May 22 2009

McClatchy Nails Cheney To The Wall

(11 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

Whenever I read a piece like the one last night from McClatchy News Service, “Cheney’s speech contained omissions, misstatements”,  I often wonder where they’ve been for the last 8 years, pre-Obama? To its credit though, McClatchy had far better reporting going on than AP and Reuters during the Bush years. This one is just scorching… HOT! It’s the kind of reporting we all lusted after, but never got, while Cheney was in office.

Cheney said that “the key to any strategy is accurate intelligence,” but the Bush administration ignored warnings from experts in the CIA , the Defense Intelligence Agency , the State Department , the Department of Energy and other agencies, and used false or exaggerated intelligence supplied by Iraqi exile groups and others to help make its case for the 2003 invasion.

I envision Yosemite Sam, right after Bugs blows him up with gunpowder or something, still smoldering.

– Cheney said that only “ruthless enemies of this country” were detained by U.S. operatives overseas and taken to secret U.S. prisons.

A 2008 McClatchy investigation, however, found that the vast majority of Guantanamo detainees captured in 2001 and 2002 in Afghanistan and Pakistan were innocent citizens or low-level fighters of little intelligence value who were turned over to American officials for money or because of personal or political rivalries.

This piece, written by reporters Jonathan S. Landay and Warren P. Strobel, is to be applauded. It’s nice to see some media not afraid of Dick Cheney.

There’s so much more at the link. For your viewing pleasure (don’t miss it!):

http://news.yahoo.com/s/mcclat…

14 comments

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  1. does anyone notice?  Cold comfort during the depression.

    But the fact that Cheney still gets air time…just more slack-jawed amazement at our media.

    The coverage of AIE deserves the David Gregory Special Merit Award for Douche Nozzlery.

  2. Probably no person is more responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians in Iraq than Cheney.

    If any Sunday Pundit Show stooge ever had the character to ask him about mega civilan deaths he would likely just turn his head and say, “So”?

  3. I thought once the Bushies were gone the so called press would ‘change’. I figured that having sold the bushies to the people,pumped the fear and outright lied about their dirty deeds they would have to at the least acknowledge that their created reality had been rejected and that the jig was up. I forgot that they are owned by the same people who ‘own the place’.

    Seems once they created the reality they have no option but to continue with their storyline. My only consolation is that they are losing money and that alternative sources are gaining. It does how ever piss me off that the chattering is the same and that it’s done by the same assorted idiots that I’ve had to listen to for the last decade. Even NPR is a jaw dropper.

    Cheney should be behind bars not on MSNBC spilling his evil guts out. Shocking to have the media still acting like this is just politics. As you say where they for the last 8 years and why are they still at it.        

  4. McClatchy owns four newspapers in Washington State:  Bellingham Herald, Morning News Tribune (Tacoma), The Olympian (Olympia) and the Tri-Cities Herald (Kennewick, Pasco & Richland).  The Tri-Cities Herald is located in the blood-red half of the state (the area east of the Cascades) and is home to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, where the plutonium was manfactured that was used in the first nuclear bomb, tested at the Trinity site, and in Fat Man, the bomb detonated over Nagasaki, Japan.

    Predictably, the eastern part of the state is blood-red, with the sole exceptions of Spokane County (home of the second or third largest city in the state, depending upon whether you are from Spokane or Tacoma) and Whitman County, home of Washington State University, the second largest college/university in the state.  In fact, most of eastern Washington could rival the Wyoming/Idaho/Utah cabal and the Old South for wingnuts per capita.

    Three of the four McClatchy newspapers in Washington state printed this story.  

    Any guesses as to which one choose to protect is readers from such inconvenient truths?

    Even though Thomas Jefferson suffered mightily under the withering attacks from newspapers of his day, and was quote as follows:


    I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it.

    The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.

    Advertisements… contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper.

           Letter to Nathaniel Macon, January 12, 1819

    But he also stated the following:

    No government ought to be without censors & where the press is free, no one ever will.

            Letter to George Washington, September 9, 1792

    Errors of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.

    I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them but to inform their discretion.

    This writer would argue that censorship by our newspapers and news organizations makes us less, not more, safe.

    • RUKind on May 23, 2009 at 09:29
    • #

    I feel comfortable that I can find the truth there. No other news organization does that for me. None. The Real News is a possibility; NPR is good and PBS’s Friday night line-up – Washington Week in Review, NOW, Bill Moyer’s Journal and Frontline are like an oasis in the desert for me.

    I spent seven months (Dec 2006 – Jun 2007) getting a health issue into remission. During that time I had no TV or net. When I got back to the world of cable and blogs I found that the presence of propaganda was overwhelming. I had to find my own truth-meter and apply it to everything I read or saw broadcast.

    For what it’s worth, I have a Firefox folder I call “Startup” which I open in all tabs every day. It goes like this:

    Docudharma

    Jon Taplin’s Blog (recent addition recced by my son, A+ so far)

    TPM (daily must for me)

    Daily Kos (remnant from a different time; I rarely do more than quick scan it; probably will drop it soon)

    McClatchy (best political cartoonist collection there is)

    The Raw Story (some awesome finds in the tiny crevices and links)

    HuffPo (some FluffPo in there too but you can’t be dead serious all the time)

    CNN (good for breaking stuff; quick scan)

    Media Matters (slower, more deliberate site with great depth)

    Wiki (for those times I need more info or am writing a piece)

    Google (just to have it handy)

    I’ll probably drop DKos and put The Real News in it’s slot).

    Does anyone else out there have this same type of set-up? If so, who do you trust for truthful news and analysis? E.g., I used to trust CNN but now I only trust Jack Cafferty over there and Campbell Brown is OK so far. Gone are the days of Bernie Shaw. The “major” networks are just corporate mouthpieces. I trust absolutely no one at any of them.

    Thoughts anyone? I’d like to get some feedback and tips on this.

    Satya.

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