Another damning admission from the New York Times: whitewashing Iraq war

With remarkable frequency, the public editor, Byron Calame, finds himself compelled to deal with mounting anger from the Times’ readership over the newspaper’s tailoring of its editorial decisions to meet the political needs of the Bush administration in general and its prosecution of the war in Iraq in particular.

Thus, in May of 2004, it fell to the public editor to issue the paper’s first mea culpa regarding the newspaper’s publishing of a long series of articles making “dire claims about Iraq” and weapons of mass destruction, most of them penned by the paper’s senior correspondent, Judith Miller, who, as the recent trial of Vice President Richard Cheney’s chief of staff I. Stewart Libby made clear, boasted of intimate connections with the administration, intelligence agencies and the right-wing Republican think tanks, whose views she shared.

Miller was employed as a conduit for unsubstantiated pro-war propaganda fed to her by Bush administration sources. Acting in concert, Miller, the Times editorial board and the paper’s foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman, whose nauseating bully-boy columns made the case for war, played a major role in conditioning public opinion to accept military aggression against Iraq as inevitable.

Because of its reputation as the “newspaper of record” (not to mention its perceived status as the voice of establishment liberalism) the lies published by the Times about the supposed threat posed to America by Iraqi weapons stockpiles and alliance with Al Qaeda (both nonexistent) played a significant role, being exploited by the administration and echoed by the mass media nationwide.

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http://wsws.org/articles/2007/mar2007/nyt-m19.shtml