iraq was coming I was writing for the Village Voice where I developed the Weapon of the Week series.

Don’t give the Voice too much credit.

The week US armor seized Baghdad and broke the back of Iraqi conventional resistance, the publisher canceled the column. They were buffaloed along with almost everyone else.

War over! Everyone was cheering. George and Dick were right. WMDs were going to be found any day. Old Don Rumsfeld was complaining the news outlets were showing the same videotapes of Iraqis stealing everything not nailed down over and over.

Yay. Don’t you feel things have become so much better?!

In 2004 I was the first person in this country to find that Colin Powell’s Security Council assertion that Hussein’s Iraq had been connected to a ricin plot in London was a fraud. At GlobalSecurity.Org we tried to take it to US newspapers and none would have it. They had simply quit doing their job.

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The Wit and Wisdom of Ken Pollack — from the archives. All the way back when I still had a beard because it hadn’t turned half white.

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