June 26, 2004

“Plausible Deniability” and Big Media: The Biggest Suppressed Stories of the Year

Here are my candidates for two of the most gigantic stories suppressed so far this year by big media:

#1. Hussein busted up giant WMD factories and shipped them out of Iraq before and during the war.

WASHINGTON – Most of the media continues to report that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

But evidence that Iraq had those weapons, or could have easily manufactured them, is now turning up in junkyards around the world. Most news organizations are ignoring the story.

I tell my friends this and they don’t believe it even happened. So yes, it was printed by the NY Times—buried on page 12:

THE REACH OF WAR: WEAPONS INSPECTIONS; Suspect Items From Iraq Shipped Abroad, U.N. Says

UNITED NATIONS, June 9— Equipment and material that could have been used to produce banned weapons and long-range missiles have been emptied from Iraqi sites since the war started and shipped abroad, the head of the United Nations inspectors office told the Security Council on Wednesday.

As the NY Times reports, factories that can produce WMD were busted up and shipped out of Iraq in the form of scrap metal during the Iraq war.

...Mr. Perricos accompanied his briefing with a report showing satellite photos of a fully built-up missile site near Baghdad in May 2003 and the same site denuded in February 2004.

His spokesman, Ewen Buchanan, said that items removed from the site included fermenters, a freeze drier, distillation columns, parts of missiles and a reactor vessel—all tools suitable for making biological or chemical weapons.

This story, which ends the “Bush lied” argument, was hidden on a back page of the NY Times. Big media is doing all they can to keep you from hearing about it.

#2. Per Russian President Putin, Russian intelligence reported that Hussein planned terrorist attacks on the U.S.

How do you ignore a story like this?

Per Victor Davis Hanson:

Russia looks at al Qaeda through the prism of Chechnya. For all its triangulation it wants America to succeed as President Putin’s amazing but mostly unheralded (buried on page 8 of the New York Times) revelation about Saddam’s terrorist plans suggests.

That’s right, the NY times hid this one on page 8:

MOSCOW, June 18 President Vladimir V. Putin said Friday that Russia gave intelligence reports to the Bush administration suggesting that Saddam Hussein’s government was preparing terrorist attacks in the United States or against American targets overseas.

This is how papers like the NY Times get “plausible deniability”—they print a story like this once, on a back page, so that they can’t be accused of not covering it. Most readers never see it. And after that one article, they ignore it. No follow-up articles are printed. The story is suppressed.

As for TV news—they often ignore such stories altogether.

And the public doesn’t hear about them.

That’s how big media tries to control how you vote.