The Gray Lady and Officials Anonymous

[laststeamtrain]

Tuesday, May 11, 2010
The Gray Lady and Officials Anonymous

The New York Times, the “Gray Lady” that abetted the efforts of Dick Cheney andDonald Rumsfeld to dupe America into supporting the Iraq invasion, is still the willing echo chambermaid of the warmongery. The most egregious piece of covert propaganda the NYT ran during the run-up to Gulf War II was the Sept. 8, 2002, article by its access-poisoned reporters Michael R. Gordon and Judith Miller that heralded “HUSSEIN INTENSIFIES QUEST FOR A-BOMB PARTS.”

We now know that the article was part of the elaborate Nigergate hoax, and that Gordon and Miller were establishing a practice that would become the NYT’s standard disinformation tactic for years and perhaps decades to come. In presenting the case that Hussein was pursuing nuclear weapons capability from Niger, Gordon and Miller cited unnamed administration officials, American officials, senior officials, intelligence officials, government officials, United Nations officials and plain old generic “officials” a walloping 28 times.

In May 2004, the NYT’s editorial board gave a smirking apology that allowed as how it “found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been” in its pre-invasion reporting. Nonetheless, the editors maintained that in most cases “what we reported was an accurate reflection of the state of our knowledge at the time, much of it painstakingly extracted” from sources that were “themselves dependent on sketchy information.” And these sources passing along sketchy information were who? “Administration officials” who “now acknowledge that they sometimes fell for misinformation.” Poppycock. Those officials fell for the misinformation they wanted to hear, and they had no qualms about passing it along to the unsuspecting public.

If the NYT had been sincerely contrite about leading us down a primrose path to quagmire, it would have stopped allowing faceless officials to make baseless assertions about the threats posed by presumed “enemies.” NYT’s editors weren’t a smidgen rueful, or course, and only an industrial-strength case of Orwellian doublethink could have led them to believe their sources were unaware that the information they were passing along was as genuine as a round dollar bill.

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http://zenhuber.blogspot.com/

[Vinnie From Indy]

1. While this is not news to million sof Americans

it is always good to remind anyone that will listen what the NYT did in support of the giggling murderer GW Bush and his criminal regime.

The fact is that the NYT has a permanent stain on it's credibility.

Thanks for the reminder though! Cheers!
:)