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Aug 06, 2008 09:54 PM by James Bowman
The sensational charge by Ron Suskind, an inveterate and (as I show in my new book, Media Madness) foolishly credulous critic of the Bush administration that the CIA was ordered by the White House to forge a letter from Saddam Hussein’s intelligence chief demonstrating the dictator’s complicity in the terror attacks of 9/11 seems to have left out a stage. This is the part where everyone slapped his forehead and said: "Look at this letter! Boy, were we ever suckers. There was a link between Saddam and the hijackers after all! President Bush obviously knew what he was doing when he went after Iraq in the aftermath of 9/11." It’s true that there were some lonely voices on the right saying things like this back in 2003, but they were largely unheard in the mainstream media. And you kind of need this earlier chapter in the media narrative if you are then going triumphantly to produce, like a rabbit out of a hat, the evidence that something nobody knew about in the first place was all a con. There might even be some among the Bush-haters who will resent the implication that, up until now, they’ve been more Bushite than the administration itself, which has always declined invitations to assert positively the link between Saddam and 9/11. They are likely to start scratching their heads and saying: "We never believed in this letter, even if we ever heard of it. So what’s the big news in claiming it’s a forgery?" And, from the administration’s point of view, I wonder what was the point of having taken the risk of commissioning such a forgery only to let the letter languish among the masses of similar documents which can hardly be supposed to prove anything? If you were going to forge something, wouldn’t you forge the unequivocal evidence of a smoking gun? Nobody that I know of thought there ever was any such evidence. You can hardly create a sensation by denying the existence of something no one believes in anyway. If he had any evidence that it was an administration-sponsored forgery, even if it wasn’t used, he might provide a matter of interest to the likes of Dennis Kucinich, which some of the press reports seem to suggest he was trying to do. "It pertains to the White House’s knowingly misusing an arm of government, the sort of thing generally taken up in impeachment proceedings," Mr Suskind was reported as saying. But, alas, his book seems sadly lacking the evidence necessary to back up such a serious charge. According to today’s Washington Post his only named sources are strenuously denying that there was ever any such forgery. It’s hard to see what is the use of such feeble journalistic sallies except to make yet another small contribution to a general media climate of hostility and hatred to President Bush and all his works. This may be pretty useless stuff, but nobody outside the right-wing media ghetto is likely to care if it is treated as just one more faggot on the presidential pyre. **** What do you think of when you read a headline like: "Fossils Add More Proof Of Global Climate Shift"? Global Warming, right? What else? Any "Global Climate Shift" that doesn’t involve prognostications about whatever disasters may or may not await "the planet" as a result of rising atmospheric and oceanic temperatures isn’t generally a matter of public controversy and therefore doesn’t require very much in the way of that journalistic fiction, "proof." But if you look at Henry Fountain’s "Observatory" column in Tuesday’s Science section of The New York Times, you will find that just that headline is used to refer to the discovery of fossils in Antarctica which suggest that sometime between 14.07 million and 13.85 million years ago, that continent underwent a 14 degree drop in temperature which essentially wiped out the life forms that have left their fossils there. Of course, nobody blames this Global Freezing on human activity, which didn’t exist then. Nor can it be connected to the Global Warming people are speculating about today, except insofar as it reminds us that climate change is a normal part of the earth’s history and always in the past has taken place without reference to us, one way or the other. But some sub-editor at the Times must have seen an opportunity further to confirm the prejudices of the believers in man-made global warming — at least the ones who only skim the Science section — by providing such a misleading headline.
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