The Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch frauds
It is difficult to watch these clips from yesterday's House hearings investigating the absolute, deliberate lies regarding Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch fed to the American public by the U.S. military -- with an eager and accommodating assist from our excellent and intrepid media -- and feel anything other than disgust (and this is just beyond comment). But as anger-inducing as it all is, there is really nothing remarkable about any of it.
What these episodes actually do is illustrate how virtually every rotted and broken branch of our political and media culture operate:
First, it has been well-known for several years that the U.S. military outright invented lies regarding literally every aspect of the Jessica Lynch story. And the Tillman family for years has been vocally complaining about the lies they were told by the Pentagon regarding the circumstances surrounding Pat Tillman's death, the pressure on other soldiers to conceal the truth, and the crass and disgusting exploitation of those lies to serve the administration's political interests. None of this is new. So why is Congress holding hearings to investigate these matters only now?
The answer, of course, is because the Republicans who controlled Congress for the last four years absolutely suppressed any attempt whatsoever to exert oversight on the administration. They not only investigated nothing, they aggressively blocked every real investigation into allegations of wrongdoing and corruption on the part of the administration. Our government literally ceased to function the way it is designed to, because Congressional Republicans deliberately abdicated their duty of checks on the executive and actively helped to conceal every improper and deceitful act.
The only reason any of this is being aired now is because the American people removed the President's party from control of Congress and they are no longer able to keep concealed the Bush administration's misconduct.
Second, I defy anyone to go back and read the April and May, 2003 tongue-wagging, mindless American press accounts of Jessica Lynch's epic firefight against the Enemy; the severe gun shot and stabbing wounds she suffered; the torture to which she was subjected while in the Iraqi hospital; and the daring, gun-blazing rescue of her by our Special Forces, and then try to claim that we have a functioning, healthy political press in this country that serves as a check on government deceit and corruption. It is impossible for any minimally honest person to make that claim in light of those stories.
The seminal article "reporting" the Lynch Fraud was published on April 3, 2003, from The Washington Post's Sue Schmidt and Vernon Loeb, which mindlessly and uncritically passed on one false claim after the next, beginning with this paragraph: "Pfc. Jessica Lynch, rescued Tuesday from an Iraqi hospital, fought fiercely and shot several enemy soldiers after Iraqi forces ambushed the Army's 507th Ordnance Maintenance Company, firing her weapon until she ran out of ammunition, U.S. officials said yesterday." If one's metric is accuracy, it goes downhill from there.
That is the article that spawned virtually every other newspaper and network news program to repeat those lies. As but one of literally countless examples, ABC News' Robin Roberts said this to Diane Sawyer on the April 3 broadcast of Good Morning America:
And we keep finding out, Diane, how remarkable it was. Military officials are calling Lynch's rescue from Iraqi captivity, the first successful rescue of an American POW in almost 60 years. . . .
This morning, we are learning dramatic new details of her rescue and her capture a week ago by Iraqi forces. According to "The Washington Post," Lynch fought fiercely after her unit was ambushed near Nasiriyah, shooting several Iraqis during the attack. Emptying her weapon before being stabbed and finally taken prisoner. The young soldier was shot at least once in the leg.
Lynch was kept in this run-down hospital that had been converted into an Iraqi military headquarters. Her whereabouts unknown until a local doctor handed a note to US Marines in the area saying there was a wounded soldier inside. The daring nighttime rescue was right out of a Hollywood thriller as seen in this footage released by the Pentagon just this morning.
The excuse from Schmidt and Loeb, of course, is the same one which such journalists always give when they uncritically print total lies fed to them by their friends in the government and military: hey, what do you want from us, this is what our sources told us? The Post's then-Ombudsman, Michael Getler, responded to reader concerns about the accuracy of the original report, by saying this:
Schmidt and Loeb are experienced reporters, and there is no reason to doubt they were told what they reported, and by a source in whom they had confidence. They say it is certain that the descriptions they used are included in sensitive internal intelligence reporting about the rescue. The official silence about Lynch, they suggest, may be due to intelligence classification, possible war crime investigations or other issues.
So, "experienced reporters" Schmidt and Loeb were lied to by their sources, causing them to publish a humiliatingly (though flamboyantly promoted) false "news" story that had a huge impact on how the American press discussed this war. Yet they continue to defend not only their own actions, but those of their lying sources.
This is what turned out to be the real story here -- that "experienced reporters" Schmidt and Loeb were completely manipulated by lying, scheming high-level officials in the military and government, and they fell for it by turning the front page of The Washington Post into a venue for false, highly manipulative government propaganda.
So what have Schmidt and Loeb done about that story -- the real story here? Absolutely nothing. In fact, here is what the completely unrepentant Vernon Loeb and his editor said months later, even once it was clear that they were totally duped:
Vernon Loeb, who wrote the story with another reporter, Susan Schmidt, calls their sourcing solid. He concedes, however, that the tale could have benefited from stronger and more prominent caveats about the sketchiness of intelligence reports. "My lesson learned is I should have been more cautious in the way I wrote this story," he says. "But, having said that, I would have written the story anyway." . . . .
But he and Post Managing Editor Steve Coll say they have no reason to doubt that their April 3 story accurately reflected the information contained in those reports--even if the reports had inaccuracies. "We had multiple sources because multiple people were reading the same intelligence report," Coll says.
So The Washington Post thinks it did nothing seriously wrong here and, astonishingly, defends the behavior of "its sources" as admirable and honorable (just a little inaccurate due to that notorious "fog of war" that put imaginary bullet and stab wounds in Jessica Lynch as a result of a heroic and inspiring firefight that never happened).
And most of all, Schmidt and Loeb continue to protect the identity of their sources, and will until the day they die. The fact that their sources fed them lies in order to manipulate American public opinion about the war is irrelevant to them. Over and over and over, our most influential American media outlets publish false stories based on government "sources" who purposely lie to them, and they never report on the real story -- who are the government sources lying to the American public while hiding behind shields of anonymity granted to them, and maintained by, our nation's "journalists"?
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http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/
