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Post by Moses on Jul 2, 2005 4:55:34 GMT -5
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Post by Moses on Jul 2, 2005 18:48:56 GMT -5
Arthur Sulzberger, the Publisher of the New York Times, has taken to playing the role of the martyr -- ever ready to risk his media empire so that future generations of journalists can protect confidential sources. Sulzberger has always cut a pathetic figure as the owner of the “paper of record.” Even so, he should not be so casually dismissed. As a designated power player with substantial political clout, he spared no effort to sell the nation on the need to invade Iraq. The journalist he is defending -- Judith Miller -- is also a political animal and a bona fide member of the War Party. It would be a monumental mistake to treat her as just another working journalist out to protect her sources. Judith Miller is the author of Germ -- a book that gave wide credence to the canard that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons. Never shy of media attention and self-promotion, she even claimed that she was herself a recipient of an envelope that might have contained anthrax spores. [And probably is involved, w/ Wolf Blitzer & others, with those who sent Anthrax through the mail.] She is no stranger to the Washington power game and her connections to the neo-cons are well established. In fact, she is one of their poster girls. Miller’s war resume is impressive. She played a major role in marketing the tall tales of Ahmed Chalabi and other suspect Iraqi exiles. Her paws are all over the campaign to sell the war to a very vulnerable American public -- still shaken by the assaults of 9/11. She was constantly leaking suspect intelligence cooked up by the Office of Special Plans, the rogue Pentagon intelligence outfit that manufactured one hoax after another to make the case for war. Like her fellow travelers at the American Enterprise Institute, Miller shared the philosophy that “you go to war with the intelligence you fix -- not the intelligence you have.” There was no intelligence failure. Rather, there was a government campaign to unleash weapons of mass deception on the American people. And the New York Times signed up as a willing, able and ready partner in a propaganda campaign to mobilize public opinion for the invasion of Iraq. Even after the war, Miller went to Iraq as an imbedded journalist with the American inspection team. Apparently, she was unimpressed with their work and at one site reportedly challenged the officers on the team and threatened to report them to Rumsfeld. As the New York Times expert on WMDs, she felt she had enough rank to bring down heat on American officers in the field. For nearly two years, Sulzberger and Judith Miller have tied down the Plame case in court. The “war president” has also consistently displayed a suspicious lack of interest in the investigation. After John Ashcroft recused himself from the case, Patrick Fitzgerald was appointed to pursue the investigation. And we haven’t heard much about it since then. It isn’t that Fitzgerald wasn’t trying. But Sulzberger -- who went so far as to take the case to the Supreme Court -- derailed his efforts. His paper has painted Miller as a patriot willing to go to jail to protect the integrity of the fourth estate. According to Sulzberger, The New York Times is doing Americans a huge public service by protecting our rights of free speech against a judicial system that would cripple the efforts of journalists to expose government wrong doing. This is utter nonsense. Judith Miller is no martyr and Sulzberger is no saint. The leakers who leaked on Miller had a political ax to grind. They wanted to punish a government servant, Ambassador Wilson, for doing his job. And they satisfied their vindictiveness by exposing the identity of his wife -- a vulnerable covert CIA agent. Wilson was tasked by Colin Powell to investigate a hoax that was used to defraud the people of the United States with the objective of coercing them to send young American soldiers half way around the world to kill and die for a suspect neo-con agenda. No one can fault the Ambassador’s job performance. As a result of his commendable work, we got an early glimpse of the mechanics of a premeditated intelligence “fix”. Yet, someone high up in the Bush administration set out to destroy his wife’s career in retaliation for the integrity of Wilson’s work. The Iraq war is Miller’s war. And it is very much Sulzberger’s war. His media empire -- a bastion of neo-con ideology -- was actively engaged in promoting the invasion and in disseminating misinformation about Iraqi WMDs. Miller wasn’t just a reporter -- she was an insider who shared a political agenda with the leakers. The unidentified sources she is protecting were not on a mission to reveal government wrongdoing – they were doing wrong by the government and by the people of the United States. The leakers were not out to expose some government conspiracy -- they were themselves conspirators who used their high security government jobs to expose and endanger Valerie Plame -- a public servant working covertly to safeguard the nation from the adverse effects of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. After Sulzberger takes off his clown suit and ends his First Amendment circus crusade -- maybe he can start covering this story instead of covering up for his in-house neo-con cabal. He has already had to apologize once for Miller’s atrocious journalism. The real heroes of this drama are Ambassador Wilson and Patrick Fitzgerald who both seem unfazed by the political clout of the neo-cons and the New York Times. The essence of this political drama has been obscured long enough. The New York Times is using the First Amendment to deprive the public of their right to know the identity of a felon who committed a national security crime. Sulzberger’s antics are an obscene distraction to cover up Judith Miller’s political motives in actively participating in the production and delivery of weapons of mass deception. If we can only shove Sulzberger and Miller out of the way, we might actually get a chance to move on and get some genuine insight and some important news about who the men in the shadows are and why they took us to war.
www.dissidentvoice.org/July05/Amr0702.htm |
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