Money quotes, from the transcript:
BILL MOYERS: It didn't make sense to Simon that the dictator would trust islamic terrorists.
BOB SIMON: Saddam as most tyrants, was a total control freak. He wanted total control of his regime. Total control of the country. And to introduce a wild card like Al Qaeda in any sense was just something he would not do. So I just didn't believe it for an instant.
JAMES BAMFORD: From the very beginning Chalabi was paid a lot of money from the US taxpayers. The CIA paid him originally about 350,000 dollars a month, to Chalabi and his organization. The CIA finally caught on in the mid-90s that-- Chalabi was a conman basically. And, they dropped him.
BILL MOYERS: Chalabi's handlers in Washington were not deterred by that stain on his credibility. He charmed Congress out of millions more dollars for his cause, and had the press eating out of his hand.
BILL MOYERS: Leslie Stahl and CBS Retracted their story a year after the invasion when nearly all the evidence presented by defectors proved to be false.
VANITY FAIR's Rose later said high government officials had confirmed his stories. But these were the very officials who had bet on Chalabi as their favorite man o'war. To the Knight Ridder team it all smelled of a con game.
JOHN WALCOTT: What he did was reasonably clever but fairly obvious, which is he gave the same stuff to some reporters that, for one reason or another, he felt would simply report it. And then he gave the same stuff to people in the Vice President's office and in the Secretary of Defense's office. And so, if the reporter called the Department of Defense or the Vice President's office to check, they would've said, "Oh, I think that's-- you can go with that. We have that, too." So, you create the appearance, or Chalabi created the appearance, that there were two sources, and that the information had been independently confirmed, when, in fact, there was only one source. And it hadn't been confirmed by anybody.
PRESIDENT BUSH: The regime has long standing and continuing ties to terrorist organizations.
BOB SIMON: Just repeat it and repeat it and repeat it. Repeat Al Qaeda, Iraq. Al Qaeda, Iraq. Al Qaeda, Iraq. Just keep it going. Keep that drum beat going.
And it was effective because long after it was well established that there was no link between Al Qaeda and the government of Iraq and the Saddam regime, the polls showed that an overwhelming majority of Americans believed that Al Qaeda-- that Iraq was responsible for September 11th.
This illustrates a pet peeve of mine. It was called to the attention of the Administration that the majority of the American people had this misperception. A responsible leader would have gone on the air and corrected this misperception, told the people that they were mistaken. But there were no responsible leaders to be found.
BILL MOYERS: Critics point to September eight, 2002 and to your show in particular, as the classic case of how the press and the government became inseparable.
Someone in the administration plants a dramatic story in the NEW YORK TIMES And then the Vice President comes on your show and points to the NEW YORK TIMES. It's a circular, self-confirming leak.
TIM RUSSERT: I don't know how Judith Miller and Michael Gordon reported that story, who their sources were. It was a front-page story of the NEW YORK TIMES. When Secretary Rice and Vice President Cheney and others came up that Sunday morning on all the Sunday shows, they did exactly that.
There is more, much more. They went on the count the stories about Iraq, leading up to the war, and found that almost all of them could be traced to sources within the White House, and nobody bothered to check the facts. OK, just one more quote:
WALTER ISAACSON: One of the great pressures we're facing in journalism now is it's a lot cheaper to hire thumb suckers and pundits and have talk shows on the air than actually have bureaus and reporters. And in the age of the internet when everybody's a pundit, we're still gonna need somebody there to go talk to the colonels, to be on the ground in Baghdad and stuff and that's very expensive.
DAN RATHER: Reporting is hard. The substitute for reporting far too often has become let's just ring up an expert. Let's see. These are experts on-- international armaments. And I'll just go down the list here and check Richard Perle.
Why am I so bothered by propaganda. I mean, aside from the fact that it is all lies? What bothers me is that the pros use psychology. Psychology, developed by scientists who intend for their work to be used for good, is instead put to evil uses. People who do that betray the lineage of teachers who developed the knowledge, and bestowed that knowledge to their students. That really bugs me.
Comments
This is going to get more and more sickening. Dick Cheney will probably move to Dubai to a penthouse in Halliburton headquarters.
Posted by: Greg P | April 26, 2007 9:52 AM
It's good to be bothered by propaganda, and partly for the reasons stated. But it's useless. The psychological techniques developed by pros are just tools, only good or bad insofar as their user is good or bad. There's nothing to be done. Until the US is balkanized as a threat to world peace (an idea proposed by a famous Hoosier, Kurt Vonnegut Jr.), we just have to live with the fact that we are a terrible force for evil in the world. If anybody has any bright ideas for changing that reality, I'd like to hear them.
Posted by: stumpy | April 26, 2007 1:14 PM
We could start by listening to those who are our allies instead of just doing whatever we want.
As unlikeable as the French can be, they warned us that Iraq would erupt in chaos if we went in there, and it looks like they called it right.
Posted by: Greg P | April 26, 2007 10:02 PM
France does a lot of things right, in my opinion. Universal healthcare, for example. I lived in France for a while, and it was really nice. Less stressful than life here. Not as many worries, and more relaxed. Lots of people rode bikes. Pretty, too. The only problem was all the Gitanes everywhere. Everybody smoked, incessantly. But, there were a lot of good chess players. Americans could do worse than to stop bashing the French and start emulating them instead. Go away with your Freedom Fries, Mr. Republican. And your SUV's and your strip malls. And your tax breaks for the rich, and your corporate welfare and your crony state and your daddy state and your chicken hawks and your Iraq war. Americans are a fat, lazy and ignorant lot, and we've got some growing up to do. Vive la France! A bas le McDonald's! -- Good night, and Good luck.
Posted by: stumpy | April 26, 2007 10:39 PM
We need to focus on nuclear de-escalation, and restore the balance of power in government. In order to change government, there will have to be structural changes to ensure that no one party gets a dominant position. That would include things such as instant-runoff voting, voter-verified paper records of votes, and campaign finance reform. All campaign contributions should go into a common pool, and each candidate can take out a proportionate amount. If there are 100 candidates, each gets 1% of the money.
Posted by: Joseph j7uy5 | April 27, 2007 11:46 AM
After reading that post and comments, I'm going to go outside tonight and look at the sky.
There has got to be a full moon !
Posted by: John J. Coupal | April 27, 2007 4:40 PM