They most certainly failed in their duty as journalists. They failed America and the American people. Now, Bush and Cheney DUPED America and the American people, and are much more at fault. But it was damn easy with the Washington press corps eating out of their hands, except for Barbara Thomas.
Well…he wasn’t complying was he? We didn’t know what he might have been hiding.
As for asking the tough question … where do the elected Dems fit into that puzzle? There lack of doing so may have influenced all of those darn reporters.
We know what he was hiding. He was hiding the fact that he didn’t have anything to hide.
The elected Dems were excoriated for their cowardice and complicity at the time by opponents of the Iraq invasion on this board.
He gave the inspectors free reign in 2003. Once it started becoming clear he didn’t have shit, Bush yanked the inspectors out before his whole casus belli could become unravelled.
Yeah, we were both pretty pissed about it.
There were indeed some Democrats with the backbone to stand up to Bush, like Feingold, Graham, and Levin. Unfortunately, there just weren’t enough.
So, Russert stated things that were untrue and he knew them to be untrue at the time? Wow. Of course, you have some proof for him knowing The Truth and lying to us.
I’ll wait.
Quick, somebody go get a Ouija board…
Did you read the link? Sam Husseini pointed out his mistatements when Gore was on the show, and then he repeated them a month later when Albright was on the show. Plenty of time to set the record straight, which he did not do.
I know. And I couldn’t have less interest in re-fighting this whole deal. But as a part of that broader argument, “Saddam kicked the inspectors out” is faulty.
Depends on what “we” means. If “we” means you, I guess not. If “we” includes me, it’s a different story. It also depends on what “complying” means. If you mean following the rules to the letter, I doubt he was complying. On the other hand, if you mean that he was providing enough information that a reasonable person would have concluded nothing was being hidden, again, we might have to agree to disagree.
Great Dave, we don’t know if Russert ever heard what Husseini was saying, so the argument that he lied on purpose is a nonstarter. Husseini says he left a message on Russert’s voicemail, but we don’t know if he actually had Russert’s voicemail, for example.
I posted this to see if there was anything to it, not be because I’m taking Schwarz and Husseini’s position as my own. It does seem a little bit of a stretch to say that Russert was helping to spread the lies with this as your only example. I thought maybe the SDMB could find something better, or refute Schwarz convincingly.
Well, look at the responses you have gotten. There is so much political spin and rhetoric tied up in the question that it’s going to depend on one’s perspective. To me it’s a stretch to say that Russert’s statement had a huge influence on the lead up to the war. Hell, I think it’s a nitpick to call it wrong as it depends on what exact time frame he meant and one’s definition of ‘kicked out’. Even if the statement was ‘faulty’, it wasn’t a huge mischaracterization as the situation was complex and the events confused and confusing, leading to such mis-statements.
Why didn’t he retract what he said, or clarify it? Maybe he didn’t think the distinction was all that important exept to nitpickers who are trying to parse what happened with a scalpel for political spin?
-XT
If this was such a big deal, and if Russert was wrong, why didn’t Gore or Albright just correct him? I read the transcript from the Albright interview, and she didn’t do so. If even they didint care to correct this “lie”, then I think it’s fair to assume it wasn’t a lie in the first place.
Yes, I did. Did you read Mace’s long post providing the timeline. You’re grasping at straws and clinging onto a meaningless technicality.
Next.
Well, the reason that Saddam gave for not complying with the inspectors at the time was that they were being by the Americans to spy on Iraq. This may have been widely viewed as a pretext at the time until it later came to light that, in fact, this was true. Since I don’t believe that the UN inspectors were supposed to be spying on what were presumably some high-value military sites for foreign governments, I would say there was more than one party not in compliance.
(By the way, one thing that Hans Blix says is that in the 2003 inspections, he was determined to keep the inspections professional and not allow it to degenerate into a spying operation as it had before.)
The fact that this history was kept from us by the Administration, and then by the media in 2002/2003 (even some of the same media outlets that had originally broken the story of the spying) was an important piece of the propaganda war, as it strengthened the claim that Saddam must have been hiding something from the inspectors if he stopped cooperating with them when in fact there was a more charitable explanation, supported by actual facts, for why he stopped cooperating with them.
As others have noted, it is unfair to lay this all at Russert’s feet as almost the entire U.S. media can be blamed.
Just so. Trouble is, they are not in the business of reporting news, but selling news. How long would Tim have lasted he started to appear “unpatriotic”?
Did you read the cite?
No one shut down those newspapers for being “unpatriotic”.
Maybe Bush just didn’t want to get Clinton in trouble for screwing up the inspections.
Seriously, though, it is S.O.P for any administration to deny or have “no comment” about allegations of spying.
I don’t see any implication by elucidator that they were shut down…just that they want to sell newspapers and thus did not want to start raising controversial issues regarding the march to war.
And, yes, at one point the media did actually do their job. But, when the chips were on the line, they ignored their previous reporting in order not to go against the drumbeat of war.
Probably so…At any rate, I wouldn’t expect the Bush Administration to reveal any information that undermined their propaganda efforts. In fact, Bush even tried to rewrite history after we had gone to war by at some point claiming that Saddam didn’t let the inspectors in before we went to war! (Even the U.S. media, thankfully, by that time wouldn’t let that whopper go unchallenged.)
However, I would expect the media to do a better job.
They were afraid to refrence their own articles? Something anyone could look up in an archive on the internet? Sounds very dubious to me.
I dunno. That link looked more like a complaint that the newspapers weren’t reporting things the way that organization wanted them to. Hey, I wish the newspapers would report things exactly the way I want, too! I don’t buy into the idea that just because a paper reported a story a certain way 3 years ago, they are obligated to reference that report every time new developments occur.