The mainstream media's Weapons of Mass Deception

If you happen to read your daily paper this morning, odds are you'll stumble across this article:

WMD claim was known to be false On May 29, 2003, 50 days after the fall of Baghdad, President Bush proclaimed a fresh victory for his administration in Iraq: Two small trailers captured by U.S. and Kurdish troops had turned out to be long-sought mobile “biological laboratories.” He declared, “We have found the weapons of mass destruction.” The claim, repeated by top administration officials for months afterward, was hailed at the time as a vindication of the decision to go to war. But even as Bush spoke, U.S. intelligence officials possessed powerful evidence that it was not true. A secret fact-finding mission to Iraq – not made public until now – had already concluded that the trailers had nothing to do with biological weapons...

Hmmm. That seems like a damaging story for the administration. Let's skip to paragraph twelve, however:

...the technical team was among several groups that analyzed the suspected mobile labs throughout the spring and summer of 2003. Two teams of military experts who viewed the trailers soon after their discovery concluded that the facilities were weapons labs, a finding that strongly influenced views of intelligence officials in Washington...

Thus, the real story -- the one left unreported in the lede -- is that the Pentagon dispatched three teams to evaluate the mobile labs. Two of the three teams concluded that the trailers were mobile bioweapons labs.

Isn't it amazing that fact isn't called out in the headline or the first eleven paragraphs?

Speaking of WMD, LGF records a fascinating snippet of a Melanie Phillips conversation with Georges Sada, formerly Air Vice Marshal for Saddam Hussein's Air Force:

In April 2004, a group of al Qaeda terrorists was caught in Jordan with 20 tons of Sarin gas. When Sada heard of this, he says, his blood ran cold. There was only one place which was capable of producing 20 tons of Sarin: Saddam’s Iraq. To his horror, he says, he realised at that moment that Saddam’s WMD had got into the hands of al Qaeda. Earlier this year, Sada was interrogated about his claims by the American House Intelligence committee, to whom he gave the names of the Iraqi pilots. Subsequently, he says, the Committee went to Iraq and spoke to the pilots. The result, he says, is that a major American investigative and diplomatic effort is now under way to finally locate the missing WMD. But in Britain, I say, people now firmly believe that there were no WMD and that we were taken to war on a lie. Sada looks utterly flabbergasted. ‘How can they possibly think that?’ he asks in bewilderment and anger, and puts his head in his hands.

It's quite amazing to me that the mainstream media has acted the as the literary equivalent of a contortionist to avoid the uncomfortable facts. Combine these various stories along with the HARMONY disclosures that Hussein was both (a) operating closely with Al Qaeda; and (b) hording WMD documentation and material, and we start to assemble the very valid rationale for taking out Hussein.

It's a pity the mainstream media can't take the time to focus on fact-based news. I guess that would detract from their efforts to unseat the GOP in the next sequence of elections.