Watchdog Blog

Archive for the 'Iraq' Category

Gilbert Cranberg: An Apology is Still Needed for the Run-up Coverage

Colin Powell’s latest book, clumsily titled, It Worked For Me: In Life and Leadership, confesses to “one of my momentous failures.” The failure: his Feb. 5, 2003, speech to the United Nations urging war against Iraq. That speech, he belatedly admits, was heavily larded with falsehoods. Public opinion was divided about the advisability of war [...]

Gilbert Cranberg: The Iraq War, Colin Powell, and the Press

No retrospective on the Iraq war would be complete without reference to the part played by Colin Powell in convincing the country to go to war. Public opinion about the war was lukewarm until Powell spoke at the United Nations on Feb. 5, 2003. He gave such a boffo performance, complete with convincing visual aids, [...]

Gilbert Cranberg: Iraq, a spectacular failure in many ways

As American troops prepare to head for the exit in Iraq, pundits prepare to critique the war. Let me contribute my two cents worth: the war was a spectacular failure for the vaunted American system of checks and balances. The only checks in evidence were those written to pay for the trillion or so dollars [...]

Gilbert Cranberg: Did Editors’ Personal Views Lead to Such Poor Iraq War Run-up Coverage?

Bill Keller, who stepped down recently as head of the news operation of the New York Times, wrote a candid piece about this country’s invasion of Iraq for the Sept. 11 Times magazine that deserves more attention than it received. Keller labels the attack on Iraq “a monumental blunder,” and he is as unsparing of [...]

Gilbert Cranberg: No Clues from Cheney on Operation Enduring Mystery

Iraq looks more and more like the proverbial tar baby the U.S. can’t get off its hands. The Obama administration had visualized getting rid of the sticky mess by year end but now several thousand American troops may well be slated for duty there beyond the planned departure date. Speaking of the embarrassment that is [...]

Barry Sussman: Reporting Is Getting Better and Worse at the Same Time

I got a few questions from a Norwegian journalist asking my reflections on the tenth anniversary of 9/11. The questions tend to be a little lofty; as the writer, Tore Saevik, noted, “It is possible to write books about several of them.” But they all are good questions, so I took a shot at them. [...]

Barry Sussman: Orwell Got It Backwards. But then, Who Could Envision Hackers?

A world-wide thriller is taking place right now. We are all in the middle of it. These are the elements, more or less: Julian Assange began Wikileaks a few years ago and released important, secret documents, getting some attention but not a great deal, and attracting some followers. One of them was a young American [...]

Barry Sussman: Justice Department Shows Its Mettle, Indicts Clemens

I got this note from a friend and colleague a little while after Roger Clemens was indicted by a federal grand jury on Aug. 19th: “And meanwhile, Condoleezza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, CIA officials and others who lied to Congress in sworn testimony about Iraq go free. If we can ‘look forward, not backward’ on torture, [...]

Gilbert Cranberg: The American Press, Guilty of Shameful Neglect

Ask an American audience what it knows about Britain’s’ “Chilcott Inquiry” and chances are you will draw blank looks. That’s too bad. Americans ought to be intently interested in the Chilcott inquiry, named for its chairman, senior civil servant Sir John Chilcott, because it’s likely to provide the only authoritative account they will have into [...]

Dan Froomkin: ‘A Failure of Editors’

What is it about the culture of our elite newsrooms that led the nation’s major newspapers and television networks to fall so short in the run-up to the war in Iraq? Why were the spurious claims from the Bush administration greeted with credulousness rather than the appropriate skepticism? Michael Getler – who was Washington Post [...]