During any time of crisis, the ruling party would benefit from the suppression of information while the subjugated would benefit from its revelation. Knowledge is power, and whoever controls it, simply controls.
In the American political system, those who hold sway over the minds of the voting public are awarded reelection. As Machiavelli once pointed out, the difference between the honest and corrupt princes may only lie in survival of circumstances beyond anyone's control.
As for the Fourth Estate, those who reveal the corruption of politicians are rewarded the front-page, but not much reward can be found in stories about perfectly honest princes ruling during perfectly prosperous times.
As for the Iraq war scandal, there were methods employed by the Bush Administration in order to minimize the damage of public opinion due to the missteps and fubars taken. I will analyze both the attempts of government to hold sway over public sentiment and the attempts of the media to discern the truth during its aftermath, even if only in self-service to compensate for its lack of skepticism during its insipid “smoking gun” phase.
Second Your Own Motion
Dick Cheney had used a “leak preemptively, then acknowledge” tactic which came into full fruition during his interview on Tim Russert's, Meet the Press, aired September 8, 2002, only a few days before the one year anniversary of 9/11 which may suggest that even this was calculated for optimal public support and sentiment.
Judy Miller, during this time a star reporter for the New York Times specializing in Iraqi and terrorist WMD searches, had been practically obsessed with exposing Saddam Hussein as the state sponsor for Islamic terrorist organizations as far back as 1990 with co-authorship of Laurie Mylroie's Saddam Hussein & the Crisis in the Gulf. The end result of this was her unwaivering trust in all leads that support her previous bias, which certainly made her a “cry wolf” darling for the Bush Administration, as Dick Cheney's Chief of Staff Scooter Libby had leaked the CIA's aluminum tube findings to Miller, though already defunct by nuclear experts.
So this is a brilliant tactic: Dick Cheney's underling leaks an incredulous story like aluminum tubes to Judy Miller, known for reporting without double-checking her sources, in the September 8, 2002 Sunday edition of the New York Times, then later in the evening Dick Cheney cites Judy Miller's “uncovering” of the aluminum tube story on Tim Russert's Meet the Press in order to further support his policy for preemptive invasion of Iraq.
As a reporter, this sort of story could have easily been exposed as hollow, by simply contacting those Department of Energy experts who had already determined that their previous usage was in artillery rockets and that they lacked the thickness needed for nuclear centrifuge. However, the emotional climate in America during this short stint in time left little room for public dissent, and although news media company Knight Ridder had maintained its journalistic skepticism it was certainly the exception to the post-9/11 status quo.
As a reporter, to continue with hard questions against an administration who had essentially been given a free pass from the usual checks and balances because of the new terror hysteria, one may have been viewed as unpopular or even blackballed from certain media in the short run, but eventually those who had stuck to their principles would be later reviewed as heroes while Judy Miller's career and credibility went down in flames, then up in smoke.
Keeping Your Enemies Closer
Embedded reporting was another smart maneuver by the neoconservative Department of Defense and their sympathetic military strategists. In the past thirty years, the Pentagon had suffered from what I call the “Vietnam Syndrome,” meaning that many within the American military and certain War Hawk politicians conveyed the myth that it was bad press, thus unpopular opinion, which failed the campaign in South Vietnam. Their fear of a repeat in Iraq lead to embedded reporting, an attempt at absolute control over what the media reports and where they will venture.
By default, it is fair to say that most reporters had either accepted this or at least felt they had no other choice; the sectarian and xenophobic turmoil in Iraq, and especially Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's kidnap-and-behead tactics, had made it quite impossible for an outside reporter to walk freely in public without armed protection from the military.
David Zucchino, embedded L.A. Times reporter, was interviewed by Mia Carter for Suite101.com, published July 28, 2008. Here is Zucchino's opinion on embedded reporting:
“The advantages were enormous. I didn't have to rely on canned statements from a public affairs person in the rear. I was able to witness event first-hand, and to interview people at the scene. there were no public affairs with my units, so I was completely unencumbered and was able to speak with everyone I came across,” Zucchino said.
“The disadvantage, of course, was that I had to rely entirely on the military for transportation, food, water, and access. I was't able to interview Iraqi soldiers, militia fighters, or ordinary Iraqis,” Zucchino said. “And I had to work hard every day to keep from adopting the point of view of the military people I was traveling with. I had to constantly remind myself to step back and keep an independent viewpoint.”
As an embedded reporter, I would adopt the tactics that Zucchino had engaged in during his correspondence in Iraq, as he described in his March 17, 2004 speech during the War & Media Conference at the University of California in Berkeley. He never stayed with one unit for any extended length of time and caught rides to areas of interest with mobile units; this considerably cut down the risk of camaraderie and it allowed him a little more freedom to choose where he thought the action might take place.
Discourse Metamorphosis
The sudden change of rhetoric in justifying the preemptive war in Iraq had allowed the Bush Administration additional time to try and justify the war with later favorable results. What this means is that when Saddam's regime was quickly toppled, the WMD search units were allowed full access in every corner of Iraq to finally uncover what Wolfowitz had always assumed was there...but they found nothing. Many American citizens and politicians alike, who had placed faith in the Bush Administration's assertions that Hussein was practically an imminent threat to American existence because of WMD stockpiling and subsequent terrorist sponsorship, were feeling a little deceived.
The Bush Administration immediately began to downplay the WMD case for war, distracting attention from those asking just where in the hell the evidence was of a reconstituted WMD proliferation, thus quipped, “The world is better off without Saddam.”
Those who were initially against the war were absolutely furious with this Orwellian balderdash, but for a while opponents of Bush foreign policies where temporarily disarmed of their indignation against an unjustified preemptive strike. For a short time, the question became less like, “Did the conservatives lead the United States into invading the wrong nation,” and more like, “Would liberals prefer if Saddam was able to continue committing atrocities on his own people?”
Had the Iraqi people been more accepting of American occupation, or even if military experts were allowed to oversee the post-war reconstruction and security rather than leaving it in the hands of civilian businessmen like Paul Bremer, Paul Wolfowitz, and Don Rumsfeld, I believe the American public would have quickly forgiven the Bush Administration for their side-tracking from pursuit of Bin Laden. Alas.
As a reporter, I would attempt to prevent such a red herring from changing the entire premise for the war on terror; just because the neoconservatives have been fixated on waging a Reaganesque arms race against another empirical nation-state boogyman since the Soviet collapse doesn't mean that the United States can afford to drain resources from Bin Laden and waste them against Hussein.
My journalistic approach would have been to interview experts on Middle Eastern affairs to find out just how plausible it would be for a Pan-Islamic terrorist organization like Al Qaeda to become bedfellows with a Pan-Arabic secular organization like the Ba'athist party: one tearing down racial barriers to promote a Middle Eastern Caliphate while the other forgoing Islamic Law to embolden the Arab people, at the expense of Persians and Kurds, working beyond national boundaries. I would also hound any members of the Bush Administration and haunt them with Bin Laden, Bin Laden, Bin Laden!!! Keep the focus on who really brought down the twin towers.
Suicidal Counter-blows
The Valerie Plame outing... Bad move. Period. The potential scandal behind this Rovian stunt far outweighs the vengeance against Wilson's scathing editorial, What I Didn't Find in Africa, published in the New York Times, July 6, 2003. It would have been suffice to blame NSA Stephen Hadley for giving Bush the green light to use the Nigerian yellowcake claim in his 2003 State of the Union speech.
As a Bush press secretary having to deal with the Valerie Plame aftermath, not much else to do but to send Scooter Libby up the river and to inoculate more powerful administrative figures like Karl Rove and Dick Cheney. As a reporter, I would turn my attention towards Judy Miller's complete inability to double-check sources as well as her willingness to act like a parakeet for the Bush Administration. I find her behavior to be a complete embarrassment for the rest of American journalists and she needed to be taken down to prevent further damage to journalistic integrity.
Closure
The best conclusion would be my own admittance; I'll be starting a journalism career as an idealist who places faith in the principles of truth as bitter medicine against corruption. I say “bitter” because too often are the long-hauls very thankless while treading the dusty road.
I'm also fully aware that, as one with higher pursuits, I'll cross that finish line as either a hero, a fool, or a hypocrite... and I'm sure that those who are intimately familiar with the political realm has met all three.
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