Tannishblog

I keep thinking about this article: Why the American Press Remains Paralyzed at Axis of Logic. Particularly this passage:

The release of the “Downing Street Memos,” for many Americans, stood in sharp contrast to their memories of the religious fervor of the Bush administration in hyping the American people for a war against Saddam Hussein, his WMD and his al Qaida connections, a war that the Bush administration had already declared. The war against Iraq was immoral before the fact, and now everyone knows it was immoral after the fact. Cheney’s projected American self-concept as “Liberators” walking victoriously down the flower-petaled streets of Baghdad, is no longer an option.

Nothing like this has ever happened in America. Never before have the American people been told overt lies and led into unprovoked war against other people. That would be bad enough but then there is the aftermath of the Bush administration’s actions in Iraq, the massive human death toll, the massive social disruption and the massive cost of it all in creating a breeding ground for additional terrorism. There is the massive loss of respect for America in the eyes of the educated world and there is the fact that Osama bin Laden, the majority of 9/11 hijackers and the majority of Iraqi insurgents are home-grown in Saudi Arabia.

Despite efforts to make the Crime of the Century into a national issue deserving national action (manifest as calls for impeachment of the entire Bush administration), little of substance has and can be accomplished without the assistance of the American press.

The press properly serves as the people’s primary source of factual information relevant to comprehension and decision-making. This is not the kind of information that the American press has been providing the people. In the face of the “Crime of the Century,” the American press remains paralyzed from the neck up.

The question is this, “Why is the American press paralyzed?” The answer is this, “The press is confronted by the Crime of the Century.”

While much is said about this so-called crime, I think back to the first bubblings in the media about the possibility of fabricated truth and I recall that the Bush administration had ample warning from Clinton’s people about a the possibility of an imminent terrorist attack in the spring of 2001. At that time, BushCo just laughed it off. Now, in the lamplight of Downing Street, it seems to me that they might have been hoping for that to happen. After all, GWB had wanted to attack Iraq even before his presidency, as remarked by his biographer. What happier news could he have imagined? If, as I suspect, Bush failed to respond to intelligence from the Clinton-era CIA becuase he was hoping for justification for his deamed-of war, then that would be the true Crime of the Century; that GWB and cronies would let Americans die to help him create the war he always intended on waging.

Doesn’t that fit the emerging pathology of this administration? We already know they will stop at nothing to further their causes.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 28th, 2005 at 7:07 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.