The Propaganda of William Safire

[Moses]

William Safire, New York Times columnist, doesn't know what he's talking (or writing) about. Who says? The New York Times.

Underneath the headline, "Found: A Smoking Gun," Safire on February 11 wrote a column that maintained a "clear link" existed between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. A from-the-start supporter of the war in Iraq, Safire was declaring that one of Bush's main rationales for the invasion--a supposed operational relationship between Al Qaeda and Hussein's regime--was solid. In doing so, he was taking on all those who have challenged or questioned this Bush claim--a long list that even includes the Republican and Democratic leaders of the House intelligence committee who last September concluded that the prewar intelligence did not contain information to support the charge that Hussein had been in league with bin Laden.

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[Moses]

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William Safire, minister of disinformation

The New York Times runs corrections when reporters get a middle initial wrong. So why does its conservative columnist get away with glaring errors that shape world affairs?

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By Barry Lando

Feb. 21, 2004 |

With daily revelations of how the White House made use of faulty intelligence to bolster its political agenda, the media is also beginning to examine its own role in the affair. There's plenty to examine: take, for instance, William Safire and the New York Times, frequently cited as a conduit for official disinformation.

A recent example was his trumpeting of the sensational charges published last November in two articles in the conservative Weekly Standard. The articles proved, according to Safire, "that Saddam Hussein's spy agency and top al-Qaida operatives certainly were in frequent contact for a decade, and that there is renewed reason to suspect an Iraqi spymaster in Prague may have helped finance the 9/11 attacks." Those charges were based on the leak of a secret memorandum from Douglas Feith, a senior Pentagon official, to the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee.

Sounds pretty sensational indeed, except for the fact that the Pentagon immediately issued an unusual statement declaring that reports claiming that the new information proved there had been contacts between al-Qaida and Iraq "are inaccurate."

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