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10/25/2005:

"Buchanan: The Greatest Scandal"

by Patrick Buchanan
While President Bush and his War Cabinet bear full moral responsibility for Iraq, they could not have taken us to war without the complicity of the "adversary press" and "loyal opposition."

Today, this town is salivating over the prospect that Karl Rove and "Scooter" Libby will be indicted for outing Joe Wilson's wife as a CIA operative. Thirty months ago, many of those anxious to see the White House brought down were hauling its water. Consider the role played by our newspaper of record, the New York Times.

To stampede us into a war neoconseratives had been plotting for a decade, Douglas Feith, the Pentagon's No. 3, set up an Office of Special Plans. Its role: Cherry-pick the intel that Saddam was acquiring weapons of mass destruction and hell-bent on using them on the United States. Then, stovepipe the hot stuff to the White House Iraq Group, and ignore the contradictory evidence.

A primary source of the hot intel about poison gas vans and nuclear bomb programs was a tight-knit exile group led by Ahmed Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress and neocon-Pentagon favorite to lead the new Iraq.

But once the hyped intel suggesting Saddam was an imminent and mortal threat had been extracted, the WHIG needed to run it through a media centrifuge to convert it into hard news.

Enter Judy Miller, self-styled "Ms. Run Amok" and the go-to girl for the War Party. Miller took the cherry-picked intel and planted it on Page 1, enabling War Party propagandists to hit the TV talk-show circuit and reference ominous stories in the New York Times about how imminent a threat Saddam had become.

These propagandists were parroting their own pre-cooked intel, but it now had the imprimatur of the Times. The White House had seduced the good Gray Lady of 43rd Street into turning tricks for war.
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