Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [297]
19. Judith Miller, “Illicit Arms Kept Till Eve of War, An Iraqi Scientist Is Said to Assert,” New York Times, April 21, 2003.
20. See Bennett et al., When the Press Fails, pp. 18–19.
21. Howard Friel and Richard Falk, The Record of the Paper: How the New York Times Misreports U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Verso, 2004), pp. 104–106.
22. Of the same morning’s report about Iraq’s efforts to acquire aluminum tubes, Vice President Dick Cheney said: “There’s a story in the New York Times this morning—this is—I don’t—and I want to attribute The Times. I don’t want to talk about, obviously, specific intelligence sources, but it’s now public that, in fact, he has been seeking to acquire, and we have been able to intercept and prevent him from acquiring through this particular channel, the kinds of tubes that are necessary to build a centrifuge. And the centrifuge is required to take low-grade uranium and enhance it into highly enriched uranium, which is what you have to have in order to build a bomb. This is a technology [Saddam Hussein] was working on back, say, before the Gulf War. And one of the reasons it’s of concern, Tim, is, you know, we know about a particular shipment. We’ve intercepted that. We don’t know what else—what other avenues he may be taking out there, what he may have already acquired. We do know he’s had four years without any inspections at all in Iraq to develop that capability.” In Tim Russert, “Vice President Dick Cheney discusses 9/11 anniversary, Iraq, nation’s economy and politics 2002,” Meet The Press, NBC-TV, September 8, 2002.
23. Mark Crispin Miller, Cruel and Unusual (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004). In a section entitled “Shooting Down Scott Ritter,” Miller quotes several mainstream reporters using the word “treason” to characterize Ritter.
24. John Barry, “Exclusive: The Defector’s Secret,” Newsweek, March 3, 2003; and Colum Lynch, “Iraqi Defector Claimed Arms Were Destroyed by 1995,” Washington Post, March 1, 2003. (Newsweek’s publication date is always listed as seven days later than the actual date the magazine is released to the public.) The New York Times finally mentioned the Kamel revelations in a column by Nicholas D. Kristof in May that misstated the “secret”: according to Kristof, Iraq had “mostly given up its work on its weapons of mass destruction program.” “Missing In Action: Truth,” May 6, 2003.
25. Friel and Falk, The Record of the Paper, pp. 22–24.
26. Secretary Colin L. Powell, “Press Remarks with Foreign Minister of Egypt Amre Moussa,” U.S. Department of State, February 24, 2001.
27. John King, “Rice Discusses Role of U.S. Military Overseas,” Late Edition, CNN, July 29, 2001.
28. Condoleezza Rice, “Campaign 2000: Promoting the National Interest,” Foreign Affairs, January/February, 2000.
29. See George Bush’s remarks commemorating the 20th Anniversary of the Reagan White House’s founding of the National Endowment for Democracy, “President Discusses Freedom in Iraq and the Middle East,” White House Office of the Press Secretary, November 7, 2003. “We’ve reached another great turning point—and the resolve we show will shape the next stage of the world democratic movement,” Bush proclaimed. “In the words of a recent report by Arab scholars, the global wave of democracy has—and I quote—‘barely reached the Arab states’….The establishment of a free Iraq at the heart of the Middle East will be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution. Therefore, the United States has adopted a new policy, a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East. This strategy requires the same persistence and energy and idealism we have shown before. And it will yield the same results. As in Europe, as in Asia, as in every region of the world, the advance of freedom leads to peace. The advance of freedom is the calling of our time; it is the calling of our country.”
30. Michael Ignatieff, “Who Are Americans to Think That Freedom Is Theirs to Spread?” New York