Trailers Were Reported Debunked By Early June, 2003

by tristero

There’s a lot of hoo-hah regarding the trailers found in northern Iraq and claimed as WMD labs by Bush during the spring of ’03. Josh Marshall thinks the trailer stuff wasn’t publicly debunked definitively until after July 17, 2003.** Not quite. True, “administration heavies” kept on lying, but serious doubts surfaced in the American press about a week after Bush’s lie, and the British press reported on a study a week after that. No reporters bothered to keep the story in the news or follow up with some hard questions. As you remember back then, only third-rate minds questioned the wisdom of the Iraq invasion or refused to trust what Bush and Blair told us. Here’s the chronology:

May 27, 2003: A secret Pentagon-sponsored study concluded the trailers weren’t evidence of WMD.

May 29,2003: Bush lied, oh excuse me… Bush, not informed abouty this study, said “We have found the weapons of mass destruction.”

Now, when did suspicions surface publicly that this was hogwash? Within days.

June 7, 2003: From the New York Times, in an article co-authored by Judith Miller no less, “American and British intelligence analysts with direct access to the evidence are disputing claims that the mysterious trailers found in Iraq were for making deadly germs.”

June 15, 2003: The Guardian reported that “An official British investigation into two trailers found in northern Iraq has concluded they are not mobile germ warfare labs, as was claimed by Tony Blair and President George Bush, but were for the production of hydrogen to fill artillery balloons, as the Iraqis have continued to insist.”

So, at least one month before the senate debate Josh refers to, both the British and American press had reported on grave misgivings and then followed up reporting on actual conclusions that the trailer wmd fable was hokum. But apparently, no one bothered, except for a few bloggers, to pick up and repeat the story.

And because no one – repeat, no one -in the press thought these reports were of any major importance to the unfolding story of Spring 2003 – a story of triumph over evil and the promise of freedom and democracy for Iraq – the administration felt no obligation to call any reporters’ attention to them. And that means that Tenet possibly wasn’t even asked any questions, let alone hard questions, during the 5 hours of closed testimony he gave on July 15, 2003 about those trailers. And that permitted Senators Durbin and McConnell later that day to mention the trailers as if they were real evidence of wmd and perpetuate the prevailing myth that substituted for the reality of Spring, ’03.

One simply couldn’t ask for a better example of the failure of the mainstream American press to focus on the important stories of their time. While Josh himself mentioned the Observer article it was within the context of a widening British scandal over no wmds. As for the June 7, 2003 Times article mentioning doubts about the trailers, Josh completely missed it, apparently. *

Now let me make this clear. This post really is not about Josh Marshall but about a criminally mendacious American president and the larger American press which failed, simply failed, to see what was in front its face until it was too late. Josh has done, is doing, will do great, great work – I could go on but everyone reading this already knows what I’d say about the importance both of TPM and TPM Cafe, not to mention Josh’s articles. They are all invaluable, even if we take issue with them strongly sometimes. This is about the wider failure of the press.

For the life of me, I failed to see then, and fail to see now, why the fact that Bush lied about the trailers wasn’t headline news in June, 2003. The country wasn’t ready for the truth? Of course it wasn’t, because the press had stopped doing its job in November, 2000, when the election was stolen. And that just walks the question back. Why wasn’t the country ready for the truth in November, 2000? Because the press covered the 2000 election campaign in an utterly incompetent fashion. And, herdlike, everyone in the press – Krugman the only serious exception – chose to ignore what was staring them in the face. It was too uncomfortable to believe that a major presidential candidate would blatantly lie about his economic program, or that that same candidate actually would steal an American election. It was too painful to imagine that as president, that same incompetent liar would neglect the most dangerous threats to America, an incompetence so spectacular that a bunch of ignorant fanatics could pull off a still unbelievably horrible series of terrorist attacks. It was simply beyond the pale to imagine that this same unspeakable bastard would then lie the United States into a bogus war, causing the deaths of thousands upon thousands of people, American and Iraqi alike, and mind-boggling anarchy.

In short, it doesn’t matter what the public is ready for, or what the press corps as a whole thinks is important to report. It’s what the real story is. Hersh understands this. Danner understands this. Fisk, too, and a few others. Unfortunately, aside from these few, and what appears to be somewhat more aggresive reporting, what happened with the trailer story is still happening. Even now, the American press as a whole simply is not reporting the real story of this administration when it’s still news.

And that brings me to my point from yesterday. Man, I hate to be a prick about this, but let’s get serious here. We are talking about the very real possibility of Bush launching a first-strike nuclear war. Dammit, we should be pricks about it. Okay, Josh hasn’t mentioned the tactical nukes yet in Hersh’s article – nor did he find time to read Hersh’s article right away. Big deal – it’s not his job and he’s chasing other stories in far more detail than I ever will. The problem is that the nuclear war plans angle has disappeared from the mainstream news. Just like the exposure of Bush’s lies about the trailers disappeared. The only thing bloggers can do to influence the discourse, and that only rarely, is to keep the salient parts of a story alive until the msm picks up on it.

The fact that Bush is seriously planning to start a nuclear war must not be permitted to drop out of sight. If it is ignored, chances are we will learn that the first 21st Century nuclear war – but not the last – will have started when we weren’t looking. Bush isn’t going to ask for authorization to use nuclear weapons. He isn’t even going to ask authorization to attack Iran. It is going to happen and if they are very nice, they’ll boast about it afterwards to the right reporters. The use of nukes will ooze out, contributing to the anomie and “whatever” attitude that Bush has cultivated towards news about his behavior.

Unless the press holds Bush’s feet to the fire and refuse to let this story suffer the same fate as the story about the trailers, we will slouch into Armageddon. It is sheer moral cowardice to ignore this, or minimize its importance. Hersh may be wrong – he’s been wrong before. But as far as I know, he’s never been wrong about the dangers of the Bush administration. The press must press the question: Does Bush plan to start a nuclear war?

*UPDATE: Thanks to DM and others, I realized I had made a careless mistake and misclicked 2002 instead of 2003 when researching the TPM archives. I deleted the erroneous sentence, which followed this one. Nevertheless, while Josh Marshall did address the issues of wmd lies in the summer of ’03- I never said he didn’t – he did apparently miss the Judith Miller co-authored Times article raising doubts about the trailer story. In any event, I apologize for the inadvertent error, and specifically to Josh.

**UPDATE: To make a subsidiary point clearer than it was in my post, I don’t think the question Josh posed in his original post is all that important. The administration is – that’s right, is – in no hurry to report its mistakes. In truth, no one should expect any administration to be that willing. Since the press in this country ignored the stories after one or two articles, the administration never bothered to make an issue out of it and it wasn’t a pressing matter for them to inform Congress. Perhaps a lawyer can tell me whether they were even obligated to inform Congress about this.

The real story here is not, per Josh, that Bush was dilatory. It’s that the US press was. And they are being so again regarding Bush’s desire to start a nuclear war.