Apr 12 2006
Washington Post Lied to Readers, Leaked Intel
Confederate yankee has the scoop on how the Washington Post lied to its readers when it claimed unanimous agreement regarding WMD capability in Iraq:
The actual facts are that a single team of nine civilian experts wrote a “unanimous” report that was only unanimous within their one group, while two military teams of experts reached the conclusion that these were bioweapons labs. By careful and I believe willful deceit, the Post would seem to purposefully imply that all experts examining the suspected bio-weapons trailers unanimously came to the conclusion that these trailers were not used to manufacture bio-weapons, and that the Administration blatantly lied in the face of the evidence. The actual facts are that this was not only a not a unanimous report, but that the “unanimous” report of the one team was actually a minority view overall.
This is willful misrepresentation of the facts by Joby Warrick and the editors of the Washington Post in a page one story. There were indeed varied interpretations of the suitability of these trailers to manufacture bio-weapons, yet the Post article purposefully decived its readers to lend weight and column inches to the minority viewpoint that was not unanimous as they suggested.
For an organization whose only asset is their reputation to be truthful and objective, the post just lost an incredibly amount of its inherent value in one decietful act.
Addendum: Note that Seixon has links to older articles (which I recalled I posted on but cannot find the post, so Seixon beat me to it!) where the fact is there was no consensus on the civilian team either!
The case of the WaPo whopper (PM UPDATE)…
Prepare yourself this morning for a fresh deluge of postings and assertions from the anti-war left who are screaming once again “BUSH LIED!!!!!!!!!!!” after referencing the following Washington Post article, the headline of which reads:
Lac…
The WaPo article pretends that this third team went on a “secret mission” and that it hadn’t been talked about publicly before – lie. As I show, the press was talking about it three years ago, both in the US and the UK. In fact, the UK sent their own squad down to Iraq to check these trailers out.
I really can’t believe that these things were for hydrogen. Every single circumstantial fact points away from that conclusion. Why would you make hydrogen with a fermentor?? Why not a hydrolysis machine? Why not at a factory and transport it in tanks like normal people? It makes absolutely no sense.
For all those “experts” who claim that the setup was to make hydrogen: PROVE IT!
Get that damn thing up and running and make some hydrogen. You say it’s for hydrogen, so make hydrogen!
Let me guess, they sent Joe Wilson over to check out the trailers… Haw haw haw.
Srixon, bravo on a well researched piece.
Captain’s quarters cites it and adds some comments of his own. http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/archives/006736.php
Is there a war going on inside the WaPo?