No More Questions For You

by digby

Those who have been reading this blog from the beginning will remember that I once had a bit of an obsession with a particular member of the Bush administration’s inner circle by the name of Jim Wilkinson. He was one of the guys who put out the propaganda report “Iraq: Decade of Defiance and Deception,” without irony then served on the White House Iraq Group and later appeared unnamed in an infamous Michael Wolfe article in New York Magazine as this person:

The next person to buttonhole me was the Centcom uber-civilian, a thirty-ish Republican operative. He was more full-metal-jacket in his approach (although he was a civilian he was, inexplicably, in uniform – making him, I suppose a sort of para-military figure): “I have a brother who is in a Hummer at the front, so don’t talk to me about too much fucking air-conditioning.” And: “A lot of people don’t like you.” And then: “Don’t fuck with things you don’t understand.” And too: “This is fucking war, asshole.” And finally: “No more questions for you.”

I had been warned

Wilkinson faded from the spotlight after he served as the communications director for the 2004 GOP convention when he became Condi’s personal spinner at State and then moved on to become chief of staff to Hank Paulson at Treasury. (Old Jim is quite the renaissance man, isn’t he?)

Anyway, I just couldn’t resist revisiting my old pal when Jonathan at ATR alerted me to this fascinating discussion on Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman featuring Josh Rushing who:

“served as a Marine spokesperson at CENTCOM in Doha as the U.S. invaded Iraq. Josh Rushing has since retired from the Marines and has started working at an unlikely outlet – the Arabic news channel Al Jazeera International Rushing became famous in the Arab world after he appeared – almost by chance – in the documentary Control Room about Al Jazeera. After the film was released, the Marines ordered Rushing to stop speaking to the press because he had begun publicly defending Al Jazeera.”

Here’s Rushing talking about our old pal Wilkinson:

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the kind of information that was presented at CENTCOM and how you were feeling as someone in the Marines who was part of shaping that message, and how you changed along the way. JOSH RUSHING: Yeah, no. This part was really rough for me, because as a military spokesperson, you don’t talk about policy. You talk about the way you’re going to conduct an action, not why you’re going to conduct an action. So if someone were to ask me before the war, “Why are you going to invade Iraq?” — and reporters did — the only honest answer I could give is, “We’ll invade Iraq if the President orders us to. And we won’t if he doesn’t. We don’t get to pick and choose our battles.” That way, it’s left to a politician in a suit behind a podium at the White House to explain why they made that decision. But instead, what we did, we had a Republican operative who was put in charge of our office, displacing a colonel that had started doing media liaison when this Republican operative was about probably five years old. And what this guy knew how to do was run a campaign, and so we were run like a political campaign. And the first step in that political campaign was to sell the product, and that was sell the invasion. So they gave the reasons down to the young troops, guys like me, to go out to reporters and give the reasons we’re going to invade a sovereign nation. Here’s the problem: the reporters in no way had the latitude to ask someone in uniform a critical question. I mean, on MSNBC their coverage was actually packaged with a banner that said, “Our hearts are with you.” So when I’m the young troop in uniform on screen, and the viewer sees “Our hearts are with you,” do you think the reporter’s going to ask me a critical question? Of course not. But I’m out there giving political answers. I’m out there saying, “We’re going to invade Iraq” — and this was the real catch: they would ask me before I would go on air live, “Are there any messages you want to get across today?” Well, yeah. My boss comes straight from the White House, and they have the messages of the day, and so they would give it to us. So I’d say, “Sure. WMD, regime change, ties with terrorism.” And they go, “OK. Well, I’ll ask you these questions, so we can get those answers out.” And they set it all up. AMY GOODMAN: Who, in particular, would say this? JOSH RUSHING: You know, I pick on FOX a lot. FOX reporters would do it. But NBC did it, as well. Those two were probably the worst about it, because those two were the most competitive about wanting access. I think they saw this as kind of part of the game. So we would go on live. They would ask me, you know, the staged questions. They would pat me on the back and thank me for my service. And then, “Back to you, John, in New York.” And the answers I gave weren’t the way we were going to conduct an action. They were the political reasons for invading another nation. And I was just a junior officer. So it was really kind of startling the way that all went down. AMY GOODMAN: Jim Wilkinson, who is he? JOSH RUSHING: Jim Wilkinson is the Republican operative I was talking about. He’s a guy that — he’s about my age. He’s from a small town in Texas. Again, I don’t believe he’s a bad guy. I just — I disagree with what he was ordered to do, what he volunteered to do. He worked in Dick Armey’s office. He is credited with coming up with a line about Gore having invented the internet. That was Jim’s work. Then, in the 2000 elections, he was in charge of the media down in the Florida recount, where there was one point where the Dade County voting board was going to recount the ballots down there. The Republicans didn’t want them to recount it until a decision had been made by the courts, and so they stormed the office. The office had to shut down, couldn’t do the recount. It was Jim in the press — you can go back and look at the articles — who says it was just a moment where a bunch of Americans felt the voting process was being taken away from them, and so, you know, they got a little over-emotional, and that’s what happened. But if you actually look at the pictures, it’s called the “Brooks Brothers Riot” these days, because everyone in the picture, the rioters, are all in bowties and nice suits [inaudible]. They’re young, twenty-something, blond hair. And if you start to kind of circle the faces and identify them, they’re all congressional staffers, Republican congressional staffers. But if that was an organized event, it would be illegal. It would be voter intimidation. So — moving them across state lines to perform that kind of thing, because they were all out of Washington, D.C. So that’s why Jim was in the press saying, “Oh, you know, this wasn’t organized. These were just emotional people who felt the system was being taken from their grasp.” AMY GOODMAN: So it was this party operative, Republican Party operative — JOSH RUSHING: That was Jim Wilkinson. AMY GOODMAN: — that was designing — JOSH RUSHING: Yeah, designed the whole thing. AMY GOODMAN: — that was setting the scene at CENTCOM. JOSH RUSHING: Yeah. He did so well there down in Florida, the next place he pops up is September 14, 2001, right here in New York, where he hands the bullhorn to President Bush, for Bush to tell the workers at Ground Zero that “I hear you, and soon the world will hear you.” And it’s a huge media event, and that, again, was Wilkinson. Wilkinson goes from there to CENTCOM.

Read Rushing’s whole interview. He was in the belly of the beast when the war began and has a lot to say about FOX — and NBC.

I think we all know just how absurd the reporting — and, worse, the editorializing — was in the run up to the war. It was a low point for American journalism. But I have long thought that one of the reasons for this was less laziness or support for the war or even ratings and circulation (although they all played a role.) It was a very unseemly and immature desire on the part of certain journalists to go out and play war correspondent, a little wet-dream at which I’m sure the real war correspondents scoffed when they realized that these pampered, perfumed princes were going to be “embedded” with the military and then debriefed by operatives like Wilkinson.

So many of the reporters were invested in their phony Ernie Pyle acts that it’s a testament to just how gargantuan a failure this war actually was that we know anything at all today. Imagine if the cock-up had only been half as bad. We’d be building monuments to Paul Bremer.

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