Cockburn: This year's worst failure [great article]

[grytpype]

http://www.aspendailynews.com/article_17492

This year's worst failure

Alexander Cockburn - columnist

Fri 12/29/2006 10:00PM MST

No task is more important for any newspaper than to impart the news convincingly to the people and their government that a war is wrong, futile or, ultimately, lost. The United States has been militarily defeated in Iraq. It has no sane options left. All talk of troop “surges,” of the need for a “continuing presence,” of the feasibility of training an Iraqi army, of any constructive capacities for the central Iraqi “government” is as hollow as kindred talk in Vietnam in the early 1970s. There is no light, of any sort, at the end of the tunnel.

The failure of the major newspapers in 2005 and 2006 to disclose the United States’s defeat in Iraq has been as disastrous as the earlier failure to challenge the claims of the Bush administration on Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction.

Because of Judy Miller’s high profile in the WMD fabrications, other Times reporters like Michael Gordon have garnered little of the criticism they richly deserve. Gordon has played a particularly pernicious role. Having co-written with Miller the infamous aluminum tube story of Sept. 8, 2002, that mightily assisted the administration in its push to war, Gordon has consistently misreported what is actually been happening militarily in Iraq. In the latter part of 2006, he became the prime journalistic agitator for a “surge” in troop strength.

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(Cockburn goes on to show how this Michael Gordon wrote article after article in the NYT pushing for a surge and pissing on the ISG report. Must read.)