There's the news and then there's the news and then there's damn lies!

posted by admin on Thursday May 29, @04:53PM

Am I angry or what?

By William Bowles

05/29/03: (Information Clearing House) The front pages of many of the newspapers in the UK today carried stories about Blair’s lies over the reasons for invading Iraq. The Independent carried the headline,

"The case for war is blown apart" (29/05/03)

Well good for them is all I can say but the reality is, as Blair and co scramble to cover their tracks over just one of the more obvious fabrications created to justify the (illegal) invasion, the real issues still seem to escape examination by the media even when it runs them over.

The BBC this morning, talking like it was walking on soft-boiled eggs, sought to deflect the issue by not exactly accusing the government of lying but on the other hand, implying that it was some kind of ‘blurring’ of the line between truth (whatever that is in media-speak) and ‘mis-interpretation’. The leaked memo which has exposed the government’s lies, supposedly from the intelligence agencies and which has caused all the fuss, centres around the infamous "45-minutes" that Saddam had to launch his WMDs, which according to the memo was from a "single source", whereas the intelligence agencies need at least two sources before they’ll consider the information reliable.

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The memo also referred to the fact that the draft document which was released last September with much fanfare was heavily amended in the week before its publication (to include Blair’s 45-minute scenario) because, we are told, "it wasn’t sexy enough". Not sexy enough? Not inflammatory enough would be closer to the truth, though of course, the craven BBC wouldn’t dream of accusing the government of actually lying to us in order to justify a war that it knew the vast majority of the public were opposed to. Instead, we’re left hanging in mid-air, with the ‘truth’ swinging in the breeze, neither one thing nor the other, until one supposes, like all the other questions the media refuses to ask let alone demand answers to, get blown away on the winds of time.

Of course the UK government has denied fabricating proof, using the ‘evidence’ given to it by the intelligence agencies as an out. And to add to their troubles, Rumsfeld’s statement that, "It is…possible that they [Iraq] decided that they would destroy them prior to a conflict and I don’t know the answer", has just added fuel to the flames.

But what is most infuriating about all the news coverage whether from a supposedly pro- or anti-war position, is that not a single news outlet will ask the question, why?

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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article3559.htm

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