June 23, 2004

Ignoring Putin's revelation

At a press conference on Friday, Russian President Vladimir Putin delivered an extraordinary statement that might explain why President Bush felt such a great sense of urgency about driving Saddam Hussein from power. Mr. Putin said that Iraq was planning some kind of attack against the United States. Unfortunately, the same major media that have erroneously suggested that the September 11 commission's report debunks any linkage between al Qaeda and Iraq have shown little interest in Mr. Putin's revelation.
    
According to Mr. Putin, sometime between the September 11 attacks and the start of the Iraq war, Russia's intelligence service "received information that officials from Saddam's regime were preparing terrorist attacks in the United States and outside it against the U.S. military and other interests." The Russians passed this information on to the United States, and Mr. Bush personally thanked a Russian intelligence official for the information.

This story is a potential blockbuster for manifold reasons — not least of which is the fact that Moscow had long been one of Saddam's closest allies and Mr. Putin was staunchly opposed to the war. Given Saddam's history of supporting terrorism — and his attempt in 1993 to assassinate the first President Bush — one would think that the American media would take this story seriously, and be deluging American and Russian officials with questions about the specifics of the Iraqi plot.

  But the reaction has been subdued. While ABC's "World News Tonight" covered the story on Friday, other networks felt that they had more important things to talk about than a possible attack on America by Saddam . According to the Media Research Center, Friday's CBS "Evening News" didn't mention Mr. Putin's revelation, even though it spent more than two minutes on the debate over ties between Iraq and al Qaeda. (Dan Rather thought that a more important story was Bill Clinton's statement, in his new book, that he warned President-elect Bush about Osama bin Laden, but Mr. Bush didn't care.)
[Between "Sixty Minutes," Dan Rather and their movies like the slanderfest they almost inflicted on the American public "about" President Reagan, CBS has become the lead soldier in the War on Bush and the Truth!--Jen]

NBC "Nightly News" skipped the Putin story and focused on something else: a story undermining the Bush administration's contention that arch-terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi — given refuge by Saddam — is linked to al Qaeda. On "Today" the next morning, NBC buried the Putin story behind excerpts of Mr. Clinton reading a passage from his book about how Martin Luther King Jr. had inspired him. On Saturday, The Washington Post relegated the story to Page A11.
    
The public is poorly served by such coverage. The fact that the president of Russia effectively is taking Mr. Bush's side on the question of whether Saddam posed a threat to this country is a major news story and should be treated as such. That it is not getting this kind of coverage suggests that many journalists do not have their priorities straight.

I beg to differ--they do have their priorities straight, which is to bring back their Leftist, appeasenik pals like John Kerry into power so that they can live in their 9/10/01 utopian world of universal peace and love.
Whatever.
If you're reading this blog, then it's safe to assume that you've already given up on getting the real news from the mainstream and partisan media! Good for you.
I know I have.
For me, the watershed moment was the Election controversy in 2000, when it became so obvious that they were pulling for Gore and the Left (Dimocrats) and no longer reporting the "news."
I know we're tuning out and that their bias is blatant to all but the most brain dead Americans, but how long can they keep it up?
And how much more can they side, in effect, with the Enemy in this war before they're truly called on it?
Don't forget that they've hammered on President Bush for saying that Saddam was an "imminent threat" in his 2003 SOTU address ever since, even though he didn't say it and yet if he had, this intell of Putin's would have constituted sufficient cause for him to do so.