Links to Feb 26 Scott Ritter Interview

[JohnyCanuck]

In the wide ranging and hard hitting press conference, Ritter described and denounced major media's role in deceiving the American people into war. Ahmed Chalabi concocted lies that US neoconservatives used to justify war, such as claims that Iraq was involved with 9/11. The New York Times and PBS's Frontline misinformed the American people. Ritter showed how neo-conservatives tried to use war to implement the pre-war Project for the New American Century. He describes in detail how The New York Times relied on Chalabi, ignored evidence to the contrary and failed its responsibility to corroborate Chalabi's claims. Now, even Chalabi admits he was lying in order to topple Iraqi regime. "The CIA's number one objective in Iraq was never disarmament, it was always the elimination of Saddam Hussein."

Ritter took questions from Andrew Stelzer of WNMF radio, Tampa, Florida; Cameron Cobane and Tom Skiba of MacDuffie School; and Noah Bein of Northampton High School; with beginning and closing questions from Sunny Miller, Executive Director of Traprock Peace Center, who moderated the live press conference with call-in participants. After the press conference, Jim Polito, WGGB/TV 40 (ABC) in Springfield, MA interviewed Ritter for the evening news. Photo © 2004 Charlie Jenks

Here's the link: www.traprockpeace.org/scott_ritter_25feb04.html

You can view a transcript (pdf file), or listen to the 50 minute interview (mp3 file or Real Player formats)


Miller: I want to ask a question and then turn it over to our many guests who also have questions. Is the misperception that Iraq was a threat concocted effectively with the complicity of the media, or do you suppose that the media really didn't have a chance to understand all that you understood? Was the media duped, or was the media complicit?

Ritter: Well, when you say the media, I mean that's a lot of people out there, a lot of organizations, so it's very difficult to lump them all together in this one overriding entity called the media. I'd say that the media is, in many cases, an extension of the American public. The media feeds off of the American public and then turns around and feeds the American public. You get a little circle. In the case of Iraq, it's a circle of ignorance. No one in the United States understands Iraq. Very few people do. I think the majority of Americans prior to March 2003 would have had a hard time pointing out Iraq on a map, couldn't have named the capital of Iraq, couldn't have named the five major cities of Iraq, would have a hard time talking about what the ethnic make-up of Iraq was, what the religious composition of Iraq was. You know, there is just a lot of ignorance out there about Iraq, what Iraq is, and from that ignorance comes fear, fear that was effectively exploited by the Bush administration after September 11 but fear that was exploited by all administrations prior to that. We were told that Saddam Hussein was the personification of evil, that he was the Middle East equivalent of Adolph Hitler. I think it's laughable today now that we realized that the Middle East equivalent of Adolph Hitler was pulled out of a spiderhole in a farm outside of Tekrit. Adolph Hitler went down swinging in his bunker, requiring a million and a half Russians to storm the city of Berlin to take him out. Saddam didn't go down quite that way. So I think that's proof positive that the comparison between Hitler and Saddam had been exaggerated in the extreme. Saddam was a brutal dictator, somebody who brutalized his own people, somebody who threatened his neighbors: Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and others. But he's not the Middle East equivalent of Adolph Hitler. But, because we're ignorant of Iraq, we're therefore fearful of that which we don't know, and this was exploited by the media because it's a good story. It's a great story. Fear sells. Terror sells. War sells. Evil sells. So they're selling us evil, and the media picks it up, so the media started feeding off of its own distortion of the truth.


URL for transcript: www.traprockpeace.org/ritter_26feb04.pdf Note that it is a PDF file, so you'll need the Adobe Acrobat reader to view it.

[dudeness]

1. thanks johny..

:)

[JohnyCanuck]

2. You're welcome dudeness

Please, don't mention it. :)