Brian Williams Helped Pave
the Way to War
By Sheldon Richman
February 13, 2015 "ICH"
- "FFF"
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The scandal of the week is NBC anchor Brian
Williams’s shabby bid for self-glorification
by falsely claiming he was in a U.S.
military helicopter forced to land in the
Iraqi desert after being hit by ground fire
in 2003. Of course so-called news people
shouldn’t make up stuff to look good, but
there’s something much worse: uncritically
passing along official lies intended to
prepare the American people for war.
Williams, like nearly all of
his mainstream media colleagues (with
precious few exceptions) did this
incessantly in the run-up to George W.
Bush’s invasion of Iraq. As conduits for the
Bush administration’s baseless claims about
weapons of mass destruction and
Iraqi links to 9/11, Williams and the
others did Bush’s bidding in
manufacturing public support for the illegal
and morally outrageous invasion and
occupation that would wreck Iraq even more
than it had been wrecked in the 1990s
through the military and economic warfare
waged by George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton.
What did these fake-news
presenters learn from that disgraceful
episode? Not a thing. If you want proof,
tune in to the three major networks’
newscasts or consult the American cable news
channels: CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News. There
you’ll find stage actors conveying the Obama
administration’s neoconservative line about
the ISIS threat to the American people and
the need for government military action to
counteract it — never noting that there
was no ISIS or al-Qaeda in Iraq before
the Bush war they helped make possible.
Reporting “news” without providing the
context is a surefire way to mislead
viewers. Why don’t they know that? Or do
they know it and prefer to mislead their
viewers out of a sense of patriotism and in
a quest for ratings?
You need another example?
Take Iran. (Ukraine would also do.) For
quite a while these same media stars have
been hawking the claim that Iran has been
relentlessly working toward building nuclear
weapons. Yet, although the U.S. and Israeli
governments have repeatedly threatened
Iran over the years — claiming “all
options are on the table” (which logically
includes nuclear strikes) — and have engaged
in covert and proxy war and terrorism
against the Islamic Republic — Iran has
not started down the road to acquiring a
nuclear arsenal.
In his book
Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of
the Iran Nuclear Scare, independent
reporter and historian Gareth Porter
shows that there is no evidence Iran has
intended to do anything but obtain a
civilian nuclear-power and nuclear-medicine
capability. Porter’s book overflows with
documentation that supports his case,
including a fatwa from Iran’s
current leader declaring that possession of
nuclear weapons violates Islamic law.
I repeat: Iran — which is
routinely inspected by the International
Atomic Energy Administration, has signed the
nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (unlike the
Middle East’s only nuclear power, Israel),
and is complying
with the interim agreement negotiated with
the United States and other powers — has not
sought nuclear weapons. American and
Israeli intelligence agencies agree.
Have you heard that from
Brian Williams, Andrea Mitchell of MSNBC,
Wolf Blitzer or Fareed Zakaria of CNN, David
Muir of ABC, Scott Pelley of CBS, or Shepard
Smith, Chris Wallace, and Bret Baier of Fox
News?
No, you have not. Instead,
they casually refer to “Iran’s nuclear
weapons program” as if it were an
indisputable fact. Therefore, in their eyes
it is unnecessary to interview anyone who
could challenge that claim. Their subtext
is: “The U.S. government says Iran has a
nuclear weapons program. That’s good enough
for us.”
This can only have the
effect of softening up the American people
for a war of aggression against Iran, which
has already been devastated by economic
sanctions, if the hawks in Congress, in
cooperation with Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu, succeed in driving Iran
from the negotiating table with even more
sanctions.
Yet even this is not
enough for the government mouthpieces who
call themselves journalists. Recently, Joe
Scarborough, host of MSNBC’s Morning Joe,
one-upped this reckless gang by asserting
that Iran has “promised to get a nuclear
weapon and then has promised to use the
nuclear weapon to annihilate Israel.” He
then repeated this double lie.
Compared to Joe
Scarborough, Brian Williams is a piker.
Sheldon Richman is vice
president of The Future of Freedom
Foundation and editor of FFF's monthly
journal, Future of Freedom. For 15 years he
was editor of The Freeman, published by the
Foundation for Economic Education in
Irvington, New York.
© The
Future of Freedom Foundation