Our Captive Media

Bill Moyers indicts media reporting in the run-up to war

By Justin Raimondo

"I have to say that watching Bill Moyers’ "Buying the War" was quite an experience for me: a kind of vindication, yes, but also, ultimately, quite a depressing experience.

As the editorial director of Antiwar.com, my job is to make sure that we cut through the government propaganda and get at the truth about what is really going on in the world, and during the run-up to the Iraq war we had quite a time of it. The lies were coming so thick, and so fast, that it was all we at Antiwar.com could do to continually refute them, and yet that is precisely what we did. Moyers takes us through the lies, and shows how the "mainstream" media failed to make any critical analysis of the administration’s allegations. That job, sadly, was left to us.

Saddam’s mythical nuclear program was really the linchpin of the case for war, and we debunked it as early as February, 2001 (also here), and kept doing so throughout the years. The fake "centrifuges," the tall tales of Iraqi "defectors" (in reality, phonies primed by the Iraqi National Congress), and the really quite comical claim by the President that Iraq was going to bomb the U.S. using unmanned aerial vehicles – all of this was derided in this space, and in the editorial columns of Antiwar.com, years before the rest of the media woke up to the fact that they’d been fooled.

Iraq’s alleged "links" to al Qaeda – the "cakewalk" fantasy – the Niger uranium mythos – the lies of Ahmed Chalabi – the announced goal of building "democracy" in Iraq: we debunked all this, and more, every day before war finally broke out (having predicted its outbreak as early as 1999).

So, if we – at the time, practically a singlejack operation with even less funding than we have now – could get this right, how come the major media organizations, with all kinds of bureaus, analysts, and whatnot, got the story so wrong? The answer doesn’t really come through in the Moyers documentary......."