The Washington Post Smears Joe Wilson

No newspaper has a more terrible track record on the Iraq War than The Washington Post. The Post basically became a propaganda outlet for Bush and Cheney's war drive in 2002 and 2003. The Post was suckered on everything. It reported every lie, every deception, every misdirection, every spin from the Administration with an uncritical attitude. Now that everything has begun collapsing in Iraq, and the lies have been made manifest, the Post is attacking...Joe Wilson! Consortium News has the story:

If future historians wonder how the United States could have blundered so catastrophically into Iraq under false pretenses and why so few establishment figures dared to speak out, the historians might read the sorry pattern of the Post’s editorial-page attacks on those who did dissent.

Washington Post Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt, who fell for virtually every Iraq War deception that the Bush administration could dream up, is back assaulting former Ambassador Wilson, again, in a Sept. 1 editorial, falsely accusing Wilson of lying and concluding that “it’s unfortunate that so many people took him seriously.”

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While some Americans might still think that a major newspaper would want to know the truth, the Post’s hierarchy has behaved with petulance whenever evidence has emerged that reveals the depths of the Bush administration’s deceptions – and the extent of the Post’s gullibility.

For instance, in 2005, when secret documents were disclosed in Great Britain describing Bush’s efforts in 2002 to “fix” the Iraq WMD intelligence to justify the war, the Post first ignored the so-called “Downing Street Memo” and then disparaged those who considered this powerful evidence of Bush’s deceptions important.

On June 15, 2005, the Post’s lead editorial asserted that “the memos add not a single fact to what was previously known about the administration’s prewar deliberations. Not only that: They add nothing to what was publicly known in July 2002.”

But Hiatt’s assessment simply wasn’t correct. Looking back to 2002 and early 2003, it would be hard to find any “reputable” commentary in the mainstream U.S. press calling Bush’s actions fraudulent, which is what the “Downing Street Memo” and other British evidence have since revealed them to be.

The British documents prove that much of the pre-war debate inside the U.S. and British governments was how best to manipulate public opinion by playing games with the intelligence. If that reality “was publicly known” before the war, why hadn’t the Post reported it and why did its editorials continue to parrot the administration’s lies and distortions?

Yet despite this disturbing record of the Post’s credulity (if not outright dishonesty), Hiatt has published yet another editorial concentrating his ugliest attacks not against the administration for misleading the nation to war or against the failure of officials (like Powell) to express their misgivings in a timely fashion, but against Joe Wilson.

The Post's editorial board has become a loathsome cheerleader for a disastrous policy. Read the whole excellent Consortium expose--and learn who the enemies of the truth really are.