Glennzilla has a good run-down various media sources repeating the “Saddam can kill us all in 45 minutes” claim, which it turns out came from a cab driver. Usually, pundits repeat things that they hear directly from taxi drivers, so this adds another layer of transparency and accountability, I suppose.
Ryan Lizza was the most credulous:
Most remarkably, hours after Blair argued that Iraq could deploy chemical or biological weapons within 45 minutes of an order to use them, French President Jacques Chirac questioned whether Iraq had any proscribed weapons at all. . . . Even worse, unmovic is bound by two “memoranda of understanding” (MOU) negotiated between Baghdad and the U.N. that would serve Saddam well if inspectors return. . . . And it’s not just unmovic’s rules that worry some Bushies, especially the hawks. It’s Blix himself. “Blix is awful,” says a top State Department official.
As a result of reporting like this, Lizza was punished with one of the most coveted jobs in journalism: he now writes for The New Yorker.
cleek
ah, the good ol days. i remember coming here and arguing with the wingnuts about the fact that there was no evidence at all for the assertions of WMDs or AlQ connections, and being told i was an America-hating douche who would probably be gay for Saddam, given the chance.
Martin
Yes, Blix kept harshing on Cheney’s lie. I’ve always suspected that Harry Whittington must have looked a lot like Hans Blix.
Noonan
Lizza was just writing down what powerful people told him. It’s then the reader’s job to do independent research, verify the claims made by competing interests and distil everything into a cogent idea he can share with friends and family. Right?
El Cid
Also, Saddam threw thousands of helpless babies off of incubators. It’s true. Hill & Knowlton found a young nurse who said so.
ChrisS
Why you guys have to bring up old shit?
Grumpy Code Monkey
@ChrisS:
No statute of limitations on gross stupidity.
Svensker
Wonder if that cabdriver was the same guy who was giving The Mustache of Understanding all the scoop on reg’lar Murkans?
Who needs the CIA or research when you’ve got the greatest resource of all — the taxi driver?!
Notorious P.A.T.
Hot Naked Chicks and World Report:
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_MnYI3_FRbbQ/Sx_HdesQ5qI/AAAAAAAACQg/SmLoeT11RJs/s1600-h/thesun.png
beltane
Instead of blogging, we should all be working as taxi drivers in DC. That sounds like the quickest and easiest way to shape opinion.
ChrisS
@Grumpy Code Monkey:
The left, always fighting last decade’s wars. You guys can’t help yourselves when you want to attack someone for being interested in the well-being of this fine country. Sarah Palin, now there’s someone interested in taking on the establishment. See her thorough destruction of the great global warming hoax, it’s 4F in Denver today. How’s that warming? Besides, temperatures have been trending down since 1998. Sounds like it’s time for another global cooling scare. Ha!
/Bleech
How does Glenn Beck do that every day? I guess I could swallow my pride for $20 or $30 million a year, but Christ I feel awful right now.
Zifnab
Collin Powell gave a two hour lecture on roving chemical weapons labs, and that basically sold me. Wow have I ever learned my lesson. Crock of shit from stem to stern.
Jim
“Blix is awful,” says a top State Department official.
I’m not good at the DC guessing game of “who’s the anonymous quote”, but I’d like to point out that Liz Cheney was a “top State Department official”. Probably too good to be true. I think Armitage was State’s biggest hawk at the time.
Martin
@ChrisS:
That’s because you have a soul.
Martin
@Jim:
Yeah, that was a pretty target-rich environment, but I’d pin any leak on Liz if only because she knew her old man had her back, and because Dick could run the whole show. Occams razor and all that.
Punchy
Fixed for shock value. But accurate.
flukebucket
Well I do too but I ain’t usin’ it.
Comrade Puppet
John Bolton was the head of the State Dept.’s WMD non-proliferation arm at the time. So my money would be on the mustache.
You’ll note how awesomely successful he was over his tenure.
SteveinSC
See her thorough destruction of the great global warming hoax, it’s 4F in Denver today. How’s that warming?
Well its 70+F here in SC today and the banana trees have fruit. How’s that for proof global warming is a hoax? Right?
Ted the Slacker
The original 45 minute claim appeared here:
http://www.fco.gov.uk/resources/en/pdf/pdf3/fco_iraqdossier
Have somewhat mixed views about media shit-eating in this case, because Blair’s goons actually made something of an effort to back up the 45 minute claim.
Some media shit-eating, such as when fed by nameless officials manning the Cheney puke funnel, that’s gold standard starfucker stenography. The 45 minute thing was sensationalized in an entirely predictable manner, but there was something ostensibly authoritative on which it was based.
I do resent the whole media conduct around the Iraq WMD nonsense, but those ultimately responsible are Bush and Blair and this is an instance which highlights their crimes more than the media’s.
J.D. Rhoades
@ChrisS:
‘Cause some of the same people spouting the old shit are coming up with new shit.
dSquib
Just can’t imagine what anyone here had to go through all those years. Today seems like a cakewalk in comparison.
I fought my own small war back home in the UK with one or two friends who were all for the Iraq invasion, bringing up points like Hans Blix had not found any evidence of nuclear stockpiles, was quoted as saying he thought war was inevitable regardless of what he came back with. No sooner had the word “Blix” left my mouth than these otherwise reasonable people were just barking back the latest State Dept. and Bush admin talking points about Blix, how he can’t be trusted, is useless and so on. It was just maddening.
Demo Woman
@Punchy: Those were the good old days according to Brick Oven Bill. The Washington Post actually debunked a lot of Powells speech. Of course they did try to hide Walter Pincus’ articles on page 14 – 20.
Doug Cramer
De-lurking just to say that I unfortunately followed the same trajectory as our host, and was quite supportive of the Iraq campaign during the run-up. What folks often seem to forget is just how crucial to the overarching story the public heard the anthrax mailings were. The arguments “back in the day” all involved whether or not Saddam had a connection, and had pre-placed anthrax caches in the US that terrorist sleepers could put in to play. Sounds crazy now, but even Andy Sullivan was buying that line.
I think if we ever want to figure out the “true story” of the build up to the Iraq invasion we’ll have to better understand what really happened with those anthrax mailings. Still unsolved, all these years later.
Ash Can
@Zifnab:
Same here. At that time, Powell was one of the extremely few Republicans I honestly trusted. When he argued his case before the UN, I was still cringing about the prospect of sending troops to Iraq, but hearing him support it at least made me hope for the best.
And, like you, I learned my lesson, but good. I’ll never make the same mistake again, in regard to either Powell in particular or Republicans in general.
Liberty60
@Ash Can:
Likewise.
In 2002 I had long since left the GOP in disgust, but I remember thinking that however much I hated Bush, the prospect of Saddam with a nuke was intolerable. I supported the war full throttle at the time.
Which made the resulting sense of betrayal all the worse. I not only was hoodwinked, it was by people I should have never believed in the first place.
When Glenn says this was a crime, it is not hyperbole. It is in fact a war crime, in every sense of the word.
Lee
OT:
DougJ, I know you enjoy the journalist behaving badly story.
Here is a great one:
Washington Post Reporter getting pwned by the Drug Czar.
Martin
@Doug Cramer:
Ok, but honestly, let’s think this through.
If you were performing a serious anthrax attack against a nation and a Republican administration, would you blow everything on taking out a handful of Democrats and some ‘liberal’ reporters?
No effort to take out Republicans, no effort to take out anyone in the military, no effort to take out heads of industry. The only thing that going after Democrats and the media would really gain you is getting them on board whatever plan the majority was cooking up. That’s why the whole thing was so suspicious to the left. Then the revelation that the stuff came from one of our labs, it just stinks. No credible theory behind the anthrax attacks has ever been forwarded either by the military or the FBI.
Now, Powell’s speech, that was a different ball of wax because very few people could accept that he’d lie in front of the UN. But the UN inspectors themselves – the only people that would really know, were debunking the administration claims. At the very least, before we marched off to war, that discrepancy needed to be closed.
BC
The one thing I remember about Powell’s presentation was when he talked about the yellow cake from Niger and Blix told him that letter was a hoax, yet that fact did not faze Powell in the least. Then I knew that Powell was just showing what he wanted to show and was not making a good-faith presentation. And when he talked about those aluminum tubes from Iran (yeah, sure, the one country that actually had a war with Iraq is going to be helping the Iraqis get nuclear weapons) that were supposed to be put in centrifuges – but I had read a report on that more than 2 weeks prior that said these aluminum tubes COULD NOT used in centrifuges and were part of artillery. So I just assumed that Powell didn’t have any idea of what he was talking about and was just making a presentation. Still feel I was duped by him (but I can’t help still liking him, just diminished respect).
Mike G
I knew the claims of Iraq’s “nookular weapons” were utter crap. The US deployed tens of thousands of troops in concentrated formations in Kuwait for several months before the invasion. Wouldn’t a “madman who must be stopped now” with WMDs have bombed such massive, easy targets right on his doorstep poised to invade Iraq? Wouldn’t Saddam have long ago nuked Kuwait City out of revenge for his humiliation in Desert Storm? As far as threats to his neighbors, Saddam had been defanged since 1991.
Let’s not forget the State Department publication published in March 2001 that showed Iraq as one of the few countries in the Middle East with NO Al Qaeda operations. The propaganda used to try to tie them together stank to high heaven.
And Powell’s speech was a flimsy joke. If he had such solid evidence of WMDs, why wasn’t it passed to the UN inspectors and discovered? Instead we had vials of talcum powder that ‘looks just like anthrax would look’, fuzzy satellite photographs of warehouses and barrels that, you’ll have to take my word for it, contain awful stuff; and illustrations of what chem-war trucks would look like. Not one shred of solid, verifiable evidence. I never understood why Powell had such an image of integrity – he always struck me as a cautious political apparatchik, attentive to the whims of his bosses. Too many people go googly for military uniforms and a facade of ‘resolve’.
jackalope
All I can say is God Bless McClatchy. Seriously, those guys deserve medals.
I suggest all good liberals treat McClatchy reporters, as a class, as war heroes. If you meet somebody who wrote for McClatchy, buy him (or her) a beer. I don’t care if you find out this person was a copy editor in the sports section. McClatchy are ALL heroes. Sing their praises. Tell everyone within earshot that this reporter is awesome, and this nation and the forces of sanity within it owe all the McClatchyites a great debt. They are true first amendment patriots.
Seriously, without their reporting we’d all still be hearing how no one could possibly have known they were being boldfaced lied to. Even though it was obvious.
Uli Kunkel
@BC: I’d have “diminished respect” for Powell if he had resigned after learning just how much water he carried for Cheney; what is there to respect now?
Remember November
@Liberty60:
ah but we all must do the Noonan post lunch martini and Ativan cocktail Walk on By dance….
we have become Ostriches.
Acceptabilty, accountability and ethics are part of a dead language.
liberal
@Doug Cramer:
Atrios is one of the few who claims that the anthrax mailings were crucial.
OTOH, my recollection is that it seemed pretty likely to me at the time that the anthrax mailings were the work of an American, not Al Queda, Saddam, etc, just based on the publicly available info of how the notes were written, but maybe my memory fails.
liberal
@Ash Can:
Much easier for me—grew up with my dad saying “The only good Republican is a dead Republican.”
liberal
@Martin:
That’s not true of anyone who knew his role in Vietnam.
liberal
@Mike G:
Not to mention anyone with a casual knowledge of the Middle East would assume that AQ and Saddam would be mortal enemies.
liberal
@jackalope:
Actually, I’ve been thinking the obverse: people like Judy Miller ought to be considered war criminals.
Xanthippas
The thing that’s so irritating to me now, is to hear these guys in the media claim that they were misled into supporting the war by the Bush administration’s lies. As Greenwald points out, there were people documenting at the time the way these claims didn’t add up, and it’s beyond belief to me that someone in the media can’t imagine a government of whatever political stripe lying to start a war. The fact of the matter is these guys wanted the war for reasons that have more to do with their balls and their reptilian brain stems, and they bought the lines they were fed by the Bush administration because that’s what they wanted to hear. If they had any balls that’s what they’d say now. But we know damn well that they didn’t learn anything from it; it’s obvious they’d support the next made up “necessary” bombing of somebody or other over supposed WMDs (Iran anyone?) We all know it, every-damn-body can see it, but they want us to think they’re reformed, and careful and cautious. They haven’t learned a damn thing and worse yet, they got promotions! It’s no wonder so many people on our side of the aisle think this country is going down a toilet.