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19/06/08 "Antiwar"
-- - Enough already with the encomiums to
Tim Russert, whose untimely death has sparked a
veritable chorus of eulogies depicting him as the epitome of
objectivity and the greatest of journalists. This is all coming,
quite naturally, from his fellow journalists and intellectual
gatekeepers, who share his prejudices, his politics, and – alas!
– his shortcomings. It's time for a little Russert revisionism.
As Bill Moyers pointed out in
Buying the War, his trenchant PBS documentary on how
the War Party
successfully
sold us on the invasion of Iraq, Russert's show was a
favored venue for the administration to publicize stories they
had planted in the media. Administration officials would get
booked on Meet the Press and point to their phony reports
as "proof" of Saddam's WMDs.
Remember back when Vice
President Dick Cheney was going around making speeches in which
he
asserted that "we now know that Saddam has resumed his
efforts to acquire nuclear weapons," that this was not in doubt,
and he knew it for a fact?
Few
were skeptical, and the New York Times came out with yet
another Judy Miller "scoop"
that seemed to confirm Cheney's claim.
Citing anonymous U.S. government
officials, the Times
averred that the Iraqis were engaged in a global effort to
gather the means to make nuclear weapons according to a design
that specifically included aluminum tubes. "And there," says
Moyers, "on Meet the Press that same morning was Vice
President Cheney"
citing Scooter Libby's
best buddy. Clearly trying to create the impression that
Saddam Hussein already had nuclear weapons, or that he was well
on his way to acquiring them, the vice president ticked off
three elements essential to the construction of a nuclear
device: technical expertise, a viable design, and fissile
material. According to Cheney, the Iraqis had all three – and
Russert just sat there, not challenging Cheney but actually
cueing him:
Cheney: "The third thing you
need is fissile material, weapons-grade material. Now, in the
case of a nuclear weapon, that means either plutonium or highly
enriched uranium. And what we've seen recently that has raised
our level of concern to the current state of unrest, if you
will, if I can put it in those terms, is that he now is trying,
through his illicit procurement network, to acquire the
equipment he needs to be able to enrich uranium to make the
bombs."
Russert: "Aluminum tubes."
Cheney: "Specifically
aluminum tubes. 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."
There were plenty of scientists
in our very own Department of Energy who were warning the
administration that this aluminum tube scenario was based on
highly dubious "evidence," but Russert, the alleged reporter,
was too
busy kissing Cheney's butt to go out and find them. There
were plenty of national security bureaucrats of
one sort or
another who strongly doubted the narrative Russert was
allowing Cheney to present, unchallenged, on the most-watched
political television show on the airwaves, but Russert didn't
know about them, and doubtless didn't want to know about
them at the time. In retrospect, however, Russert realized, at
least to some extent, how badly he'd been used::
Moyers: "Critics point to
September 8, 2002, and to your show in particular, as the
classic case of how the press and the government became
inseparable. Someone in the administration plants a dramatic
story in the New York Times. And then the vice president
comes on your show and points to the New York Times. It's
a circular, self-confirming leak."
Russert: "I don't know
how Judith Miller and Michael Gordon reported that story, who
their sources were. It was a front-page story of the New
York Times. When Secretary Rice and Vice President Cheney and
others came up that Sunday morning on all the Sunday shows, they
did exactly that. My concern was, is that there were concerns
expressed by other government officials. And to this day, I wish
my phone had rung, or I had access to them."
As Moyers pointed out in his
scathing documentary, some journalists – not a lot, but
a few of the really good ones – "didn't wait for the phone
to ring."
Russert wanted to
believe, as did the reporters and pundits who constitute the
"mainstream" media, not only because this was the bipartisan
consensus at the time, but also because of the
incestuous relationship that often exists between
journalists and the individuals whose doings they cover. The
former are dependent on the latter for their bread and butter:
if they don't toe the line and deliver the right cues at the
right moment, then they might not get that "scoop," and – worse
– they could soon find themselves frozen out of the information
pipeline that runs through Washington like an underground sewer.
Okay, so Russert was an
enabler of the neocons, who allowed his vastly influential
program to function as the War Party's sounding board, but then
again, so many were duped that it seems vindictive to emphasize
this point so soon after his tragic death. Right?
Wrong. It wasn't just his
sycophancy in the presence of power that motivates my little
exercise in Russert revisionism – it's what was clearly his
vehement hostility to anyone who challenged the status quo in
any way and sought to provide an antidote to the Dick Cheneys of
this world. Example number one: his
disgraceful
interview with GOP presidential candidate
Ron Paul, the Texas
congressman who made opposition to the war and our foreign
policy of "preemptive" imperialism the
linchpin of his remarkable campaign.
In what has got to be one of the
worst examples of high-handed hectoring and attempted
intellectual intimidation I've seen in my lifetime, Russert tore
into Paul the way he should have lit into Cheney, impugning his
integrity, spending half the interview on the arcane subject of
the Civil War – which Paul had never made a speech about,
and obviously wasn't even a minor issue in the campaign.
When Paul raised the issue of
U.S. intervention in the Middle East as fueling al-Qaeda's jihad
and support for bin Laden, Russert fell back on that old neocon
canard: "So you see a moral equivalency between the West and
Islamic fascism."
When Paul pointed out that Bush
was intent on invading Iraq just as soon as he got into office,
and his war moves had little to do with 9/11, Russert's response
was open hostility:
"You mentioned September
11th; a former aide of yours, Eric Dondero said this. 'When
September 11th happened, he just completely changed,' talking
about you. 'One of the first things he said was not how awful
the tragedy was, it was, "Now we're going to get big
government."' Was that your reaction?"
How pathetic: Russert couldn't
be bothered to get on the phone and talk to even one of many CIA
employees who were trying to counter the administration's line
of BS about Saddam's alleged WMD, but he went and dug up the
demented Dondero, a fool who has made a career out of
gunning for the Good Doctor ever since he was fired from Paul's
staff. Now that's American journalism at its best.
Oh yes, Russert did his
research, all right, but he only utilized it to the War Party's
advantage. He sucked up to power and was little more than a
stenographer for high government officials whose confidence he
coveted. He was, in short, a great journalist, at least by
today's standards, and that's why the media blowhards are
turning his death into a celebration of… themselves. Because
they're virtually all the same – shameless, sycophantic suck-ups
who will do anything to advance their careers and could care
less about where it takes the country.
The
sad state of American journalism is why Antiwar.com was
founded: it's why we continue to provide you with the real news
about vital issues of foreign policy, war and peace, and the
myriad deceptions of our rulers. The "mainstream," which is
defined by its subservience to the powers that be, has simply
abdicated its responsibilities, the execution of which are so
vital to a free society. Few journalists exemplified this
abdication more clearly and consistently than the late
ringmaster of Meet the Press.
Justin Raimondo is the
editorial director of Antiwar.com. He is the author of
An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard
(Prometheus Books, 2000). He is also the author of
Reclaiming
the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement
(with an Introduction by Patrick J. Buchanan), (Center for
Libertarian Studies, 1993), and Into the Bosnian Quagmire: The
Case Against U.S. Intervention in the Balkans (1996).
He is a contributing editor
for The American Conservative,
a Senior Fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute, and an Adjunct
Scholar with the Ludwig von
Mises Institute, and writes frequently for
Chronicles: A
Magazine of American Culture.
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