It's a Sad Day When You Can't Decide If The MSM Is Lying or Just Incompetent

| March 14, 2008 | 7 Replies

I have long said that the MSM has a serious problem with telling the truth about Iraq. Namely, they won’t. They haven’t ever and they’re not about to start now. The latest exhibit comes courtesy ABC News.

ABC News has requested and obtained a copy of the Pentagon study which shows Saddam Hussein had no links to Al Qaeda.

It’s government report the White House didn’t want you to read: yesterday the Pentagon canceled plans to send out a press release announcing the report’s availability and didn’t make the report available via email or online.

Based on the analysis of some 600,000 official Iraqi documents seized by US forces after the invasion and thousands of hours of interrogations of former officials in Saddam’s government now in US custody, the government report is the first official acknowledgment from the US military that there is no evidence Saddam had ties to al Qaeda.

I’d say that the government doesn’t have a huge problem with you reading the report; it’s the MSM they’re more concerned with. Apparently, ABC didn’t bother to read its own report. If it had, it would ahve found that there were lots and lots and lots and lots of links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda as well as groups tied very closely to al-Qaeda.

What ABC reported yesterday is pure, unadulterated bullshit. It shows that they either didn’t bother to red even the summary of the report or that they did and didn’t give a rat’s patoot about telling you the truth because that would destroy the careful narrative of “BUSHLIED!!!!” they and their cohorts have been shoving down our throats for five years. Stephen Hayes says that “the confusion is not entirely the fault of the news organizations” because the executive summary did not demonstrate a “smoking gun (direct connection)” between Hussein and al-Qaeda. He’s being entirely too generous, because that’s not that ABC reportes. Their report said, very plainly, that there were “no links” and “no evidence” that there were “ties” between the two. As he proved, that’s laughable. But it’s what they said and he’s letting them off the hoow way too easily. They had the same abstract he did. They could have told us the same thing.

Either ABC News didn’t bother to do five minutes worth of reading or it’s lying. Either way, their report is irresponsible and unacceptable and I’m sick and tired of hearing this same misinformation being peddled as absolute fact. A few years ago, I would have chalked a report like that up to simple incompetence. Now, I’m not so generous with my benefit of the doubt. When I see exactly the same reporting from the usual anti-Bush suspects, I’m led to conclude that there’s more than a touch of malice and dishonesty going on. I find it impossible to believe that any professional journalist would be so incredibly derelict as to write a story on a report without even browsing the abstract or the summary.

Thank goodness for folks like Eli Lake, who actually did something resembling journalism and got it right.

Category: Featured, Fighting the Islamists, Oh, THAT liberal media., President George Bush

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