One more lie: "liberal media'

Zero-tolerance on altering articles is a good policy; however, that just stopped me from taking the @ out of the author's email to reduce his spam, which i think i've done before; exception warranted?

U.S. intelligence learned in 1998 of a plot to attack the World Trade Center with hijacked airliners and in 1999 of a plot to attack the Pentagon in the same manner. On Aug. 6, five weeks before 9/11, Bush was warned of an imminent attack on the United States. But Bush didn’t bother to put the nation’s defenses on alert, not even when he was told an airliner had hit the World Trade Center.

Nor did he order national defense to action when he was told the nation was under attack. Instead, he lied that there had been no warning and no one imagined airliners being used as bombs, lies he repeated until 2004.

No reporter asked why the mightiest nation the world has known was unable to defend itself from 19 hijackers for an hour and a half.

Oh, the shades and degrees between the OCT and "inside job"

Is it futile to hope that someday we will have an independent media faithful to the truth rather than corporate interests and the party line?

It's called the blogosphere, dude; and the corporate MSM are all Baghdad Bob in the info wars. Send him some links to make him think.

http://www.wacotrib.com/opin/content/news/opinion/stories/2008/06/09/06092008wacflynn.html

Robert Flynn, guest column: One more lie: "liberal media'

Click-2-Listen
Monday, June 09, 2008

Perhaps seeing Bush’s incompetence and inability to act, the media did the right thing in trying to prop up the feckless administration. However, it had no excuse in excusing what happened before and after Katrina.

It was left up to former White House spokesman and Bush toady Scott McClellan to shatter the near-sacred Big Lie of a “liberal media.”

Instead, he revealed the conservative, even right-wing, unpatriotic, “deferential, complicit enablers” of George W. Bush.

If you’re complicit in a war that Pope John Paul II called immoral and “a crime against peace,” in letting slide the dereliction of duty surrounding Katrina, in ho-humming spying on U.S. citizens, torture and rendition, don’t dare call yourself a patriot. Certainly don’t call yourself “liberal.”

U.S. intelligence learned in 1998 of a plot to attack the World Trade Center with hijacked airliners and in 1999 of a plot to attack the Pentagon in the same manner. On Aug. 6, five weeks before 9/11, Bush was warned of an imminent attack on the United States. But Bush didn’t bother to put the nation’s defenses on alert, not even when he was told an airliner had hit the World Trade Center.

Nor did he order national defense to action when he was told the nation was under attack. Instead, he lied that there had been no warning and no one imagined airliners being used as bombs, lies he repeated until 2004.

No reporter asked why the mightiest nation the world has known was unable to defend itself from 19 hijackers for an hour and a half.

Perhaps seeing Bush’s incompetence and inability to act, the media did the right thing in trying to prop up the feckless administration. However, it had no excuse in excusing what happened before and after Katrina.

The government was aware of warnings that the levees could be breached. This was met by indifference by Bush, who then claimed that no one imagined such a thing. And that was just the start of a performance of breath-taking incompetence.

Relative to the claims that led us into Iraq, one news organization Knight-Ridder (later to become McClatchy) did what an independent press should. It checked Bush’s “evidence.” It found it lacking.

Nevertheless, when leaked British documents disclosed that Bush “fixed” the facts to support his claims, the news went unreported for a month by U.S. media, which then claimed it was old news.

A leaked British document revealed that in an emergency meeting two months before Bush’s war on Iraq, Bush and Tony Blair agreed that weapons of mass destruction would not be found. Bush said they needed another pretext because he was making war anyway.

Blair went along. That disclosure forced Blair out of office.

The administration and media pundits perpetuate the lie that “everyone” believed Iraq had WMD, when not even Bush and Blair believed it.

The “liberal” New York Times, which was used so egregiously by the administration to convince the nation about its WMD claims, was coopted as well on illegal spying.

The Times held that story more than a year in order not to negatively influence a presidential election. The Times reported it only because one of its own reporters, unable to report it in the newspaper for which he worked, had disclosed it in a book.

Is it futile to hope that someday we will have an independent media faithful to the truth rather than corporate interests and the party line?

Robert Flynn, a former Baylor University professor, is retired from Trinity University and resides in San Antonio. E-mail: rlflynn@earthlink.net.