Greenwald: White House Spread False Story About Venezuela Burning Aid Trucks to Win Support for War & The Press at War, From Vietnam to Iraq & Media's failure on Iraq still stings 11MAR19 & 20MAR18 & 11MAR13

THE American mainstream media did a lot of "soul searching" after they bought the fascist bush-cheney administration's propaganda campaign and promoted the illegal and immoral U.S. invasion of Iraq. It seems that was all just for show because much of the American mainstream media are beating the drums of war again. Yes cnn along with most the rest of the mainstream broadcast media and the vast majority of the mainstream print media, through their own voluntary ignorance and false patriotism joined with the bush-cheney neocons built up the American public's support for war, and they are falling into the same trap again. The fascist drumpf / trump-pence administration, with their neocons Sen marco rubio rf* FL, john bolton and elliott abrams (of Iran - Contra fame) have been ramping up their pro -war campaign to win the support of the American people for American military intervention in Venezuela and the American media is starting to fall in line, spreading the deception and lies of this war state administration. maduro is a total failure as a head of state and should leave office to stop the suffering and destruction of the country he claims to love and allow Guaido to take control until free and fair elections can be held. But Maduro has not done anything to the Venezuelan people that justifies American military intervention. maduro has not killed as many Venezuelans as kim jong-un has killed north koreans or the saudi royal family has killed saudis (or syrians, or yemenis, or palestinians) but this administration is not threatening war against either one. (NOT MY) pres drumpf / trump just finished a failed summit in Hanoi with kim jong-un and is an active supporter in the repression of the Saudi people by the kingdom's murderous theocratic regime as well as an active participant in the slaughter of Yemeni children, women and men by the saudi military being directed by American intelligence while using American weapons. Still, some media is speaking out against American military intervention in Venezuela. The New York Times for one, and this from DemocracyNow! followed by The Atlantic and CNN......

Greenwald: White House Spread False Story About Venezuela Burning Aid Trucks to Win Support for War

STORYMARCH 11, 2019

An investigation by The New York Times has found that several trucks carrying so-called humanitarian aid that were set ablaze during a showdown at the Colombia-Venezuela border last month were not caused by President Nicolás Maduro’s forces, as was widely reported at the time by the media and Trump administration officials. We speak with Glenn Greenwald, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and one of the founding editors of The Intercept. His latest piece is “NYT’s Exposé on the Lies About Burning Aid Trucks in Venezuela Shows How U.S. Government and Media Spread Pro-War Propaganda.”

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, I also want to talk to you about Venezuela. An investigation by The New York Times found several trucks carrying so-called humanitarian aid that were set ablaze during a showdown at the Colombia-Venezuela border last month were not caused by President Nicolás Maduro’s forces, as was widely reported at the time by both media and Trump administration officials. This is Vice President Mike Pence.

VICE PRESIDENT MIKE PENCE: Maduro’s loyalists turned on their own people. As the world watched, they set fire to trucks loaded with food and medicine desperately needed by the Venezuelan people.

AMY GOODMAN: Independent journalist Max Blumenthal first raised questions about what happened, in a piece on February 24th that was headlined “Burning Aid: An Interventionist Deception on Colombia-Venezuela Bridge?”

Glenn, your latest piece is headlined “NYT’s Exposé on the Lies About Burning Aid Trucks in Venezuela Shows How U.S. Government and Media Spread Pro-War Propaganda.” Talk about the latest in Venezuela and how this has fueled that.

GLENN GREENWALD: Every time the U.S. wants to start a new war, it does it the same way, which is, it invents some really inflammatory, emotionally wrenching lie that gets people to hate the government they want to topple so much that they set their rationality aside and support the war. So, they claimed North Korea—or, North Vietnam attacked U.S. ships in the Gulf of Tonkin, which was a lie to start the Vietnam War. They claimed that Saddam had been ripping babies out of incubators in Kuwait, to start the Gulf War, which was a lie. They claimed weapons of mass destruction, which was a lie, to start the Iraq War.

And now you have Marco Rubio and John Bolton and Elliott Abrams, the crew, the neocon crew, who are experts at lying to start wars, going around telling lies about what the Maduro government is doing. And regardless of what you think about the Maduro government or President Maduro himself, you should be highly angry when your own government, with the help of its media, lies to you in order to start a war.

And this incident on February 23rd was incredibly important because that imagery of burning humanitarian trucks was very powerful. And the claim that it was Maduro’s forces that did it came not just from Marco Rubio, who cited anti-Maduro media outlets with no evidence. CNN—CNN—lied to the world. They claimed that their own journalists witnessed with their own eyes Maduro’s forces throwing incendiary devices that set those trucks on fire.

Right away, independent journalists, including Max Blumenthal, as well as Dan Cohen, who works at RT, looked at and studied—they were in Venezuela—the available footage and said that it was clear that it was the anti-Maduro protesters who set those trucks on fire. But those people were ignored by the corporate media in the United States, which only paid attention to the people who were lying on behalf of the U.S. government, only aired the lies that it was the Maduro forces who did it. And then, suddenly, The New York Times comes out with a good exposé that proves that it was a lie. They didn’t bother to credit any of the independent journalists who did it two weeks ago using much of the same evidence, but they did show that it was a lie.

And since then, Marco Rubio has got caught in two other lies. He claimed that babies were dying in hospitals, and then The Wall Street Journal reporter in Venezuela went to that hospital and said no babies had died. And also he claimed that a dam, that he called the German Dam, had collapsed because of the energy shortages, when, in reality, there was no dam that collapsed. The person who reported it was named Germán Dam, and Marco Rubio confused that and thought that it was a dam that had collapsed.

So he’s running around Venezuela telling all kinds of lies, acting like a buffoon and a clown, with John Bolton and Elliott Abrams in tow, in order to try and start a new war in Venezuela. And as usual, the corporate media—unlike Democracy Now!, which has put Venezuelan officials on to give the other side of the story, the corporate media in the U.S. have completely excluded any questioning or dissent of any of these storylines and have allowed these lies to go unchallenged, and, in the case of CNN, have often vouched for the lies themselves.

AMY GOODMAN: So, I wanted to go to this issue that you just raised, local reporting emerging that ongoing power outage has killed 17 people in hospitals, where backup generators failed; President Maduro saying last week anti-government saboteurs backed by the U.S. took the nation’s main hydroelectric power station at the Guri Dam offline; meanwhile, The New York Times reporting the sanctions have affected Venezuela’s ability to import and produce the fuel required by the thermal power plants, that could have backed up the Guri plant once it failed. If you could respond to all this, and especially President Maduro’s accusation that the power outage, which has plunged the country into darkness, though the electricity is coming back now, was as a result of a plot backed by the United States?

GLENN GREENWALD: Well, one really interesting part of that New York Timesexposé that got very little attention, was buried within, I think, the 12th or 13th paragraph, was an acknowledgment that the reason for the power outages, at least in large part, were the sanctions that the U.S. has imposed on Venezuela, that has made it impossible for Venezuela to get the energy that it needs to provide to its people. And so, as usual, the sanctions regime that’s being done in the name of helping the Venezuelan people is one of the biggest factors in their suffering deprivation and misery.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Glenn, your response to what’s happened in the United States, in Congress, to Ilhan Omar and the ultimate just general statement against hatred, of all forms, that the House passed?

GLENN GREENWALD: It’s just so ironic that the whole controversy began—actually in response to one of my tweets—by her simply pointing out that just like the NRA and Wall Street and the fossil fuel industry controls Congress through the use of money and lobbying power, so too does the Israeli lobby, making it impossible for dissent to be aired. And the three weeks of controversy that ensue proved her point, as people treated her as though she had said something anti-Semitic, when in fact she never mentioned or even alluded to Jews at all. The Israel lobby is composed of evangelicals, of militarists, of neocons, of all kinds of people.

And she was simply trying to air a debate that is urgently needed but that never takes place in Washington. And for that, she has been vilified, not just by members of the Republican Party, but also the cowards in her own party, with all kinds of character attacks and smears. And yet she’s incredibly brave. As she said herself, she survived a war in Somalia; this is nothing. And she’s going to continue—and I’m really grateful for this—to do the things she was sent to Washington to do, which is exactly to raise these issues, no matter how many names she’s called for doing it.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to get your response to Judge Jeanine Pirro, who was speaking on Fox News. After the resolution passed against anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, white supremacy and other forms of hate, she attacked Congressmember Ilhan Omar—one of the two Muslim women in Congress now—for wearing a hijab. Your response, Glenn?

GLENN GREENWALD: I mean, no decent person needs it explained to them why what Jeanine Pirro said is absolutely disgusting and bigoted and repulsive and ignorant. And, in fact, what I find really interesting is that even people at Fox News, including a Muslim producer, publicly denounced Jeanine Pirro in a viral tweet, and then Fox News itself repudiated her remarks and said that they were inappropriate and that they had spoken with her privately and made clear their disapproval. So, just think about that. Her remarks were so grotesque that they went way over the line even for Fox News and its very low standards for what you’re allowed to say about Muslims.

But this is—I mean, Jeanine Pirro is—this is who she’s always been. For people who live in New York, people have always known that. And this is the kind of bigotry that’s typically allowed to be expressed about Muslims, in a way that you’re not allowed to express about any other groups. She just went a little too far in being a little too explicit, and therefore got denounced even by Fox News for having done so.

AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, I want to thank you very much for being with us, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, one of the founding editors of The Intercept.

And that does it for our show. Democracy Now! has an immediate job opening for a full-time junior systems administrator here in our New York City studios. Details are available at democracynow.org.

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The Press at War, From Vietnam to Iraq

The conflicts change, but the factors influencing the quality of the coverage—including ignorance, confusion, and competition—stay consistent.

CULLEN MURPHY

MAR 20, 2018

MURPHY / MARKO DROBNJAKOVIC / AP / KATIE MARTIN / THE ATLANTIC

The Iraq War, launched 15 years ago today, always brings another war immediately to mind for me, and did so even when it first began. It’s not that Iraq itself did not loom large. I was an editor at The Atlantic when the war started, and the magazine’s coverage of issues relating to it was intensive and prolonged. Michael Kelly, who for four years was The Atlantic’s editor in chief, had covered the previous war against Iraq, in 1991, with courage and distinction. He had witnessed the horrors perpetrated in Kuwait during the Iraqi occupation, and was a strong proponent of military action against Saddam Hussein. Mike embedded with the Third Infantry Division, and was killed during the first weeks of the fighting.

The war that Iraq brought to mind was Vietnam—not because the two wars were intrinsically similar (they were very different) but because questions about the role of the press, and the responsibilities of the press, arose ferociously from both conflicts. As a young editor in one of my first jobs—at a journal called The Wilson Quarterly, lodged in the red-sandstone Smithsonian Castle on the Mall, in Washington—I worked for a Marine and former New York Times and Washington Post reporter named Peter Braestrup. He knew a lot about Vietnam firsthand, and he had drawn clear journalistic lessons from his experience. While fussing with his pipe or tapping it for emphasis, he was not shy about sharing them. Instilling might be a better word.*  *  *

eter Braestrup was a Korean War veteran who had been badly wounded in combat and still sometimes discovered tiny shards of metal weeping from his eye. He had been The Post’s bureau chief in Saigon during the Tet Offensive, a coordinated series of surprise attacks launched by the North Vietnamese against U.S. and South Vietnamese targets on January 30, 1968. When I went to work for him, in the mid-1970s, Braestrup was in the midst of writing a monumental book, titled Big Story, about the press coverage of those events.

Not quite a decade had elapsed since Tet, and the conventional wisdom was that reporting by the major newspapers and TV networks had somehow turned an American military victory (however stunned the military had been by North Vietnam’s offensive) into an American psychological defeat—helping to skew public opinion increasingly against the war. Some critics went further: The media had done this willfully, spurred by left-wing, antiwar bias. As the last U.S. helicopters left the embassy compound in Saigon, in 1975, the New York Times columnist James Reston acknowledged the argument: “The reports of the press and radio and television are now being blamed for the defeat of American policy and power in Indochina.”

Braestrup didn’t buy it. (Neither did Reston, for different reasons.) If the media hadn’t always presented an accurate picture, you didn’t need to invoke bias as the explanation. As Braestrup explained, the situation in Vietnam was exquisitely engineered to obscure the truth. The press and the military had different cultures and were often mutually suspicious. The government in Washington, a third actor, was suspicious of the other two and distrusted by them in turn. Neither the government nor the military spoke candidly, in Vietnam a pattern going back years.

During the chaos and intense fighting of the Tet Offensive, no one had an overall view of what was happening; because reporters were based in Saigon, the fighting there—blocks away from where they lived!—colored everything. Reporters were hampered by communications that now seem primitive; it could take a day or more to get a report with footage on the network news. Reporters had to pursue rapidly changing events from day to day, and were rarely able to dig deeper or reflect on what they’d learned. They were also drawn to wherever the action was, even if the reality of “no action” in much of the country was itself a salient fact.

“Their time horizons were short,” Braestrup wrote of his colleagues in Big Story(and he explicitly included himself in his assessment). “Their focus was narrow. By temperament or training they were not ‘experts,’ systematic researchers, writers trained in synthesis; they were adventurers and to some extent, voyeurs; at their best, on some occasions, they were also shrewd observers and interrogators; and perceptive tellers of tales.”

Braestrup’s ideas about the press and the military—and the government as a whole—get a thorough airing in Big Story. They fill two fat volumes (with 41 appendices). As he was writing the book, which was published in 1977, he would talk expansively at the end of the day with his younger colleagues, myself among them. His office in the old castle was dominated by a rose window, and the interior niches that formed the petals became a filing system for the chapters of his book. He talked about the different senses of time characteristic of different forms of media—the unrelenting dailiness of newspaper and broadcast reporting, where the news was always hot; the less-pressured environment of magazines, which rarely broke news but offered time to think; the sheer luxury of books—and the advantages and disadvantages of each; about the need to invest in deep background reporting, if you possibly could, well before major events might reasonably be expected to occur; about the imperative to come back to a story long after the herd had moved on; and about the usefulness of looking at a subject not directly but a little to the side. (He noted that you could sometimes see stars better that way too.)  Braestrup spoke frequently, and above all, about the need for humility regarding what you could ever know—much less know in a short time, much less know in the middle of a war. In war, nothing worked out as planned, and even if it seemed to, the process of getting from A to B always created an X, Y, and Z that you’d never anticipated.                                                                

*  *  *

Braestrup’s perspective acquired renewed relevance as the Iraq War became imminent, then a reality, then a catastrophe. The Tet Offensive had come suddenly and by surprise. In contrast, when the Iraq War began, on March 20, 2003, there had been more than a year of very public buildup. A decision to go to war was not theoretically inevitable but was correctly seen as a fait accompli by officials in Washington, by the Pentagon, and by the press—whatever delicate and facile parsing one might hear from the administration.

Nothing about the fundamentals had changed for the better since Vietnam. War was still war. The White House still insisted on its version of facts, with questionable evidence to back them up. The press corps was larger and more fragmented than it had been in 1968, and the news moved at a faster pace. TV crews didn’t need to wait for an airplane to carry film canisters from Saigon to Tokyo for satellite transmission. Print journalists could write stories that would be published online within minutes. Cable channels aired news programming around the clock, and their reach was global. None of this fostered a spirit of calm analysis.

Unlike in Vietnam, few of the reporters who went to Iraq were military veterans. Many came to the war without much relevant experience. It wasn’t just Iraqi culture that was unfamiliar. In an experiment, the Pentagon allowed some 600 journalists to embed with military units. Soon after arriving in Iraq, Michael Kelly wrote back about an orientation briefing for the embeds where the colonel in charge had to explain certain realities to a reporter from Japanese television, who wanted to know if instead of a backpack she could bring a roller-board suitcase.

The colonel said, “You mean, like in an airport?”

“Yes,” the woman replied.

“Uh, ma’am,” said the colonel, “we’ll be in the desert, which is, uh, sand, so I don’t know about that.”

If the rap on the media after Tet was that biased reporting turned public opinion sour, the rap on the media after the Iraq War was virtually the opposite: that it had been too slow to subject government claims to scrutiny—indeed, that it had amplified official assessments in advance of the war and given them credibility. There are well-known examples of this, notably concerning the allegations by the Bush administration that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. (He did not.) If you go back and take a look, you’ll also find a note of naive triumphalism, or maybe just premature optimism, in some early reported accounts after the war began.

But the chief factors influencing the quality of the coverage were the ones present in Vietnam, and present in any war: ignorance, confusion, inexperience, deadlines, excitement, competition, and the reliance, because there was no choice, on sources that may not prove to be trustworthy. (Taken together: an argument, again, for humility.) Even Colin Powell, the secretary of state, had not fully known what was going on—he made the case for war to the United Nations, unaware that some of the evidence provided by his own government was at best flawed and at worst manufactured. But everything could have been on the level, and there’d still be this: Nothing works out as planned (“Mission Accomplished”), even if you think it did.

In the years after the invasion, with the security situation deteriorating, many news organizations pulled their staffs from Iraq, leaving a dangerous job to reporters for the Post (in particular), the Times, and a handful of other outlets. As the war dragged on, and as reporting got better and better, the real problem with news from Iraq would turn out to be how little of it most Americans ever saw or heard. Across the board, as documented by Pew and others, the percentage of the news hole devoted to the war declined steeply.

And yet the body of published work on Iraq, within a few years of its start, would quickly become impressive. Thomas Ricks’s prize-winning Fiasco (2006) went back to square one and looked afresh at how this calamity had come about. (Ricks, a veteran military correspondent who covered the war for thePost, shared an office with me in a castle tower back in Peter Braestrup days.) That same year, the late Anthony Shadid published Night Draws Near, which described the impact of war on the Iraqi people themselves—based in part on reporting for which he’d won a Pulitzer Prize. A year later, the Post’s Rajiv Chandrasekaran produced Imperial Life in the Emerald City. The book is a portrayal of life in the fortified “green zone,” where the U.S. military occupation maintained its headquarters (and an example, too, of coming at a subject a little bit to the side). Starting even before the war, and continuing after, my Atlantic colleague James Fallows weighed in with a series of extraordinary articles—“The Fifty-First State” (which looked ahead to what running Iraq would entail), “Blind Into Baghdad” (which described all the expertise that had been ignored by the Bush administration), and “Why Iraq Has No Army” (which traced the disastrous decision to disband the Iraqi military). The long lead time of a monthly magazine definitely has its drawbacks, but it provides a kind of freedom that short lead times don’t have patience for. In retrospect, it seems only natural that Peter Braestrup ended his career at a quarterly.

*  *  *

And the next war? Military action on the Korean peninsula seems more likely now than it has in decades. The situation throughout the Middle East remains unpredictable. The United States currently has troops stationed in about 70 countries. They are engaged in combat roles in a number of them. That it’s impossible to say exactly how many is a testament to another structural problem the news industry faces—much of this activity is secret, and it’s hard to report on wars when no one will tell you where they are. If any of these potential occasions of strife blew up into a major conflict, the news media would find itself in an all-too-familiar spot. (Forget about Mali and Somalia: How many reporters speak Korean?) There will be another war somewhere at some point. The only certainty, for those who report the news as well as those who consume it, is that much of what we learn at first will be wrong.

Meanwhile, the reporting challenge today that, to me, seems most comparable to that of Vietnam or Iraq is not a military conflict at all. It is the man in the Oval Office. The presidency of Donald Trump confronts the media with all the familiar wartime woes, and on a wartime scale: Officials at every level who lie as a matter of course; events that unfold like surprise attacks; a cascade of urgent news that seems to change by the second; a fog of confusion that no epistemology could dispel. When I brought up this comparison with Tom Ricks, he said, “It resonates psychologically. The fatigue, the dull mental ache, the sense of being shackled to a never-ending fight. I keep on wondering how the White House reporters handle it. Trump’s tweets remind me of incoming mortar fire—never quite predictable, and sometimes quite scary.”

In some ways, the Trump presidency may prove harder to cover effectively than Vietnam or Iraq. For one thing, the field of operations involves the entire U.S. government. For another, the very idea of reality seems up for grabs. In Vietnam and Iraq, there was an economy of truth, sometimes a deliberate distortion of it, often a wish that it might be other than it was—but not an assault on the very idea of truth, as there is now. That aside, the sheer volume of news items—five or six damning stories every day that would each have sunk a Jimmy Carter—lessens the impact of any single piece of it. (“Their time horizons were short. Their focus was narrow.”)

But for whatever reason, something feels different. News organizations of all kinds—newspapers, magazines, and web sites especially—are on a war footing, mounting big investigations and asking big questions, independent of the daily churn. There is another Big Story to be written, and it may have a better ending this time.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

CULLEN MURPHY is The Atlantic’s editor at large.

Media's failure on Iraq still stings

By Howard Kurtz, CNN

Updated 1:29 PM ET, Mon March 11, 2013

10 years later: Iraq's phantom WMD 03:17

Story highlights

• Howard Kurtz: News reporting before war in Iraq was media's greatest failure in recent times
• He says news organizations aided Bush administration's push to war on faulty premises
• Newspapers ran stories without enough skepticism, he says
• Kurtz: Public's lack of confidence in media can partly be traced back to 2003

The 10th anniversary this month of the invasion of Iraq will remind most people of a divisive and dubious war that toppled Saddam Hussein but claimed the lives of nearly 4,500 Americans and more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians.

What it conjures up for me is the media's greatest failure in modern times.

Major news organizations aided and abetted the Bush administration's march to war on what turned out to be faulty premises. All too often, skepticism was checked at the door, and the shaky claims of top officials and unnamed sources were trumpeted as fact.

By the time U.S. soldiers discovered there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the media establishment was left with apologies and explanations. The Bush-Cheney administration helped whip up an atmosphere in the wake of 9/11 in which media criticism of national security efforts seemed almost unpatriotic.

As the war, once sold as a cakewalk, went sour in 2004, the New York Times said in an editor's note that its editors were "perhaps too intent on rushing scoops into the paper," some of them erroneous stories by Judith Miller. The paper said its reporting on what turned out to be nonexistent WMDs was "not as rigorous as it should have been" and that the Times overplayed stories with "dire claims about Iraq."

I was working at The Washington Post at the time, and I took it upon myself to examine the paper's performance in the run-up to war. It was not a pretty picture.

From August 2002 through the March 19, 2003, launch of the war, I found more than 140 front-page stories that focused heavily on administration rhetoric against Iraq: "Cheney Says Iraqi Strike Is Justified"; "War Cabinet Argues for Iraq Attack"; "Bush Tells United Nations It Must Stand Up to Hussein or U.S. Will"; "Bush Cites Urgent Iraqi Threat"; "Bush Tells Troops: Prepare for War."

By contrast, pieces questioning the evidence or rationale for war were frequently buried, minimized or spiked.

Len Downie, then the executive editor, told me that in retrospect, "we were so focused on trying to figure out what the administration was doing that we were not giving the same play to people who said it wouldn't be a good idea to go to war and were questioning the administration's rationale. Not enough of those stories were put on the front page. That was a mistake on my part."

Bob Woodward told me that "we did our job, but we didn't do enough, and I blame myself mightily for not pushing harder." There was a "groupthink" among intelligence officials, he said, and "I think I was part of the groupthink."

Tom Ricks, who was the paper's top military reporter, turned in a piece in the fall of 2002 that he titled "Doubts," saying that senior Pentagon officials were resigned to an invasion but were reluctant and worried that the risks were being underestimated. An editor killed the story, saying it relied too heavily on retired military officials and outside experts -- in other words, those with sufficient independence to question the rationale for war.

"There was an attitude among editors: Look, we're going to war, why do we even worry about all this contrary stuff?" Ricks said.

I actually think the Post did a better job than most. And there is no minimizing the difficulties that even the most intrepid journalists faced: They couldn't go to Iraq to investigate for themselves, and most government sources were echoing the administration's line about WMDs.

But that system's failure casts a dark shadow on the news business that has not entirely lifted. The press needs to challenge what government officials say, whether it is about war or weapons or Wall Street, or whether the impact of federal budget cuts is being exaggerated. The low level of public confidence in the media has many causes, but one of them stems from what happened back in 2003.

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