If anxious viewers at home were hoping for some last-minute insight from Bush to help ease their doubts about the imminent war, why it had to be fought now, and why so many of the United States’ longtime allies around the world refused to support it, those viewers were likely disappointed as the president stuck to his well-worn talking points (“Saddam Hussein has had twelve years to disarm. He is deceiving people”). And for any viewers who held out hope that members of the assembled mainstream media (hereafter, “MSM”) would firmly, yet respectfully, press Bush for answers to tough questions about the pending invasion, they could have turned their TVs off at 8:05 p.m.

The press corps’s barely-there performance that night, as reporters quietly melted into the scenery, coming at such a crucial moment in time remains an industry-wide embarrassment. Laying out the reasons for war, Bush that night mentioned al-Qaida and the terrorist attacks of September 11 thirteen times in less than an hour, yet not a single journalist challenged the presumed connection Bush was making between al-Qaida and Iraq, despite the fact that intelligence sources had publicly questioned any such association. And during the Q&A session, nobody bothered to ask Bush about the elusive Osama bin Laden, the terrorist mastermind whom Bush had vowed to capture. Follow-up questions were nonexistent, which only encouraged Bush to give answers to questions he was not asked.

At one point while making his way through the press questioners, Bush awkwardly referred to a list of reporters whom he was instructed to call on. “This is scripted,” he joked. The press laughed. But Bush meant it was scripted, literally. White House spokesman Ari Fleischer later admitted he compiled Bush’s cheat sheet, which made sure he did not call on reporters from some prominent outlets like Time, Newsweek, USA Today, or the Washington Post. Yet even after Bush announced the event was “scripted,” reporters, either embarrassed for Bush or embarrassed for themselves, continued to play the part of eager participants at a spontaneous news conference, shooting their hands up in the air in hopes of getting Bush’s attention. For TV viewers it certainly looked like an actual press event.

That was not the night’s only oddly scripted moment. Before the cameras went live, White House handlers, in a highly unusual move, marched veteran reporters to their seats in the East Room, two-by-two, like school children being led onto the stage for the annual holiday pageant. The White House was taking no chances with the choreography. Looking back on the night, New York Times White House correspondent Elisabeth Bumiller defended the press corps’ timid behavior: “I think we were very deferential because … it’s live, it’s very intense, it’s frightening to stand up there. Think about it, you’ re standing up on prime-time live TV asking the president of the United States a question when the country’s about to go to war,” she told students at Towson University in Maryland. “There was a very serious, somber tone that evening, and no one wanted to get into an argument with the president at this very serious time.”

It’s unlikely viewers expected “an argument” that night in the East Room. But what about simply asking pointed questions and firmly requesting a direct response? On March 6, even that was beyond the media’s grasp. The entire press conference performance was a farce — the staging, the seating, the questions, the order, and the answers. Nothing about it was real or truly informative. It was, nonetheless, unintentionally revealing. Not revealing about the war, Bush’s rationale, or about the bloody, sustained conflict that was about to be unleashed inside Iraq. Reporters helped shed virtually no light on those key issues. Instead, the calculated kabuki press conference, stage-managed by the White House employing the nation’s most elite reporters as high-profile extras, did reveal what viewers needed to know about the mind-set of the MSM on the eve of war.

And for viewers that night who didn’t get a strong enough sense of just how obediently in-step the press corps was with the White House, there was the televised post-press conference analysis. On MSNBC, for instance, “Hardball’s” Chris Matthews hosted a full hour of discussion. In order to get a wide array of opinion, he invited a pro-war Republican senator (Saxby Chambliss, from Georgia), a pro-war former Secretary of State (Lawrence Eagleburger), a pro-war retired Army general (Montgomery Meigs), pro-war retired Air Force general (Buster Glosson), a pro-war Republican pollster (Frank Luntz), as well as, for the sake of balance, somebody who, twenty-five years earlier, once worked in Jimmy Carter’s White House (Pat Caddell).

Battered by accusations of a liberal bias and determined to prove their conservative critics wrong, the press during the run-up to the war — timid, deferential, unsure, cautious, and often intentionally unthinking — came as close as possible to abdicating its reason for existing in the first place, which is to accurately inform citizens, particularly during times of great national interest. Indeed, the MSM’s failings were all the more important because of the unusually influential role they played in advance of the war-of-choice with Iraq. “When America has been attacked — at Pearl Harbor, or as on September 11 — the government needed merely to tell the people that it was our duty to respond, and the people rightly conferred their authority,” noted Harold Meyerson in the American Prospect magazine. “But a war of choice is a different matter entirely. In that circumstance, the people will ask why. The people will need to be convinced that their sons and daughters and husbands and wives should go halfway around the world to fight a nemesis that they didn’t really know was a nemesis.”

It’s not fair to suggest the MSM alone convinced Americans to send some sons and daughter to fight. But the press went out of its way to tell a pleasing, administration-friendly tale about the pending war. In truth, Bush never could have ordered the invasion of Iraq — never could have sold the idea at home — if it weren’t for the help he received from the MSM, and particularly the stamp of approval he received from so-called liberal media institutions such as the Washington Post, which in February of 2003 alone, editorialized in favor of war nine times. (Between September 2002 and February 2003, the paper editorialized twenty-six times in favor of the war.) The Post had plenty of company from the liberal East Coast media cabal, with high-profile columnists and editors — the newfound liberal hawks — at the New Yorker, Newsweek, Time, the New York Times, the New Republic and elsewhere all signing on for a war of preemption. By the time the invasion began, the de facto position among the Beltway chattering class was clearly one that backed Bush and favored war. Years later the New York Times Magazine wrote that most “journalists in Washington found it almost inconceivable, even during the period before a fiercely contested midterm election [in 2002], that the intelligence used to justify the war might simply be invented.” Hollywood peace activists could conceive it, but serious Beltway journalists could not? That’s hard to believe. More likely journalists could conceive it but, understanding the MSM unspoken guidelines — both social and political — were too timid to express it at the time of war.

To oppose the invasion vocally was to be outside the media mainstream and to invite scorn. Like some nervous Democratic members of Congress right before the war, MSM journalists and pundits seemed to scramble for political cover so as to not subject themselves to conservative catcalls. One year later, a pro-war writer for Slate conceded he was “embarrassed” by his support for the ill-fated invasion but he insisted, “you’ve got to take risks.” But supporting the war posed no professional risk. The only MSM risks taken at the time of the invasion were by pundits who staked out an unambiguous position in opposing the war. Bush’s rationale for war — Saddam Hussein, sitting on a swelling stockpile of weapons of mass destruction, posing a grave and imminent threat to America — turned out to be untrue. And for that, the press must shoulder some blame. Because the MSM not only failed to ask pressing questions, or raise serious doubts about the White House’s controversial WMD assertion, but in some high-profile instances, such as with Judith Miller’s reporting for the New York Times, the MSM were responsible for spreading the White House deceptions about Saddam’s alleged stockpile; they were guilty of “incestuous amplification,” as former Florida senator Senator Bob Graham called it. Being meek and timid and dictating administration spin amidst a wartime culture is one thing. But to be actively engaged in the spin, to give it a louder and more hysterical voice, is something else all together. In fact, the compliant press repeated almost every administration claim about the threat posed to America by Saddam. The fact that virtually every one of those claims turned out to be false only added to the media’s malpractice.

And when not playing up the threat of WMDs in 2002 and 2003, the press was busy playing down the significance of peace activists and war doubters, as the MSM instead handed over the press platform at times exclusively to pro-war drum beaters and government talking heads. The White House could not have asked for more. Of course, by March 2003, the White House had already become accustomed to having a compliant press diligently detail each and every one of the administration’s War on Terror warnings, warnings that played to Bush’s political strength by casting him as a wartime leader and warnings that almost always fell into the less-than-meets-the-eye category. The often overblown MSM reporting on terror threats, fed directly from the White House, segued right into the overblown reporting on Saddam’s deadly arsenal, also fed directly from the White House. The latter would not have been possible without the former. The press’s timid War on Terror coverage foreshadowed its timid WMD coverage.

As Washington Post ombudsman Michael Getler later wrote, the MSM’s performance in 2002 and 2003 — its inability and refusal to demand sharp answers to difficult questions about prewar intelligence — likely represented their most crucial newsroom failing in nearly half a century. “How did a country on the leading edge of the information age get this so wrong and express so little skepticism and challenge?” asked Getler. “How did an entire system of government and a free press set out on a search for something and fail to notice, or even warn us in a timely or prominent way, that it wasn’t or might not be there?” The single-word answer is, timidity.

Looking back, bigfoot journalists conceded they failed to do their jobs during the run-up to war. ABC’s Ted Koppel admitted, “If anything, what we’ve been criticized for, and probably more justifiably, is that we were too timid before the war.” Dan Rather agreed: “We did not do our job of pressing and asking enough questions often enough.” They weren’t the only ones disappointed. A majority of Americans thought the news media could have done a better job informing the public about Iraq and the stakes involved in going to war, according to an August 2005 survey conducted by the McCormick Tribune Foundation in Chicago.

While some journalists admitted their mistakes, most refused to admit it was political pressure from the right and a fear of being labeled unpatriotic that fueled the timidity. Instead, journalists offered up head-scratching explanations for their timorous prewar performance. PBS’s Jim Lehrer suggested journalists just weren’t smart enough to have foreseen all the troubles that would plague Iraq following the invasion. Appearing on MSNBC’s “Hardball,” Lehrer was asked by host Matthews about the press’s wartime performance. Matthews noted, “During [the] course of the war, there was a lot of snap-to-it coverage. We’ re at war. We have to root for the country to some extent. You’ re not supposed to be too aggressively critical of a country at combat, especially when it’s your own.” Matthews asked Lehrer if he thought the press had failed to provide “critical analysis” in the months before the war.

Lehrer: I do. The word “occupation,” keep in mind, Chris, was never mentioned in the run-up to the war. It was “liberation.” So as a consequence, those of us in journalism never even looked at the issue of occupation.

Matthews: Because?

Lehrer: Because it just didn’t occur to us. We weren’t smart enough to do it. I agree. I think it was a dereliction of our — in retrospective.

It never occurred to journalists that the United States might have to effectively occupy Iraq in the wake of the invasion? That’s just not believable. It’s far more likely journalists were too anxious to express their doubts during the drum-beating of early 2003. Lehrer later returned to the topic, suggesting even if journalists had been smart enough to figure out the occupation angle, it still would have been hard to report it out:

Lehrer: It would have been difficult to have had debates about that going in, when the president and the government of the — it’s not talking about “occupation.” They’re talking about — it would have been — it would have taken some — you’d have had to have gone against the grain.

“Could ‘courage’ be the word Lehrer sought?” asked the Daily Howler. “Did he want to say: ‘It would have taken some courage’ ” for the nation’s press to have gone against the grain.

Equally odd, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, looking back on the press’s failings with regards to Iraq, suggested, “The media were victims of their own professionalism. Because there was little criticism of the war from prominent Democrats and foreign policy analysts, journalistic rules meant we shouldn’t create a debate on our own.”

Little criticism of the war from prominent Democrats? In a sense, Ignatius was right and for Post readers that statement may have had a ring of truth to it simply because the Post seemed to do such a masterful job of ignoring prewar criticism from prominent Democrats, like party stalwart Senator Ted Kennedy. In September 2002 he made a passionate, provocative, and newsworthy speech raising all sorts of doubts about the war. It garnered exactly one sentence — thirty-six words total — of coverage from the Post, which in 2002 printed more than a thousand articles and columns, totaling perhaps 1 million words about Iraq, but only set aside thirty-six words for Kennedy’s antiwar cry. As for Ignatius’s suggestions that journalists were supposed to wait to be signaled by the political parties before leaping into action — that reporters and pundits couldn’t raise doubts about the war because Democrats, supposedly, were not — that represented an entirely new standard for news gathering. Or did Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein wait for Democrats to raise doubts about Watergate before the duo started making calls?

When the Post was not downplaying criticism from Democrats, it was downplaying the warnings from respected foreign policy analysts, and even decorated generals. On October 10, 2002, retired Marine General Anthony Zinni, the former head of Central Command for U.S. forces in the Middle East, delivered a keynote address at a Washington think tank where he outlined his grave concerns about the Bush administration’s war with Iraq. Among the key points made by Zinni, who endorsed Bush during the 2000 campaign and whom Bush then handpicked to serve as the United States’ envoy to the Middle East, was that war with Iraq should not be the United States’s top priority. “I’m not convinced we need to do this now,” said Zinni. “I believe that [Saddam] can be deterred and is containable at this moment.” How did the Post play the antiwar speech by one of the administration’s own senior officials? It set aside 336 words, which were tucked away on page 16. (One year later Zinni spoke before the U.S. Naval Institute and the Marine Corps Association, undressed the administration for its bungled handling of the war, and famously described its misguided preemptive war effort as “a brain fart of an idea.” The Washington Post declined to cover those remarks.)

Zinni was hardly alone in getting snubbed. A survey conducted by the liberal media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting focused on the first two weeks of February, 2003, when the debate about the war should have been raging on the public airwaves. The survey found that of 393 people interviewed on-camera for network news reports about the war, just 6 percent were people who expressed skepticism about the looming invasion. Keep in mind, at that time a majority of Americans — 61 percent according to one national poll — expressed some skepticism over the war; specifically favoring diplomacy over invasion. But on television, the narrative was quite different. Additionally, according to Media Matters for America, 23 percent of U.S. senators voted to oppose the war in the fall of 2002, but only 11 percent of the senators invited to appear on the Sunday morning talk shows prior to the invasion were antiwar.

Then again it should not have been surprising that most guests invited by MSM producers to discuss the war on television were in favor of it, since so many of the experts were on the government payroll themselves. According to figures from media analyst Andrew Tyndall, of the 414 Iraq stories broadcast on NBC, ABC, and CBS from September 2002 until February 2003, almost all the stories could be traced back to sources from the White House, the Pentagon, or the State Department. Only 34 stories, or just 8 percent, were of independent origin.

Independence did not seem to be a trait held in particularly high regard by the MSM at the time. Prior to the invasion of Iraq, CNN’s then-news chief Eason Jordan took the extraordinary step of making sure he received a personal okay from Pentagon officials regarding the retired military officers CNN planned to use as on-air commentators for its war coverage. As Jordan explained it, “I went to the Pentagon myself several times before the war started and met with important people there and said, for instance, at CNN, ‘Here are the generals we’re thinking of retaining to advise us on the air and off about the war.’ And we got a big thumbs-up on all of them. That was important.”

MSNBC was so nervous about employing an on-air liberal host opposing Bush’s ordered invasion that it fired Phil Donahue preemptively in 2003, after an internal memo pointed out the legendary talk show host presented “a difficult public face for NBC in a time of war.” MSNBC executives would not confirm — nor deny — the existence of the report, which stressed the corporate discomfort Donahue’s show might present if it opposed the war while “at the same time our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity.” By canning Donahue, MSNBC made sure that cable viewers had no place to turn for a nightly opinion program whose host forcefully questioned the invasion. The irony was that at the time of Donahue’s firing one month before bombs started falling on Baghdad, MSNBC officials cited the host’s weak ratings as the reason for the change. In truth, Donahue was beating out Chris Matthews as MSNBC’s highest-rated host.

Newspapers played it safe, too. In 2003 the Columbia Journalism Review called around to letters-page editors to gauge reader response to the looming war in Iraq and was told that at The Tennessean in Nashville letters were running 70 percent against the war, but that the newspaper was trying to run as many pro-war letters as possible in order to avoid accusations of bias.

Indeed, between the time Bush first included Iraq as part of the “axis of evil” in January 2002, and the time the invasion commenced in March 2003, the MSM didn’t seem to know how to cover those who opposed the war. The press just wanted the protesters to go away. Maybe because, as influential broadcast news consulting firm Frank N. Magid Associates informed its clients, covering antiwar protesters turned off news consumers, according to its survey. On October 26, 2004, antiwar protesters staged a massive rally in Washington, D.C., drawing more than 100,000 people from across the country. The next day in a small piece on page 8 that was accompanied by a photo larger than the article itself, the New York Times reported falsely that “fewer people attended than organizers had said they hoped for.” Two days later, scrambling to fix the article’s obvious error, yet at the same time refusing to run an actual correction, the Times published a second, sort of do-over article about the rally. As historian Todd Gitlin noted, “the Times ran a rare nonapology apology story under the peculiarly passive headline, “Rally in Washington Is Said to Invigorate the Antiwar Movement,” stating that the demonstration had drawn “100,000 by police estimates and 200,000 by organizers” this time declaring that the numbers “startled even organizers.”

Meanwhile, editors at the Washington Post seemed similarly unsure how to handle the October 2004 outpouring of antiwar sentiment in its backyard, as the newspaper dramatically downplayed the story. The Post’s ombudsman Michael Getler was not impressed. “Last Saturday, some 100,000 people, and possibly more, gathered in downtown Washington to protest against possible U.S. military action against Iraq,” he wrote. “The Post did not put the story on the front page Sunday. It put it halfway down the front page of the Metro section, with a couple of ho-hum photographs that captured the protest’s fringe elements.” Months later Getler detailed the Post’s laundry list of misses when it came to covering the antiwar movement or even noteworthy displays of war doubt. The list is worth reading in full, while keeping in mind the extraordinary resources the Post devoted to covering the war story, albeit only certain parts of the war story:

“The [missed opportunities] started last August with the failure to record promptly the doubts of then-House Majority Leader Richard K. Armey (R-Tex.) and of Brent Scowcroft, the first President Bush’s national security adviser. The first public hearings on the implications of war, held by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, got just a few paragraphs at the end of stories. In September, there was no spot coverage of the testimony of three retired four-star generals before the Senate Armed Services Committee warning against an attack without exhausting diplomatic options and gaining United Nations backing. Soon after, a widely reported speech by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) got one line in The Post, and large antiwar rallies in London and Rome went unreported the next day. In October, when more than 100,000 people gathered in Washington to protest war, the paper put the story in the Metro section. Then came complaints that a major speech by Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.), one of the few senators who has taken a strong antiwar position, was missed and that the story about the most recent bin Laden audiotape failed to point out bin Laden’s description of Iraqi leaders as “infidels.” An overflow town meeting on war policy in Alexandria was missed. A rare story last month estimating the cost of the war, which was front-page news elsewhere, ran on Page A19. The congressional testimony the following day of Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, who discounted those cost estimates and who described as “wildly off the mark” previous testimony by the Army chief of staff that hundreds of thousands of troops might be needed for occupation duty, was not reported.”

The MSM’s awkward look-the-other-way approach to peace activists extended for years. In August 2005 Cindy Sheehan, a mother from Vacaville, California, whose son Casey was killed while serving in Iraq, set up a bring-the-troops-home vigil in Crawford, Texas, as Bush relaxed during his five-week vacation. On August 8, and one week into her campaign, the New York Times profiled Sheehan, reporting that much to the White House’s chagrin, she and her antiwar protest had been “transformed into a news media phenomenon.”

But had she really? The story certainly seemed compelling; an angry mom camped out on the side of the road in the 100 degree Texas heat waiting out a reluctant president who refused to meet with her but whose caravan of Secret Service SUVs actually sped past her in a cloud of dust on the way to a GOP fundraiser. Yes, reporters took an early interest. But as had become customary since 2003 when dealing with any antiwar protest story, the press proceeded with extreme caution.

Between August 5 and August 8, the time frame during which the Times called Sheehan a “phenomenon,” here’s how many times “Cindy Sheehan” was mentioned on CNN: eight. Between August 5 and August 8, here’s how many times “Britney Spears” was mentioned on CNN: eighteen.

During the second and third weeks of August the MSM did increase its coverage of Sheehan’s protest, as her antiwar camp quickly swelled in size to include hundreds of fellow demonstrators. (USA Today correctly described it as a “headline-grabbing national movement.”) But there were still some notable MSM holdouts. For three weeks, as the protest story continued to mushroom, ABC’s “Nightline” refused to touch it. (“Nightline” finally addressed the Sheehan story on August 19, giving it just seven minutes of air time.) The omission was telling because, despite the uptick in print coverage, the Sheehan story still had not crossed over into phenomenon territory for most television producers, and certainly not at network news outlets. For instance, between August 8 and August 18, ABC News aired more than fifty hours of morning and evening national news programming, but mentioned “Cindy Sheehan” just twenty-six times.

Compare that to the 2005 springtime news craze when Terri Schiavo’s parents, who like Sheehan, staged a very public, and political, vigil for their child. The Schiavo story, cherished by conservatives, dominated the networks night after night. During the peak ten-day period of that saga, from March 20 to March 30, here’s how many times ABC News mentioned “Terri Schiavo”: 189. During that same stretch “Nightline” devoted four entire programs to the story. The message was clear: Schiavo, a right-to-life martyr (for some) was very big news, but Sheehan, an antiwar martyr (for some), was not.

As Sheehan’s star rose through August, so did the right-wing attacks. As nervous Bush supporters watched the president’s approval rating slide, they unleashed their wrath on Sheehan, labeling the mourning mom a “crazy,” “anti-Semite,” “left-wing moonbat,” “crackpot” whose behavior bordered on “treasonous” and who was nothing more than a “hysterical noncombatant.” They also charged that Sheehan was a creation of the radical left, that she was being exploited, and she did not represent mainstream Americans. That kind of organized attack was to be expected from the conservative operatives. What was not expected was how easily some in the MSM absorbed those talking points for themselves. On MSNBC, Norah O’Donnell referred to the “left-wing supporters” behind Sheehan. Later she asked a guest if Sheehan had become “a tool of the left,” while pressing another on whether it was wise for Sheehan to be associated with “antiwar extremists” camped out in Crawford. (At no point during the 2005 Schiavo story did an MSNBC anchor ever suggest the pro-life parents had become “tools of the right.”)

The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank wondered out loud if Sheehan would be remembered as a modern-day Lyndon LaRouche, the fringe political figure who’s been accused of being a cult leader and fascist, and who served a prison sentence for mail fraud and tax code violations. Later that month, Milbank gave prominent display in the Post to a right-wing activist who accused Sheehan of being a communist. Meanwhile, Milbank’s Post colleague Mike Allen, appearing on CBS’s Face the Nation on August 21, belittled the Crawford protesters by highlighting what he considered to be the camp’s fringe elements: “Right now it’s PETA, hippies, Naderites.” Allen conveniently left out the fact that also in attendance at the Sheehan camp were military parents whose children had also been killed while serving in Iraq.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution printed an opinion column in which a critic of Sheehan asserted “Cindy Sheehan evidently thinks little of her deceased son.” Asked if that was appropriate, even in an opinion column, to suggest a mother “thinks little” of her dead son, the Journal- Constitution’s op-ed page editor David Beasley insisted the attack on Sheehan was fair game. Yet it’s hard to imagine that if a prominent Georgia politician’s son was killed in the line of duty the Journal-Constitution op-ed page would allow a columnist to assert that the politician thought little of his or her dead son.

At the same time several corporate-owned television stations refused to broadcast antiwar ads that Sheehan appeared in. In one ad Sheehan pleaded with Bush for a meeting and accused him of lying to the American people about Iraq’s development of weapons of mass destruction and its connection to al-Qaida. An ABC affiliate in Utah owned by Clear Channel Communications informed backers their ad was an “inappropriate commercial advertisement for Salt Lake City.” A CBS affiliate in Boise, Idaho, also refused to air the ad, insisting its claim that Bush lied about Iraq’s WMDs was not provable. The station’s action was highly unusual. As the Associated Press noted in a 2004 article about political advertising, “Stations rarely reject commercials” over a concern about accuracy.

The following month, on September 24, Sheehan helped lead a massive antiwar rally in Washington, D.C., which drew between 100,000 and 200,000 participants, making it the largest United States demonstration since the war began. Nonetheless, the event was effectively boycotted by television news outlets. Instead, CNN, Fox, and MSNBC were obsessed with providing wildly overexcited coverage of Hurricane Rita, which delivered less-than-expected damage as it came ashore in the marshlands along the Texas and Louisiana borders. Unlike Hurricane Katrina, the monster storm that decapitated New Orleans just weeks before, television news outlets struggled to find compelling images of real Rita-related devastation to justify their breathless, around-the-clock coverage, while at the same time they all but refused to even acknowledge the historic antiwar rally.

Question: If between 100,000 and 200,000 pro-war demonstrators had assembled in the nation’s capital on that same September 2005 weekend and cheered Bush outside the White House, would the MSM have given them just cursory coverage, Rita or no Rita?

The night of the antiwar protest, NBC Nightly News at least managed to mention the rally on the air. Anchor Brian Williams, though, was careful to give one sentence to the antiwar protesters and one sentence to a small group of pro-war demonstrators who also gathered in Washington, D.C., that day. Antiwar forces absolutely dwarfed their pro-war counterparts but NBC news executives thought both groups deserved the same amount of coverage, with the subtext being dueling war demonstrators facing off against each other. That was a common MSM theme. CNN reported it “was a weekend of protests and counter-protests in Washington.”

The MSM’s ingrained timidity regarding war protesters, even in 2005, was telling because on the eve of the Sheehan-led rally, a CNN/USA Today poll revealed 67 percent of Americans disapproved of Bush’s handling of the war in Iraq and 59 percent said sending troops to invade Iraq was a mistake. Both numbers represented public opinion high-water marks since the war began. Yet the press, still spooked about charges it was not being sufficiently pro-administration during a time of war, treated antiwar demonstrators with an overabundance of caution.

On Monday, September 26, when Sheehan along with 370 war protesters were arrested outside the White House, NBC’s Nightly News ignored the arrests. Both the CBS and ABC nightly newscasts gave the arrests one sentence, downplaying the numbers involved. CBS reported Sheehan was arrested along with “dozens” of others. (As in, thirty dozen?) The next morning CNN, ignoring the fact that nearly four hundred people chose to be arrested in order to protest the war, reported “Sheehan and several others were arrested.” [Emphasis added.]

The MSM’s signature 2002-2003 timidity during the run-up to war, though, was most clearly visible in their reporting on weapons of mass destruction and the overblown prewar estimates about Iraq’s firepower. The topic was absolutely essential. If the White House could prove, or at least convince most Americans, that Saddam posed an imminent danger, then the war of choice with Iraq would be easier to sell. Easier for Bush to announce, one month before the invasion, “My job is to protect the American people from further harm. I believe that Saddam Hussein is a threat to the American people.” Any lingering, why-a-war-now doubts would hinder that sales pitch. In the fall of 2002 the White House needed to paint a picture of Saddam’s Iraq as a country flooded with illegal chemical and biological warfare agents. The MSM was more than willing to help with the task.

A telling and comprehensive media study of the WMD coverage conducted by Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland (CISSM) and the University of Maryland and released in March 2004 concluded too many press stories simply repeated the “official line” on WMD regarding the Iraq war, and that most journalist accepted the Bush administration’s linking of the War on Terror with WMDs, while at the same time failing to note that there was no precedent of terror organizations demonstrating the capacity to use WMDs. Simply put, “The American media did not play the role of checking and balancing the exercise of power that the standard theory of democracy requires,” according to CISSM, which monitored WMD coverage between October 2002 and May 2003 from seven U.S. news outlets: Christian Science Monitor, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Washington Post, Newsweek, US News & World Report, as well as NPR’s “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered.”

In retrospect, NBC’s Brian Williams argued the MSM had no choice but to simply repeat what administration officials were saying about Saddam’s alleged WMD arsenal. “We had no independent testing authority,” Williams told CNN. “We had to go with [what] the government experts and witnesses [were saying], including our own secretary of state before the United Nations.” Williams’s predecessor Tom Brokaw agreed, insisting, “A lot of what happened during the lead-up to [war] was unknowable.” In truth, there was a long list of distinguished military and political experts who were ready and willing — before the war began — to illuminate NBC’s viewers about the gaping holes in Bush’s justification for war and what the colossal hurdles would be post-invasion. NBC anchors, though, were not overly interested in hearing from them and yet years later insisted there was no way to have known the war had been poorly thought out.

As the MSM watched Fox News post big rating numbers with its openly conservative broadcasts while at the same time journalists were being dogged by accusations of being too liberal, out of touch, and unpatriotic in a time of national crisis, pressure mounted to prove they could play nice with a Republican administration and forcefully back a war. That seemed to be particularly true at the New York Times, which knee-jerk conservatives had singled out as being too pro-peace in its reporting. Executive editor Howell Raines wanted to show his right-wing critics wrong. “According to half a dozen sources within the Times, Raines wanted to prove once and for all that he wasn’t editing the paper in a way that betrayed his liberal beliefs,” wrote Seth Mnookin in his 2004 Times expose, “Hard News.” Mnookin quoted Doug Frantz, the former investigative editor of the Times, who recalled how “Howell Raines was eager to have articles that supported the war-mongering out of Washington. He discouraged pieces that were at odds with the administration’s position on Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction and alleged links of al-Qaida.” The New York Observer later reported, “One senior Washington bureau staffer said that as the Bush administration edged closer to invasion, the editorial climate inside The Times shifted from questioning the rationale for military action to putting the paper on a proper war footing. ‘Everyone could see the war coming. The Times wanted to be out front on the biggest story,’ the staffer said. ‘It became the plan of attack.’”

For the administration, one cornerstone of its plan of attack was built around Iraqi defectors who told reporters wild tales about Saddam’s WMDs. Shepherded to the press by Ahmad Chalabi, the unreliable, glad-handing Iraqi defector who, much to the White House’s delight, conned reporters with tales of Saddam’s fearsome arsenal, the defectors were greeted as truth tellers. And perhaps nowhere were their tales told more excitedly than on the front pages of the New York Times, and most often told by the sympathetic Judith Miller who stood out as the paper’s go-to person for anonymous heavy security scoops and who had risen to the top of the Times’s newsroom star system. Miller may have won the admiration of the Times leadership, but years prior to the war in Iraq at least one reporter with the paper voiced his distaste for Miller’s unique style of pro-government reporting. According to the Washington Post, Craig Pyes, a former contract writer for the Times who teamed up with Miller for a series on al-Qaida, complained about her in a December 2000 memo to Times editors and asked that his byline not appear on one piece:

“I’m not willing to work further on this project with Judy Miller. I do not trust her work, her judgment, or her conduct. She is an advocate, and her actions threaten the integrity of the enterprise, and of everyone who works with her. … She has turned in a draft of a story of a collective enterprise that is little more than dictation from government sources over several days, filled with unproven assertions and factual inaccuracies.”

One of the Times’s first high-profile, post-9/11 defector stories came on December 20, 2001, when neoconservatives inside the White House were first pressing their case for an invasion of Iraq. The article was headlined, “An Iraqi Defector Tells of Work on at Least 20 Hidden Weapon Sites.” Written by Miller, the story wove the startling tale of Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, a forty-three-year-old Iraqi who had fled his homeland in Kurdistan and who, according to Miller, “said he personally worked on renovations of secret facilities for biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons in underground wells, private villas, and under the Saddam Hussein Hospital in Baghdad as recently as a year ago.” If verified, she noted, “his allegations would provide ammunition to officials within the Bush administration who have been arguing that Mr. Hussein should be driven from power partly because of his unwillingness to stop making weapons of mass destruction, despite his pledges to do so.”

As James Bamford later detailed in Rolling Stone, al-Haideri was lying about his claims about Saddam. CIA officials, who had strapped al-Haideri up to polygraph tests for hours at a time, knew he was lying long before Miller ever wrote her ominous-sounding article. (The CIA did not peddle the fake al-Haideri story to Miller, Chalabi did.) Regardless of its authenticity, al-Haideri’s fanciful tale, trumpeted by the Times, proved to be invaluable to the White House. Wrote Bamford:

“For months, hawks inside and outside the administration had been pressing for a preemptive attack on Iraq. Now, thanks to Miller’s story, they could point to ‘proof’ of Saddam’s ‘nuclear threat.’ The story was soon being trumpeted by the White House and repeated by newspapers and television networks around the world. It was the first in a long line of hyped and fraudulent stories that would eventually propel the U.S. into a war with Iraq — the first war based almost entirely on a covert propaganda campaign targeting the media.”

The administration’s war architects had set up a simple, yet foolproof way to disseminate pro-war propaganda through the Times; foolproof as long as Times reporters and editors played along. Here’s how one former CIA analyst described the scheme to James Moore, writing in Salon:

“The White House had a perfect deal with Miller. Chalabi is providing the Bush people with the [Saddam] information they need to support their political objectives with Iraq, and he is supplying the same material to Judy Miller. Chalabi tips her on something and then she goes to the White House, which has already heard the same thing from Chalabi, and she gets it corroborated by some insider she always describes as a ‘senior administration official.’”

Round and round it went. Of course there were scores of senior intelligence officials within the administration, and specifically within the CIA, who refuted Chalabi’s intelligence, but they never received the same type of airing in Miller’s articles. In retrospect, Miller’s Iraq reporting was in desperate need of balance, not to mention professional skepticism. Two Page One stories in particular stand out not only for being extraordinarily helpful to the White House’s war efforts — in fact, the articles appear to have been spoon-fed by government officials — but also for being untrue.

The first arrived September 8, 2002, and was co-written with Michael Gordon. The duo were investigating the state of Iraq’s arsenal and discovered that Saddam had made a bold initiative in hopes of reconstituting his nuclear weapons program. Two weeks earlier Vice President Dick Cheney announced in an August 26 speech, that “Many of us are convinced that Saddam Hussein will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon … and subject the United States and any other nation to nuclear blackmail.” Few independent arms experts signed off on Cheney’s Armageddon warning. But that’s where the Times September 8 expose came in. Keep in mind that the Times article surfaced after Bush’s chief of staff and former General Motors executive Andy Card had famously explained that the administration held off from trying to publicly make the case for war during the summer months of 2002 because, “From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.”

So think of the Times September 8 article as the launch commercial in the war marketing effort. And what more could the White House have asked for than the so-called liberal New York Times trumpeting on its front page a Holy Shit-type exclusive that forcefully reported, “More than a decade after Saddam Hussein agreed to give up weapons of mass destruction, Iraq has stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb, Bush administration officials said today.” Specifically, the article relayed administration claims that Saddam had been trying to import thousands of high-strength aluminum tubes used for rotors in centrifuges to enrich uranium, a key step in producing an atomic bomb. None of the tubes ever reached Iraq. The article came complete with colorful quotes from administration officials who feared a “mushroom cloud” if Saddam’s mad arms march was not stopped.

At times it was difficult for readers to discern where White House spin ended and the Times reporting began. Adopting the administration rhetoric with astonishing ease, Miller and Gordon wrote, “Mr. Hussein’s dogged insistence on pursuing his nuclear ambitions, along with what defectors described in interviews as Iraq’s push to improve and expand Baghdad’s chemical and biological arsenals, have brought Iraq and the United States to the brink of war.” [Emphasis added.] Of course, arms inspectors later determined that allegations about Saddam’s “nuclear ambitions” were erroneous.

The tubes article, which was later discredited, appeared on a Sunday. That morning administration officials, the same ones who likely leaked the story in the first place, hyped the Times exclusive on the morning talk shows. On CNN’s “Late Edition,” National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice insisted the tubes “are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs.” She added: “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud,” using the exact same language as one of the off-the-record administration sources featured in the Times exclusive. The synergy between the White House and the Times was stunning, even to other members of the MSM. “You leak a story to the New York Times and the New York Times prints it, and then you go on the Sunday shows quoting the New York Times and corroborating your own information,” noted CBS reporter Bob Simon. “You’ve got to hand it to them. That takes, as we say here in New York, chutzpah.”

As Michael Massing wrote in the New York Review of Books, “The September 8 story on the aluminum tubes was especially significant. Not only did it put the Times’ imprimatur on one of the administration’s chief claims, but it also established a position at the paper that apparently discouraged further investigation into this and related topics.” In other words, Miller, a star reporter, had publicly and forcefully staked out her, and the paper’s, position regarding Saddam’s WMD. Unfortunately for both, it was the wrong position.

The Times tubes article immediately raised doubts among scientists and other independent experts who did not believe the tubes in question would have been used for making nuclear weapons. At least one, David Albright, director of the Institute for Science and International Security, contacted Miller after the article ran and spoke with her at length, relaying the skepticism he and others had. A follow-up to the tubes story was imminent and the Times had two choices. It could step back and emphasize the doubts being raised regarding the story being told by the White House, thereby deflating some of the original article’s hyperbole, or the paper could stick close to the president and forge ahead with the Saddam-might-have-nukes narrative. Miller opted for the latter. Said Albright after reading the Times follow-up tubes article, “I thought for sure she’ d quote me or some people in the government who didn’t agree. It just wasn’t there.”

Fast forward to Iraq, April 2003, and Miller was embedded with U.S. forces, hunting for WMDs, sporting a military uniform, and boasting top-secret security clearance no other reporter — let alone Times editor — could match. (Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld reportedly signed off on Miller’s unique arrangement.) It seemed clear Miller, rewarded for her bellicose prewar WMD reporting, had landed a unique role in the search for WMDs, although one that would be hard to describe as a journalist. Instead, she seemed to be more of a quasi government agent who happened to file dispatches on deadline. As the Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz reported, “More than a half-dozen military officers said that Miller acted as a middleman between the Army unit with which she was embedded and Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmed Chalabi, on one occasion accompanying Army officers to Chalabi’s headquarters, where they took custody of Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law. She also sat in on the initial debriefing of the son-in-law, these sources say. Since interrogating Iraqis was not the mission of the unit, these officials said, it became a “Judith Miller team,” in the words of one officer close to the situation. Kurtz also quoted an anonymous senior staff officer complaining, “It’s impossible to exaggerate the impact she had on the mission of this unit, and not for the better.”

Miller was embedded with the high-profile WMD military search team, Mobile Exploitation Team (MET) Alpha, which was combing Iraq looking for the same weapons Miller had spent so much of 2002 hyping. Being embedded with MET Alpha — the best seat in the house — and being the first reporter to break the worldwide news when MET Alpha found the WMDs was going to be Miller’s victory lap, and likely lock up her second Pulitzer Prize in three years. And on April 21, it all seemed to come together when Miller filed her biggest post-invasion scoop: “Illicit Arms Kept Till Eve of War, an Iraqi Scientist Is Said to Assert.” In it, she reported MET Alpha had hit the trifecta in the sands of Iraq when it located a scientist who said he worked in Iraq’s chemical weapons program for more than a decade and that: (a) He’d “led Americans to a supply of material that proved to be the building blocks of illegal weapons.” (b) He insisted Saddam had destroyed chemical weapons and biological warfare equipment just days before the war began. (c) And Saddam had also ferried lots of WMDs into Syria for safekeeping, which explained why U.S. forces couldn’t find them. In case readers missed the implications, Miller reported that the scientist’s allegation “supports the Bush administration’s charges that Iraq continued to develop those weapons and lied to the United Nations about it.” Indeed, the scientist represented the answer to anxious White House prayers.

But when readers delved deeper into the story, Miller’s account became more peculiar as she revealed that she had no independent confirmation on any of the information; it was all relayed to her by MET Alpha commanders. That’s because Miller was never told the scientist’s name, she could not confirm he was a scientist, she was not allowed to interview him, and she was not allowed to visit his home. She was, however, allowed to look at him, from a distance, and watch as he “pointed to several spots in the sand where he said chemical precursors and other weapons material were buried.” Additionally, Miller agreed not to write about the scientist and his claims for three days while military officials read over her story and okayed it for publication. In other words, military officials provided Miller with a string of exclusive and extraordinary WMD revelations via the scientist. Miller then typed the information up and military officials double-checked it to make sure she got everything right. The next day, appearing on PBS, Miller hyped the scientist’s story even harder, suggesting he was better than a “smoking gun” of Saddam’s WMD arsenal. To Miller, the alleged scientist was “a silver bullet in the form of a person.” (Reporter James Moore noted that during the same PBS appearance Miller referred to scientists, plural, whom the MET Alpha team had found; her article referred only to a single mysterious scientist.)

Like Bush’s infamous March 6 press conference, Miller’s MET Alpha article should be studied and dissected in journalism schools for years to come. The fact that it was printed as is, with no independent verification of any kind, on the front page of the New York Times was stunning. But in retrospect, the “wacky-assed piece,” as one anonymous Timesman famously dubbed it, served a very useful purpose — it illustrated just how dramatically the wartime mind-set among top Times editors had shifted, to the point where they thought that kind of trust-me brand of journalism was acceptable. (It’s ironic: During the Clinton years, high-profile reporters at the Times cut journalism corners writing dubious Whitewater stories that embarrassed the White House. But during the Bush years, Times reporters cut journalism corners writing dubious WMD stories that aided the White House.)

Needless to say, the scientist’s claims championed by Miller were never verified, and the United States’ handpicked weapons inspector — and war supporter — David Kay, concluded the WMDs were nowhere to be found. Or as Kay put it, “There were no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction at the time of the war.” In 2005 Miller did concede her WMD articles failed to hold up, but Miller insisted everyone else got it wrong, too: “W.M.D. — I got it totally wrong. The analysts, the experts and the journalists who covered them — we were all wrong. If your sources are wrong, you are wrong.”

But other reporters found the right sources prior to the war. Knight Ridder’s Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landay wrote in October 2002 about a “bitter feud over secret intelligence” that was unfolding between the CIA and Bush administration appointees at the Pentagon who were pushing for the war rationale. “The dispute,” they wrote, “pits hardliners long distrustful of the U.S. intelligence community, against professional military and intelligence officers who fear the hawks are shaping intelligence analyses to support their case for invading Iraq.” Another Knight Ridder piece quoted an anonymous official who said “analysts at the working level in the intelligence community are feeling very strong pressure from the Pentagon to cook the intelligence books.” Miller never wrote those kinds of stories during the run-up to war. Instead of sparking debate over intelligence, she, along with the White House, seemed intent on snubbing it out.

Walter Pincus, the veteran national security reporter for the Washington Post, was another notable example. Prior to the war Pincus wrote a string of insightful articles about the type of intelligence the administration was leaning on to justify a preemptive war. Those stories included “Bush Clings To Dubious Allegations About Iraq,” “U.S. Lacks Specifics on Banned Arms,” “Alleged al-Qaida Ties Questioned; Experts Scrutinize Details of Accusations Against Iraqi Government,” and “Making the Case Against Baghdad; Officials: Evidence Strong, Not Conclusive.”

The only problem was, prior to the war Pincus’s prophetic dispatches were routinely buried by his editors inside the Post’s A section, on page 13, 16, 18, or 21. It wasn’t until three months after the invasion when the elusive weapons of mass destruction could not be found that Post editors began to regularly feature Pincus’s Iraq exposes on the front page. “[They] went through a whole phase in which they didn’t put things on the front page that would make a difference,” Pincus complained.

The same mind-set was on display at the New York Times; breathless scoops about Saddam’s mighty arsenal were paraded on Page One, while insightful examinations about doubts surrounding prewar intelligence got buried. For instance, the Times’s James Risen completed “C.I.A. Aides Feel Pressure in Preparing Iraqi Reports” days before the invasion began. Yet editors held the article for a week before finally publishing it on Page B10.

Given that reticence, it was not surprising that MSM outlets were so slow in admitting their prewar shortcomings. As early as July 2003, Slate media critic Jack Shafer, looking back on Miller’s overexcited reporting, labeled it “wretched.” The Times leadership, though, did nothing. Nine months later, in March 2004, the paper’s public editor, badgered by readers asking that the paper hold itself accountable for its fraudulent reporting, asked executive editor Keller about the issue. In a dismissive response, he insisted there was no need to recant Miller’s reporting, that she was a “fearless” journalist, that her critics basically didn’t know what they were talking about, and that an internal review would simply “consume more of my attention than I was willing to invest.” (During the run-up to war in 2002 and 2003 Keller worked as a Times columnist and wrote for the Sunday Times Magazine, where he supported the war and wrote glowingly of Paul Wolfowitz, then-deputy defense secretary and chief architect of the Iraq invasion.)

On May 26, 2004, the Times, without mentioning Miller by name, finally addressed the paper’s faulty WMD reporting. In its “From the Editors” note, Times leaders conceded the reporting was “not as rigorous as it should have been.” Keller, though, remained in a defensive crouch. “I don’t see this as an apology,” he told the Boston Globe the day the editors’ note was published. “I see this as an explanation. It’s not a note that’s going to satisfy our most bloodthirsty critics.” He stressed that while there may be a “small lynch mob of people who want to see someone strung up,” it was time for the Times, “to move on” from the debate; to get past the annoying “distraction” of the paper’s faulty WMD reporting. It was telling that the Times’s “mini-culpa,” as Shafer dubbed it, only appeared after the Times public editor tipped off the paper’s leadership that he was going to investigate, and write about, the Times’s prewar reporting. (He later called it “very bad journalism.”)

Another year later, and now nearly thirty months after the invasion, the Times was still wrestling with the ghost of Miller’s war reporting after she got dragged into court as part of the ongoing criminal investigation into which Bush White House insider leaked the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame, the wife of a prominent Bush administration war critic. Miller stood her ground and served eighty-five days in jail rather than cooperate with prosecutors, a move the Times cheered from its editorial page. But when Miller emerged from prison only to announce she couldn’t remember who leaked her the sensitive information (it was not Cheney’s top aide, Scooter Libby, she insisted), nor could she recall why she had scribbled the name “Valerie Flame” in a notebook she brought back from a July 2003 meeting with Libby at the time Plame’s name was being leaked by the White House, the notion that Miller had swapped her allegiance from the Times to the White House became impossible to ignore. Amid the unfolding scandal, which did deep damage to the newspaper’s reputation, Keller addressed the staff in an October 21 memo and was forced, yet again, to circle back to the paper’s faulty prewar reporting. “I wish we had dealt with the controversy over our coverage of WMD as soon as I became executive editor [in July 2003]. At the time, we thought we had compelling reasons for kicking the issue down the road,” Keller explained. “The paper had just been through a major trauma, the Jayson Blair episode, and needed to regain its equilibrium. It felt somehow unsavory to begin a tenure by attacking our predecessors.” (Blair was a young reporter who had duped Times editors into publishing scores of his fictitious news reports.) “I was trying to get my arms around a huge new job, appoint my team, get the paper fully back to normal, and I feared the WMD issue could become a crippling distraction.”

That’s a plausible explanation. But there was likely another, unspoken, element in play — Keller in 2003 simply didn’t feel like he had to deal with the WMD controversy because the criticism mostly came from the left (i.e., the “small lynch mob”), and from the MSM perspective in 2003, antiwar critics did not have to be engaged, which was part of the larger media mind-set during the Bush years of ignoring their liberal critics.

But try to imagine a parallel universe where the WMD facts had been reversed. Imagine that Miller, playing up tips from Democrats and progressives, had been aggressively skeptical in her prewar reporting about administration claims about Saddam’s WMDs, and that time and again her editors gave Miller’s pro-peace-flavored dispatches pageone placement. But then months after the invasion, U.S. troops uncovered WMD stockpiles bigger and deadlier than even the administration officials had claimed. At that point right-wing press critics like Rush Limbaugh, Michelle Malkin, and the team at the Weekly Standard would have declared war on the Times, accusing the paper of undermining the president, putting the nation at risk, and being driven by a blind liberal bias. The notion that, beset with those kinds of outside political attacks, editor Keller would have kicked the Miller controversy down the road for a year or more because it would have been too messy to deal with is just not believable. Instead, following an immediate internal review, Miller likely would have been quietly relieved from the paper within six months of the invasion. In reality though, Times leadership, for nearly two years, did not treat criticism of Miller’s reporting seriously. In fact, if it hadn’t been for the subpoena power of Fitzgerald, whose investigation cast the spotlight on the Times’s regrettable prewar performance, it’s doubtful the paper, based on its halfhearted effort at self-examination in 2004, would have ever come clean.

The Times WMD embarrassment was not an isolated incident. In fact, it fit into a larger pattern that the paper’s leaders refused to address, let alone fix. Just as with its dishonest Whitewater coverage in the 1990s and its misleading coverage of Wen Ho Lee, the scientist inside the Los Alamos National Laboratory who was wrongly charged with espionage, a charge the Times hyped relentlessly, the paper continued to let itself be used by partisan Republicans who were planting and pushing phony stories for political advantage. During the Clinton years the fantastic tales — Whitewater and Wen Ho Lee — were designed to embarrass a Democratic president. During the Bush years the fantastic tale about WMDs was designed to help start a war. In each case the Times, anxious to shed its “liberal media” tag, fell for the ploy, promoted the false stories, and did severe damage to the newspaper’s reputation in the process.

Both the press and the White House were guilty of hyping the WMDs’ existence, and both often avoided taking a serious look back. Unless, of course, it was to look back and have a good laugh together about the administration’s fruitless hunt. The backslapping occurred on March 24, 2004, at the annual black-tie dinner of the Radio and Television Correspondents Association, held at the Washington Hilton. The eagerly anticipated social event attracted a media-saturated crowd of approximately 1,500 people who were treated to a tongue-in-cheek address from Bush. Tradition held that sitting presidents took the opportunity at the Correspondents dinner to poke fun at the press as well as themselves. Bush did just that during his ten-minute, professionally written monologue, delivering some topical zingers: “‘Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.’ My Cabinet could take some pointers from watching that show. In fact, I’m going to have the Fab Five do a makeover on [Attorney General John] Ashcroft.”

Then Bush turned to the “White House Election-Year Album,” as photos flashed on the screen behind his podium. One showed Bush gazing out an oval office window as he provided the narration: “Those weapons of mass destruction must be somewhere!” The audience laughed. Then came a picture of Bush on his hands and knees peering under White House furniture. “Nope, no weapons over there!” The MSM audience laughed harder. And then came a snapshot of Bush searching behind the drapes. “Maybe under here?” The audience roared in approval — Bush couldn’t find the WMDs!

The next morning, newspaper reporters who laughed out loud themselves at the Correspondents dinner dutifully typed up the jokes. It wasn’t until some Democratic members of Congress, along with parents whose children had been killed in Iraq, expressed their disgust that it dawned on some members of the MSM that Bush’s jokes might be considered offensive. Even after objections were raised the MSM rallied around Bush arguing the jokes were no big deal. In fact, it was telling how the MSM were reading off the exact same talking points as the Bush supporters in the right-wing press. Their mutual message was simple — lighten up! On National Review Online, conservative talk show host Michael Graham, who attended the Correspondents dinner, mocked the critics: “Somehow, over the past 30 years, liberalism has mutated into something akin to an anti-comedy vaccine. The more you’re Left, the less you laugh.”

The supposedly liberal Los Angeles Times completely agreed. In an unsigned editorial, the paper belittled Democrats and anyone else who had the nerve to question Bush’s sense of wartime humor, or daring to question Beltway tradition: “The truly serious thing about what’s known as Washington’s ‘Silly Season’ is whether presidents rise to the challenge.” On Fox News, there was heated agreement between Sunday News anchor Chris Wallace and the network’s Washington bureau managing editor, Brit Hume, that Bush’s WMD jokes were perfectly acceptable.

Wallace: “I still think it’s funny.”

Hume: “I thought it was a good-natured performance.”

But what about Fox liberal Juan Williams? He also had no patience for the Bush critics upset about the jokes: “I think people are petty in the situation.”

Washington Post news reporter and Fox panelist Ceci Connelly concurred: “The pictures were funny. I laughed at the photos.”

To his credit, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews was among the few Beltway celebrity pundits who separated from the pack and expressed real resentment over the poor taste displayed by Bush and his press apologists: “I wonder if they’re spending a day at Walter Reed Hospital with all the guys who had limbs amputated and brain injuries and things like that, how funny they think it is that the reason they were given for fighting this war is now the butt of humor by their commander in chief.”

The MSM’s meek performance prior to the war did not spring out of a vacuum — the WMD charade, the mad rush to quote government sources, and the knee-jerk attempt to undermine and ignore administration critics. It was all telegraphed in the wake of 9/11 and through the early stages of the press’s deferential War on Terror coverage, which worked full-time to portray Bush as a savvy wartime president. Those efforts didn’t come any more devoted than Washington Post’s 2002 eight-piece series, “10 Days in September: Inside the War Cabinet,” in which reporters Bob Woodward and Dan Balz were given extraordinary access to the White House and in exchange explained away lingering questions about Bush’s response to 9/11, like why he spent that day flying around the country instead of returning to the capitol, and why it was his flack Karen Hughes who first addressed the nation and took questions that traumatic day, not Bush or Cheney. The duo also covered up for the White House regarding its phony cover story that a coded message had come in on 9/11 indicating Air Force One was a terrorist target.

Conservative pundits cheered the series, suggesting it was a Pulitzer Prize must-win. Raves from the right were understandable. To say the series presented the administration, and Bush in particular, in a favorable light would be an understatement. Readers saw Bush utterly sure of himself, operating on gut instincts, leading roundtable discussions, formulating complex strategies, asking pointed questions, building international coalitions, demanding results, poring over speeches, and seeking last-minute phrase changes.

The portrait was so contrary to the public’s previous perception of the president that it was reminiscent of the classic “Saturday Night Live” sketch that ran at the height of the Iran-Contra scandal and featured an outwardly jolly and oblivious Ronald Reagan, who in private Oval Office meetings revealed himself as a mastermind of the complicated arms-for-hostage operation, barking out orders to befuddled cabinet members. In the same way, but without satire, the Post series suggested that a president often depicted prior to 9/11 as a genial delegator of duties, who ducked the Vietnam War with a stateside post in the Texas Air National Guard, was in fact a natural, hands-on commander in chief of the War on Terror.

From the ubiquitous flag pin lapels for anchor men and women and the stirring news team theme music to the permanent terror alert logos sketched into the corner of television screens, the MSM broadcast their allegiance. It was CBS anchor Dan Rather, on September 17, 2001, declaring, “George Bush is the president, he makes the decisions. Wherever he wants me to line up, just tell me where. And he’ll make the call.”

Twenty months after announcing he’d take orders from Bush, Rather, as the war in Iraq unfolded, made another public proclamation: “Look, I’m an American. And when my country is at war, I want my country to win, whatever the definition of ‘win’ may be. Now, I can’t and don’t argue that that is coverage without a prejudice. About that I am prejudiced.” NBC’s Brian Williams called it “the 9/11 syndrome,” or “guilty of settling in to too comfortable a journalistic pattern.” Some outside the MSM likely preferred the phrase “dictation.” It was the kind of pronounced and prolonged presidential press reverence likely not seen in this country in half a century.

ABC News’s White House correspondent Terry Moran claimed he was offended when he overheard two print reporters talking inside the briefing room in January 2002, as they awaited spokesman Ari Fleischer’s arrival to face mounting questions about the administration’s role in the burgeoning Enron business scandal. “I heard people saying, ‘All right, we’re back, to hell with the war [in Afghanistan],’ as if chasing the shadows and ghosts of potential appearances or possible conflicts of interest [regarding Enron] was more important than the war the country had been thrust into,” Moran told American Journalism Review. “I was shocked … I’m not sure that lower Manhattan had actually stopped smoldering.” Four months after the attacks of 9/11, Moran thought it was still inappropriate for reporters to pose tough questions to the White House.

That was the prevailing MSM attitude as 2002 unfolded. Then halfway through the year the administration doubled down and secured another round of free passes when it signaled its interest in invading Iraq. Between the War on Terror and the war with Iraq, the Bush White House all but guaranteed itself a timid press corps that emphasized its megaphone function. The MSM coverage of the War on Terror and their reporting during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq were inexorably linked. By the time the invasion was launched in March of 2003, the press was so comfortable having spent the previous year lying down for the White House and its foreboding War on Terror, that it could not muster enough energy to get up off the floor.

What was telling, and often ignored by the MSM, was how the White House’s choreographed terror alerts so often coincided with crass political maneuvering; jockeying the MSM refused to acknowledge. For instance, the first noticeable wave of terror scares came in early 2002, in the weeks surrounding Bush’s hawkish “Axis of Evil” State of the Union Address, in which the first seeds for an invasion of Iraq were publicly planted. In his speech Bush warned about “thousands of dangerous killers” who had spread throughout the world “like ticking time bombs set to go off without warning.” Later, White House communications director Karen Hughes told reporters 100,000 men had been trained in al-Qaida camps and were now scattered in sixty countries.

The same week, FBI Director Robert Mueller warned Americans that undetected al-Qaida sleeper cells might still be operating on American soil. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld warned Americans to prepare for other attacks that “could grow vastly more deadly than those we suffered” September 11. And CIA Director George Tenet sent a report to Congress indicating agents found crude diagrams of nuclear weapons in a suspected al-Qaida safe house in Afghanistan. Maybe the scariest scenario of all was an alleged terrorist plot to fly a commercial airliner into an American nuclear power plant.

The bad news came so fast and furious that it was hard to get a handle on what was more upsetting; that the Bush administration, which had previously maintained absolute secrecy about its domestic anti-terror operations, was suddenly so talkative, or that the media reported the thinly documented terror threats so breathlessly and uncritically. This was the same administration, after all, that refused to identify hundreds of mostly Middle Eastern immigrants jailed in the United States in the wake of September 11, that ordered many routine immigration hearings closed to the public and mandated records of the proceedings not be released to anyone. It also refused to release the identities of al-Qaida fighters held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and proposed that accused terrorists be tried in secret military tribunals. Yet when it came to suggestive and potentially deadly terrorist scenarios, the White House opened the spigots for the press.

Of course, for careful news consumers who read deep into news stories and searched out lots of different perspectives, they soon realized the dire warnings coming from the White House were not all that they appeared to be. Those 100,000 al-Qaida -trained terrorists roaming the world? One week after the allegation was made by the White House, Newsweek reported that intelligence officials thought the number was inflated … by 90,000.

The White House alone controlled virtually all the information about the war on terrorism and it alone decided how that information was disseminated. The press, anxious for access, eagerly played along. That snug relationship was on stark display on January 17, 2002, just weeks before Bush’s State of the Union Address. That’s when Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Mueller held a hurried press conference, carried live on CNN, to unveil five videotapes found in the rubble of a home near Kabul, Afghanistan, owned by Muhammad Atef, a top aide of bin Laden’s. Five men seen on the tapes were identified as deadly terrorists, who, in the words of Ashcroft, “may be trained and prepared to commit future suicide terrorist attacks.”

What made the discovery so unsettling, Ashcroft said, was the fact that “the videotapes depict young men delivering what appear to be martyrdom messages from suicide terrorists.” The nation’s top crime fighter added that the seriousness of the threat demanded the information be released immediately. The names and pictures of the five al-Qaida members were distributed to the press as a sort of worldwide version of the TV show “America’s Most Wanted,” as Ashcroft asked for tips from concerned world citizens in helping track the men down.

The press eagerly complied. The New York Times played the story on page 1, where it also ran color head shots of the men. The Washington Post also printed the story on its front page, reporting excitedly that “five al-Qaida members … may be on the loose and planning suicide attacks against Western targets.” (Then again, they “may” not.) Meanwhile, CNN reported extensively about the “extraordinary videotape.” In fact, there wasn’t a television news operation in the country that didn’t display the government’s most-wanted poster of the five al-Qaida members. It was the best War on Terror prop producers had had in weeks.

Naturally it’s newsworthy when government officials lay out those sorts of terror warnings, and nobody’s suggesting they should be ignored. But it’s also the press’s job to seek context and perspective, and pry additional information from officials to determine just how dire the threats might be. Because there was something odd about Ashcroft’s breathless news bulletin. For instance, pressed further at the press conference, Ashcroft seemed to back away from his original, already tentative description of the taped utterances, suggesting, “We believe that these could be, and likely appear to be, sort of, martyrdom messages from suicide terrorists.” Sort of? Either the statements were martyrdom messages or they were not. Even the overworked Arabic translators inside the government should have been able to make that simple distinction.

Meanwhile, what exactly did the men say on the tapes? Journalists were never told, because before being shown snippets of the tapes, the government stripped all the sound off and refused to provide a printed transcript. Reporters instead were reduced to describing the men’s silent gesticulations in an effort to wring out any meaning. There was even less to the story than that. Ashcroft and Mueller did not know, or would not say, if the men planned any imminent attacks, when the tapes were made, when the tapes were found, who found the tapes, what the nationalities of the five men were, if they were in America, or even if they were dead or alive.

No matter. The tapes were universally treated as very big news. Two weeks later, though, in a brief, 235-word aside, the Washington Post revealed intelligence officials had determined the martyrdom tapes had actually been made more than two years earlier, raising doubts about the fear of “imminent” suicide attacks. Would the Post or the New York Times have originally played that story on Page One if Ashcroft had forthrightly announced the so-called suicide tapes had been made in 1999? Probably not. But that’s how the War on Terror press game was played; Ashcroft garnered huge headlines with frightening allegations about terrorist threats, and then when the stories petered out the MSM obediently looked away.

On February 20, 2003, when Ashcroft personally announced the terrorist indictment of Sami Al-Arian, a former University of South Florida professor, the news conference was carried live on CNN (Ashcroft tagged Al-Arian the North American leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad) and the story generated a wave of excited media attention. Al-Arian’s case never had anything to do with bin Laden or Saddam, but Bush’s Justice Department, which indicted Al-Arian just one month before the invasion of Iraq, made sure to leave the impression that the crucial terror case would keep America safe. That night, ABC’s World News Tonight led its newscast with the Al-Arian indictment. Both NBC and CBS also gave the story prominent play that evening. But fast forward to December 2005 when, in an embarrassing blow to prosecutors, Al-Arian was acquitted by a conservative Tampa, Florida, jury. Big news, right? Nope. That night, neither ABC, CBS, nor NBC led with the terror case on their evening newscasts. None of them slotted it second or third either. In fact, none of the networks reported the acquittal at all. The odds that the networks would have ignored the conclusion of the Al-Arian trial if the jury had returned a guilty verdict in a case that the government had called a centerpiece to its War on Terror? Zero.

By early 2003, with the war in Iraq only weeks away, the MSM, and particularly the cable news outlets, had taken their unique brand of “Fear Factor” programming to new extremes (remember the duct tape scare?), never pausing to ask whether the red-hot terror rhetoric streaming out of the administration was intended to accomplish anything besides whip up hysteria about Arab terrorists and placing the country on a firm war setting for the Iraq invasion.

“With terrorists out there somewhere, how scared should you be?” asked CNN one month before the invasion. Terror experts displayed the hottest models of gas masks on television, the way toy gurus usually run down the must-have gifts during the Christmas buying season; endless what-if chatter about possible terrorist attacks replaced the kind of hype that usually comes with the arrival of a category-four hurricane. ABC News, trotting out its “Good Morning America” home improvement editor, showed viewers how to turn a laundry room into a fallout shelter with duct tape and drop cloths.

Solid reporting could have helped relieve some of the anxiety surrounding terror threats, instead of heightening it. For instance, the Pentagon’s decision to deploy Avenger surface-to-air missile launchers around Washington, D.C., at the time clearly ratcheted up the panic level. The New York Daily News simply reported they were there to “protect prime targets — the White House, Congress and the Pentagon — from an aerial attack.”

But an aerial attack from whom? The newspaper never asked. Neither Saddam nor bin Laden had planes or missiles that could reach America. Of course, al-Qaida successfully turned commercial jets into missiles. But if seventeen months after 9/11 the government was placing surface-to-air missile launchers to shoot down hijacked planes as a last defense before crashing into U.S. targets, what did that say about the country’s national defense? The press was entirely uninterested in that debate.

There’s no question that the White House, teaming up with the MSM in early 2003, succeeded in scaring the hell out of Americans, with an amazing 82 percent of those interviewed by CBS/New York Times pollsters saying they expected America to be hit by a terrorist attack in the next few months. For the White House, the scare offense made for great politics. First, the anxiety level helped boost support for the war in Iraq since Bush — falsely — assured Americans an invasion would help eliminate Islamic terrorists. And second, Americans routinely gave the Bush presidency its highest marks for his handling of terrorist threats. (By early 2006, polls indicated that battling terror was virtually the only issue Bush scored well in.)

The media’s obedient brand of terror scare reporting extended all the way into 2005, as the MSM dutifully played up the White House’s selected theme for Bush’s second inauguration: terror. The MSM’s signature timidity was on full display as it detailed the massive, unprecedented, and largely unexplained security blanket that turned the nation’s capital into something akin to an armed fortress. Snipers were positioned on rooftops, bombers flew overhead, Humvee-mounted antiaircraft missiles dotted the city, manholes were cemented shut, and news racks swept off the streets. Specialists in chemical, biological, and radiological terrorism prevention mingled with the spooked inauguration crowds. Armed Coast Guard boats patrolled the Potomac River. And there was even an emergency engineering unit on standby to deal with any collapsed buildings.

The MSM, though, were too afraid to ask the simple question, why? Why were tens of millions of taxpayer dollars being spent — nearly 9,000 police officers and military personnel were deployed — to transform a public celebration of democracy into a show of foreboding military force? And was it all simply a political ploy for a White House that thrived on the issue of national security? Keep in mind, the military clampdown came despite the fact an assessment compiled at the time by the departments of Defense, Homeland Security, and Justice declared, “There is no credible information indicating that domestic or international terrorist groups are targeting the inauguration.” Indeed, Homeland secretary Tom Ridge refused to raise the terror alert level, announcing on the eve of Bush’s second swearing-in, “There is nothing that we’ve seen that gives us any reason to even consider [it].”

Another way cable news outlets boosted Bush’s War on Terror was by simply handing over huge chunks of airtime to the president for him to use however he wanted. By the spring of 2002, Bush’s afternoon stump speeches from cereal factories, elementary schools, and chambers of commerce had become a staple on the cable news networks. CNN officials insisted the coverage reflected the unique war on terrorism being waged. “CNN, like all news organizations, makes decisions about its coverage based on the stories of the day. In covering a war at home and military action overseas, it is necessary to cover the administration making the decisions, regardless of political party,” said a network spokesperson.

The high-minded protestations of the news channels notwithstanding, the fact was that the majority of the Bush events the cable outlets rushed to cover had nothing whatsoever to do with the war on terrorism. Viewers who regularly watched CNN in 2002 saw it break away from programming to show Bush delivering prepared, extended remarks in front of friendly, partisan crowds about faith-based charities, defense modernization, education reform and tax cuts, education, simplifying tax codes for small business, strengthening Social Security, protecting the rights of investors, welfare reform, and on and on and on.

The irony was that in May of 1999, CNN’s high-profile anchor Lou Dobbs got into an on-air tiff with then CNN chief Rick Kaplan. A noted friend of the Clintons, Kaplan demanded that producers cut away from Dobbs’ program in order to show Clinton addressing a ceremony honoring the victims of the shooting at Columbine High School. Dobbs, a firm Republican, was incensed. As the New York Post reported, “Dobbs, who didn’t consider the staged event breaking news, was absolutely livid.” But no one at CNN seemed mildly concerned — let alone absolutely livid — about the countless staged events CNN aired for Bush. Once again, the MSM came up with new, more convenient rules for the wartime president.

Excerpted with permission from “Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush,” by Eric Boehlert (Free Press, 2006).

We now live in a world that is wilder than a lot of science fiction from my youth. My phone is 58 times faster than IBM’s fastest mainframe computer in 1964 (calculates my older brother Steve) and more powerful than the computers on the Apollo spaceship we landed on the moon in 1969 (adds my nephew Jason). Though we never got the promised jetpacks and the Martians were a bust, we do live in a time when genetic engineers use jellyfish genes to make mammals glow in the dark and nerds in southern Nevada kill people in Pakistan and Afghanistan with unmanned drones.  Anyone who time-traveled from the sixties would be astonished by our age, for its wonders and its horrors and its profound social changes. But science fiction is about the present more than the future, and we do have a new science fiction trilogy that’s perfect for this very moment.

Sacrificing the Young in the Arenas of Capital

“The Hunger Games,” Suzanne Collins’s bestselling young-adult novel and top-grossing blockbuster movie, is all about this very moment in so many ways. For those of you hiding out deep in the woods, it’s set in a dystopian future North America, a continent divided into downtrodden, fearful districts ruled by a decadent, luxurious oligarchy in the Capitol. Supposedly to punish the districts for an uprising 74 years ago, but really to provide Roman-style blood and circuses to intimidate and distract, the Capitol requires each district to provide two adolescent Tributes, drawn by lottery each year, to compete in the gladiatorial Hunger Games broadcast across the nation.

That these 24 youths battle each other to the death with one lone victor allowed to survive makes it like — and yet not exactly like — high school, that concentration camp for angst and competition into which we force our young. After all, even such real-life situations can be fatal: witness the gay Iowa teen who took his life only a few weeks ago after being outed and taunted by his peers, not to speak of the epidemic of other suicides by queer teens that Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” website, film and books aspire to reduce.

But really, in this moment, the cruelty of teens to teens is far from the most atrocious thing in the land. “The Hunger Games” reminds us of that.  Its Capitol is, of course, the land of the 1 percent, a sort of amalgamation of Fashion Week, Versailles and the KGB/CIA. Collins’s timely trilogy makes it clear that the 1 percent, having created a system of deeply embedded cruelty, should go, something highlighted by the surly defiance of heroine Katniss Everdeen — Annie Oakley, Tank Girl and Robin Hood all rolled into one – who refuses to be disposed of.

Now, in our world, gladiatorial entertainment and the disposability of the young are mostly separate things (except in football, boxing, hockey and other contact sports that regularly result in brain damage and sometimes even in death). But while the Capitol is portrayed as brutal for annually sacrificing 23 teenagers from the Districts, what about our own Capitol in the District of Columbia? It has a war or two on, if you hadn’t noticed.

In Iraq, 4,486 mostly young Americans died.  If you want to count Iraqis (which you should indeed want to do), the deaths of babies, children, grandmothers, young men and others total more than 106,000 by the most conservative count, hundreds of thousands by others. Even the lowest numbers represent enough kill to fill nearly 5,000 years of Hunger Games.

Then, of course, there are thousands more Americans who were so grievously wounded they might have died in previous conflicts, but are now surviving with severe brain damage, multiple missing limbs, or other profound mutilations. And don’t forget the trauma and mental illness that mostly goes unacknowledged and untreated or the far more devastating Iraqi version of the same. And never mind Afghanistan, with its own grim numbers and horrific consequences.

Our wartime carnage has been on a grand scale, but it hasn’t been on television in any meaningful way; it’s generally been semi-hidden by most of the American media and the government, which censored images of returning coffins, corpses, civilian casualties and anything else uncomfortable (though in our science-fiction era when every phone is potentially a video camera, the leakage has still been colossal). Most of us did a good job of being distracted by other things — including reality TV, of course.  The U.S. Ambassador and military commander in Afghanistan were furious not that our soldiers struck jokey poses with severed limbs, but that the Los Angeles Times dared to publish them last month. And those whistleblowers who took the effort to reveal the little men behind the throne are facing severe punishment.  Witness one Hunger-Games-style hero, Bradley Manning, the slight young soldier turned alleged leaker, long held in inhumane conditions and now facing a potential life sentence.

The Return of Debt Peonage

In “The Hunger Games,” kids in poor families take out extra chances in their District lottery — that is, extra chances to die — in return for extra food rations; in ours, poor kids enlist in the military to feed their families and maybe escape economic doom. Many are seduced by military recruiters who stalk them in high school with promises as slippery as those the slave trade uses to recruit poor young women for sex work abroad.

And then there’s another form of debt peonage that is far more widespread in our strange and ever-changing land: student loans. The young are constantly told that only a college education can give them a decent future. Then they’re told that, to pay for it, they need to go into debt — usually into five figures, sometimes well into six. And these debts are, in turn, governed by special laws that don’t allow you to declare bankruptcy — no matter what.  In other words, they are guaranteed to follow you all your life.

One of my close friends wept when her husband began to earn enough money to pay off her $45,000 loan, structured so that it looked like she would continue to pay interest on it for the rest of her life; not so dissimilar, that is, from the debts sharecroppers and workers in company towns used to incur.

In other words, we’re creating a new generation of debt peonage. And she’s not the worst case by far. Early in the Occupy Wall Street moment, she told me, someone arrived at Zuccotti Park in downtown Manhattan with markers and cardboard on which participants were to write their debt.  What shocked her was how many of the occupiers in their early twenties were already carrying huge debt burdens.

According to the website for Occupy Student Debt, 36,000,000 Americans have student debts.  These have increased more than fivefold since 1999, creating a debt load that’s approaching a trillion dollars, with students borrowing $96 billion more every year to pay for their educations. Two-thirds of college students find themselves in this trap nowadays. As commentator Malcolm Harris put it in N + 1 magazine:

Since 1978, the price of tuition at U.S. colleges has increased over 900 percent, 650 points above inflation. To put that number in perspective, housing prices, the bubble that nearly burst the U.S. economy, then the global one, increased only fifty points above the Consumer Price Index during those years. But… wages for college-educated workers outside of the inflated finance industry have stagnated or diminished. Unemployment has hit recent graduates especially hard, nearly doubling in the post-2007 recession. The result is that the most indebted generation in history is without the dependable jobs it needs to escape debt.

About a third are already in default. You can only hope that this bubble will burst in a wildcat strike against student debt, and if we’re lucky, a move to force tuition lower and have a debt jubilee.

The rest of us, the 99 percent, need to remember that, when it comes to public education, the crisis has everything to do with slashed tax rates — to the wealthy and corporations in particular — over the last 30 years. We went into bondage so that they might be free. Getting an education to make your way out of poverty and maybe expand your mind is becoming another way of being trapped forever in poverty. For too many, there’s no way out of the hunger labyrinth.

The Labyrinths of Poverty

Which brings us to the hungriest in our 2012 real-life version of the Hunger Games: the poor. The wealthiest and most powerful nation the world has ever seen is full of hungry people. You know it, and you know why. In this vast, bountiful, food-producing, food-wasting nation, it’s a crisis of distribution, also known as economic inequality, described at last with clarity and force by the Occupy movement.

One of the sad and moving spectacles of camps like Occupy Oakland last year was the way they became de facto soup kitchens as the homeless and hungry came out of the shadows for the chance at a decent meal. Some of the camps had really dedicated chefs who cooked superbly.  They also had rudimentary medical clinics where the poor received the healthcare they couldn’t get anywhere else.

We are in a new era of desperation, when lots of people who were getting by these last several decades aren’t anymore. There are no jobs, or the jobs available pay so abysmally that workers can barely survive on them.

Of course, we do have one arena in which meals are guaranteed, and the population there keeps growing. Six million Americans live there, and it often does get gladiatorial inside. It’s called prison, and we have the highest percentage of prisoners per population in the world, higher than in the U.S.SR gulags under Stalin. Half of them are there for drug offenses, 80 percent of those for simple possession.

Which, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, hasn’t stopped the flow of drugs meant to numb the pain we’re so good at creating here.  We should create a measure for Gross National Suffering (GNS) before we even think about the Gross National Happiness they measure in Bhutan.

And once our prisoners get out, they’re a stigmatized caste, uniquely ill-suited to survival in this economy — speaking of hunger, debt, poverty, being branded for life and hopelessness. Like universities, prisons are profitable industries, though not for the human beings who are the raw material they process.  In this age, both systems seem increasingly like so many factories.

In the Shadow of 900 Tornados

But if you want to think about all the ways we’re dooming the young, there’s one that puts the others in the shade, a form of destruction that includes not just American youth, or human youth, but all species everywhere, from coral reefs to caribou. That’s climate change, of course.

Our failure to do anything adequate about it has rocketed us into the science-fiction world Bill McKibben so eloquently warned us about in his 2010 book “Eaarth.” His argument is that we’ve so altered the planet we live on that we might as well have landed on a new one (with an extra “a” in its name), more turbulent and far less hospitable than the beautiful Holocene one we trashed.

There were 160 tornados reported on March 2nd of this year. Remember that, in April of 2011, 900 tornadoes were ripping up interior United States, and this April was similarly volatile.  Remember the unprecedented wildfires, the catastrophic floods, the heat waves, the bizarrely hot North American January and other oddities? That’s science fiction of the scariest sort, and we’re in it. Or on it, on the crazy new planet we’ve made ourselves. Here in the U.S.A sector of Eaarth in the year 2012, 15,000 high-temperature records were broken in March alone, and summer is yet to come. A town in north-central Texas hit 111 degrees — in April! What turbulent planet is this?

One grain of good news: a lot of us, even in this country, finally seem to be of aware of the strangeness of the planet we’re now on. As the New York Times reported, a new survey “shows that a large majority of Americans believe that this year’s unusually warm winter, last year’s blistering summer, and some other weather disasters were probably made worse by global warming. And by a 2-to-1 margin, the public says the weather has been getting worse, rather than better, in recent years.”

If you want to talk about hunger, talk about the unprecedented flooding that’s turned Pakistan from one of the world’s breadbaskets into a net food-importing nation, with dire consequences for the agricultural poor. Talk about China’s many impending ecological disasters, its degraded soil, contaminated air and water, its many systems ready to collapse. There’s more disruption of food production to come, a lot more, and lots more hunger, too.

Around this point in science fiction books and even history books, a revolution seems necessary. The good news I have for you this May Day is that it’s underway.

Revolution 2012

2011 was the year of strange weather, but it was also the year of global uprisings, and they’re far from over. They erupted in Russia, Israel, Spain, Greece, Britain, much of the Arab-speaking world, parts of Africa and Chile, among other spots in Latin America (some of which got their revolutions underway earlier in the millennium). Uprisings have blossomed even in what the rest of the hungry world sees as the elite Capitol, the United States and much of the English-speaking world, from London to New Zealand.

Remember that revolution doesn’t look much like revolution used to. That might be the most retrograde aspect of the very violent “Hunger Games” trilogy, the way in which the author’s imagination travels along conventional or old-fashioned lines. There, violence is truly the arbitrator of power, along with cunning, whether in the ways the teenagers survive in the gladiatorial arena or the Capitol, or how both sides operate in conflicts between the Districts and the Capitol. In our own world, the state is very good at violence, whether in its wars overseas or in pepper-spraying and clubbing young demonstrators. You’ll notice, however, that neither the Iraqis, nor the Afghanis, nor the Occupiers were subjugated by these means.

Violence is not power, as Jonathan Schell makes strikingly clear in “The Unconquerable World,” it’s what the state uses when we are not otherwise under control. In addition, when we speak of “nonviolence” as an alternative to violence, we can’t help but underestimate our own power.  That word, unfortunately, sounds like it’s describing an absence, a polite refraining from action, when what’s at stake — as demonstrators around the world proved last year — is a force to be reckoned with; so call it “people power” instead.

When we come together as civil society to exercise this power, regimes tremble and history is made. Not instantly and not exactly according to plan, but who ever expected that?

Still, many regimes have been toppled by this power, and the capacity to do so is ours in the present.  As Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan point out in their recent “Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict“, since 1900 people-power campaigns have been successful in achieving regime change more than twice as often as violent campaigns.

It’s May Day, a worldwide General Strike has been called, and last week tiny Occupy Norman (Oklahoma) announced that it “had won a major battle”: their city is moving all its money out of Bank of America into a local bank. Last fall’s Move Your Money campaign included city money from the outset and quiet victories like this could begin to reshape our economic landscape. Activism in the streets is so intimidating that next month’s G8 Summit scheduled for Chicago will hole up at Camp David instead.

Meanwhile last week, both the Wells Fargo and General Electric shareholders’ meetings were under siege from Occupy activists.  The Wells Fargo meeting and protests took place in San Francisco, and afterward an arrested friend of mine posted this on Facebook: “I forgot to mention that Max gave me the Hunger Games salute in jail today. It was awesome.”

In this way do fiction and reality meld in misery and triumph as, this very day, janitors in California go out on strike and even Golden Gate Bridge workers will be protesting. May Day actions are planned across the globe.

Still alive and kicking, Occupy is chipping away in a thousand places at the status quo. 350.org, the little organization that defeated the Keystone XL Pipeline (so far), is holding a global Climate Impacts Day on May 5th and plans to take on the petroleum industry in its next round of actions.

Of course, this is only a beginning, and the banking and oil companies, the 1 percent, and the prison and education rackets are more than capable of pushing back.  So we need one more tool in our arsenal, and that’s a picture of what we want, of what a better world looks like. McKibben’s “Eaarth” and “Deep Economy” offer such a picture, as does William Morris’s “News from Nowhere,” even 120-odd years later, but we won’t get that from “The Hunger Games,” which, for all its thrilling, subversive and surly delights, is all dystopia all the way home. We may still get it, however, on our stranger-than-fiction planet.

May Day is a day of liberation — a day to be seized and celebrated, a day to remember who was shot down on it and who fought for it.  It’s a day to join those who fought and fight for liberation, to imagine what its most delicious and profound possibilities might look like.

So skip work, flip a bird at the Capitol, commit your deepest love and solidarity to the young whose lives are being gambled away, feed the hungry, take a long look at how beautiful our planet still is, find your way into solidarity and people power, and dream big about other futures. Resistance is one of your obligations, but it’s also a pleasure and a way of stealing back hope.

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Kagan wasn’t the first to make this argument. Bush’s deputy national security advisor Elliott Abrams wrote in January 2011 that “the revolt in Tunisia, the gigantic wave of demonstrations in Egypt and the more recent marches in Yemen all make clear that Bush had it right.” Bush speechwriter Peter Wehner claimed “vindication for Bush’s freedom agenda” when the uprising began. Even Dick Cheney said that “I think that what happened in Iraq, the fact that we brought democracy, if you will, and freedom to Iraq, has had a ripple effect on some of those other countries.”

Few things could be more condescending than the argument that Middle Easterners had never thought of freedom or democracy before George W. Bush began speaking about it. Countries from Algeria to Iran had held elections or saw large-scale protests long before any former Texas governor illegally invaded Iraq.

But the idea that the Iraq War had a galvanizing effect on the freedom movements under way in the Middle East is best refuted by simply listening to the movements’ leaders. Those individuals leading the protests from Iran in 2009 to Syria in 2012 are unanimous: the Iraq War hurt, not helped, the cause of democracy in the Middle East. By unleashing anarchy and a civil war that caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, the invasion in 2003 actually discredited democracy, if anything.

Here is leading Iranian dissident Akbar Ganji: “Since Iranians, in particular opposition groups, do not want to see a repeat of Afghanistan or Iraq in Iran, they’ve actually had to scale back their opposition to the government … The belligerent rhetoric of Bush didn’t help us [the Iranian democracy movement], it actually harmed us during that period.” In fact, what helped facilitate the large-scale protests in 2009 was the Obama administration’s engagement with Iran. According to Ganji, “the mere fact that Obama didn’t make military threats made the Green Movement possible.”

Or consider Wael Ghonim, who helped foment the Egyptian revolution and was imprisoned for his deeds. Asked if the cause of Egyptian self-determination was helped by the Iraq War, he was succinct: “Not at all.” He continued: “The war in Iraq killed so many innocent people, and it’s not something that any civilized nation should be proud of.” His thoughts on revolution represent the views of almost all Middle Easterners: “People who live in a country are the ones to decide their destiny because they are the ones who eventually pay the price for whatever choices they make.”

Leadership aside, it is clear that few people in the region take seriously the claim that the Iraq War sparked a wave of inspiration, for the simple reason that they see the war as a disaster for the Iraq people. A November 2011 conducted by Zogby found that most people in Iran, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates believed that Iraq was worse off as a result of the American invasion. Even most Iraqis — those who are said to have received the blessing of democracy — agreed that their country was worse off as a result of the war. If those in the Middle East believe the American-led war was a calamity for Iraqis, it is hard to believe they would think it was a model to be emulated in their own respective countries.

Of course, none of this will change the mind of those desperate to retrospectively justify the Iraq invasion. If an Arab Spring had broken out in 2050 instead of 2011, some student of a current neoconservative would have claimed Iraq was the spark the caused the fire. That fallacy may be pleasing for Bush’s intellectuals and policymakers unable to face the consequences of their decision to push for war in Iraq, but those in the region are under no such delusion. Nobody else should be either.

Watch, if you can bear it, as the helicopter crew blows people away, killing at least a dozen of them, and taking good care to wipe out the wounded as they try to crawl to safety.  (You can also hear the helicopter crew making wisecracks throughout.) When a van comes on the scene to tend to the survivors, the Apache gunship opens fire on it too, killing a few more and wounding two small children.

The slaughter captured in this short film, the most virally sensational of WikiLeaks’ disclosures, was widely condemned as an atrocity worldwide, and many pundits quickly labeled it a “war crime” for good measure.

But was this massacre really a “war crime” — or just plain-old regular war? The question is anything but a word-game. It is, in fact, far from clear that this act, though plainly atrocious and horrific, was a violation of the laws of war.  Some have argued that the slaughter, if legal, was therefore justified and, though certainly unfortunate, no big deal. But it is possible to draw a starkly different conclusion: that the “legality” of this act is an indictment of the laws of war as we know them.

The reaction of professional humanitarians to the gun-sight video was muted, to say the least.  The big three human rights organizations — Human Rights Watch (HRW), Amnesty International, and Human Rights First — responded not with position papers and furious press releases but with silence.  HRW omitted any mention of it in its report on human rights and war crimes in Iraq, published nearly a year after the video’s release. Amnesty also kept mum.  Gabor Rona, legal director of Human Rights First, told me there wasn’t enough evidence to ascertain whether the laws of war had been violated, and that his organization had no Freedom of Information Act requests underway to uncover new evidence on the matter.

This collective non-response, it should be stressed, is not because these humanitarian groups, which do much valuable work, are cowardly or “sell-outs.”  The reason is: all three human rights groups, like human rights doctrine itself, are primarily concerned with questions of legality.  And quite simply, as atrocious as the event was, there was no clear violation of the laws of war to provide a toehold for the professional humanitarians.

The human rights industry is hardly alone in finding the event disturbing but in conformance with the laws of war.  As Professor Gary Solis, a leading expert and author of a standard text on those laws, told Scott Horton of Harper’s Magazine, “I believe it unlikely that a neutral and detached investigator would conclude that the helicopter personnel violated the laws of armed conflict. Legal guilt does not always accompany innocent death.”  It bears noting that Gary Solis is no neocon ultra. A scholar who has taught at the London School of Economics and Georgetown, he is the author of a standard textbook on the subject, and was an unflinching critic of the Bush-Cheney administration.

War and International “Humanitarian” Law

“International humanitarian law,” or IHL, is the trying-too-hard euphemism for the laws of war.  And as it happens, IHL turns out to be less concerned with restraining military violence than licensing it.  As applied to America’s recent wars, this body of law turns out to be wonderfully accommodating when it comes to the prerogatives of an occupying army.

Here’s another recent example of a wartime atrocity that is perfectly legal and not a war crime at all. Thanks to WikiLeaks’ Iraq War Logs, we now know about the commonplace torture practices employed by Iraqi jailers and interrogators during our invasion and occupation of that country.  We have clear U.S. military documentation of sexual torture, of amputated fingers and limbs, of beatings so severe they regularly resulted in death.

Surely standing by and taking careful notes while the Iraqi people you have supposedly liberated from tyranny are getting tortured, sometimes to death, is a violation of the laws of war.  After all, in 2005 General Peter Pace, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, publicly contradicted his boss Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld by commenting into a live mike that it is “absolutely the responsibility of every American soldier to stop torture whenever and wherever they see it.” (A young private working in Army Intelligence named Bradley Manning, learning that a group of Iraqi civilians handing out pamphlets alleging government corruption had been detained by the Iraqi federal police, raised his concern with his commanding officer about their possible torture.  He was reportedly told him to shut up and get back to work helping the authorities find more detainees.)

As it turned out, General Pace’s exhortation was at odds with both official policy and law: Fragmentary Order 242, issued by Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon, made it official policy for occupying U.S. troops not to interfere with ongoing Iraqi torture.  And this, according to some experts, is no violation of the laws of war either. Prolix on the limits imposed on the acts of non-state fighters who are not part of modern armies, the Geneva Conventions are remarkably reticent on the duties of occupying armies.

As Gary Solis pointed out to me, Common Article 1 of the Fourth Geneva Convention assigns only a vague obligation to “ensure respect” for prisoners handed over to a third party.  On the ground in either Iraq or Afghanistan, this string of words would prove a less-than-meaningful constraint.

Part of the problem is that the laws of war that aspire to restrain deadly force are often weakly enforced and routinely violated. Ethan McCord, the American soldier who saved the two wounded children from that van in the helicopter video, remembers one set of instructions he received from his battalion commander: “Anytime your convoy gets hit by an IED, I want 360 degree rotational fire.  You kill every [expletive] in the street!”  (“That order,” David Glazier, a jurist at the National Institute for Military Justice, told me, “is absolutely a war crime.”)  In other words, the rules of engagement that are supposed to constrain occupying troops in places like Afghanistan and Iraq are, according to many scholars and investigators, often belittled and ignored.

Legalized Atrocity

The real problem with the laws of war, however, is not what they fail to restrain but what they authorize.  The primary function of International Humanitarian Law is to legalize remarkable levels of “good” military violence that regularly kill and injure non-combatants.  IHL highlights a handful of key principles: the distinction between combatant and civilian, the obligation to use force only for military necessity, and the duty to jeopardize civilians only in proportion to the military value of a target.

Even when these principles are applied conscientiously — and often they aren’t — they still allow for remarkable levels of civilian carnage, which the Pentagon has long primly (and conveniently) referred to as “collateral damage,” as if it were a sad sideline in the prosecution of war.  And yet civilian deaths in modern war regularly are the central aspect of those wars, both statistically and in other ways.  Far from being universally proscribed, the killing of high numbers of civilians in a battle zone is often considered absolutely legal under those laws.  In the pungent phrase of Professor David Kennedy of Harvard Law School, “We should be clear — this bold new vocabulary beats ploughshares into swords as often as the reverse.”

The relative weakness of the laws of war when it comes to preventing atrocities is not simply some recent debasement perpetrated by neoconservative Visigoths.  Privileging the combatant and his (it’s usually “his”) prerogatives has been the historical bone marrow of those laws.  In the Vietnam War, for instance, the declaration of significant parts of the South Vietnamese countryside as “free-fire zones,” and the “carpet bombing” of rural areas by B-52s carrying massive payloads were also done under cover of the laws of war.

IHL has certainly changed in some respects.  A century ago, the discourse around the laws of war was far more candid than today.  Jurists once regularly referred to “non-uniformed unprivileged combatants” simply as “savages” and the consensus view in mainstream scholarly journals of international law was that a modern army could do whatever it wanted to such obstreperous, lawless people (especially, of course, in what was still then the colonial world).  On the whole, the history of IHL is a long record of codifying the privileges of the powerful against lesser threats like civilians and colonial subjects resisting invasion.

Even though the laws of war have usually been one more weapon of the strong against the weak, a great deal of their particular brand of legalism has seeped into antiwar discourse. One of the key talking points for many arguing against the invasion of Iraq was that it was illegal — and that was certainly true.  But was the failure to procure a permission slip from the United Nations really the main problem with this calamitous act of violence?  Would U.N. authorization really have redeemed any of it?  There is also a growing faith that war can be domesticated under a relatively new rubric, “humanitarian intervention,” which purports to apply military violence in precise and therapeutic dosages, all strictly governed by international humanitarian law.

Here is where the WikiLeaks disclosures were so revealing.  They remind us, once again, that the humanitarian dream of “clean warfare” — military violence that is smoothly regulated by laws that spare civilians — is usually a sick joke.  We need to wean ourselves from the false comfort that the law is always on the side of civilians.  We need to scrap our tendency to assume that international law is inherently virtuous, and that anything that shocks our conscience — that helicopter video or widespread torture in Iraq under the noses of U.S. soldiers — must be a violation of this system, rather than its logical and predictable consequence.

Let’s be clear: what killed the civilians walking the streets of Baghdad that day in 2007 was not “war crimes,” but war.  And that holds for so many thousands of other Afghan and Iraqi civilians killed by drone strikes, air strikes, night raids, convoys, and nervous checkpoint guards as well.

Regulatory Capture

Who, after all, writes the laws of war?  Just as the regulations that govern the pharmaceutical and airline industries are often gamed by large corporations with their phalanxes of lobbyists, the laws of war are also vulnerable to “regulatory capture” by the great powers under their supposed rule. Keep in mind, for instance, that the Pentagon employs 10,000 lawyers and that its junior partner in foreign policy making, the State Department, has a few hundred more.  Should we be surprised if in-house lawyers can sort out “legal” ways not to let those laws of war get in the way of the global ambitions of a superpower?

It’s only fair that the last words on the laws of war go to Private Bradley Manning, now sitting in a prison cell in Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas, awaiting court-martial for allegedly passing troves of classified material to WikiLeaks, documents that offer the unvarnished truth about the Afghan War, the Iraq War, and Guantánamo.  They are taken from the instant-message chatlogs he wrote under the handle of “bradass87” to the informant who turned him in.  The young private saw very clearly what so many professors and generals take pains to deny: that the primary function of the laws of war is not to restrain violence, but to justify it, often with the greatest lawyerly ingenuity.

(02:27:47 PM) bradass87: i mean, we’re better in some respects… we’re much more subtle… use a lot more words and legal techniques to legitimize everything…

(02:28:19 PM) bradass87: but just because something is more subtle, doesn’t make it right

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That was too much for even a well-seasoned cubicle warrior like me to ignore and so I wrote a book about it, “We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the War for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People.” I was on the spot to see it all happen, leading two Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs) in rural Iraq while taking part up close and personal in what the U.S. government was doing to, not for, Iraqis. Originally, I imagined that my book’s subtitle would be “Lessons for Afghanistan,” since I was hoping the same mistakes would not be endlessly repeated there. Sometimes being right doesn’t solve a damn thing.

By the time I arrived in Iraq in 2009, I hardly expected to be welcomed as a liberator or greeted — as the officials who launched the invasion of that country expected back in 2003 — with a parade and flowers. But I never imagined Iraq for quite the American disaster it was either. Nor did I expect to be welcomed back by my employer, the State Department, as a hero in return for my book of loony stories and poignant moments that summed up how the United States wasted more than $44 billion in the reconstruction/deconstruction of Iraq. But I never imagined that State would retaliate against me.

In return for my book, a truthful account of my year in Iraq, my security clearance was taken away, I was sent home to sit on my hands for months, then temporarily allowed to return only as a disenfranchised teleworker and, as I write this, am drifting through the final steps toward termination.

What We Left Behind in Iraq

Sadly enough, in the almost two years since I left Iraq, little has happened that challenges my belief that we failed in the reconstruction and, through that failure, lost the war.

The Iraq of today is an extension of the Iraq I saw and described. The recent Arab League summit in Baghdad, hailed by some as a watershed event, was little more than a stage-managed wrinkle in that timeline, a lot like all those purple-fingered elections the U.S. sponsored in Iraq throughout the Occupation. If you deploy enough police and soldiers — for the summit, Baghdad was shut down for a week, the cell phone network turned off, and a “public holiday” proclaimed to keep the streets free of humanity — you can temporarily tame any place, at least within camera view. More than $500 million was spent, in part planting flowers along the route dignitaries took in and out of the heavily fortified International Zone at the heart of the capital (known in my day as the Green Zone). Somebody in Iraq must have googled “Potemkin Village.”

Beyond the temporary showmanship, the Iraq we created via our war is a mean place, unsafe and unstable. Of course, life goes on there (with the usual lack of electricity and potable water), but as the news shows, to an angry symphony of suicide bombers and targeted killings. While the American public may have changed the channel to more exciting shows in Libya, now Syria, or maybe just to “American Idol,” the Iraqi people are trapped in amber, replaying the scenes I saw in 2009-2010, living reminders of all the good we failed to do.

Ties between Iraq and Iran continue to strengthen, however, with Baghdad serving as a money-laundering stopover for a Tehran facing tightening U.S. and European sanctions, even as it sells electricity to Iraq. (That failed reconstruction program again!) Indeed, with Iran now able to meddle in Iraq in ways it couldn’t have when Saddam Hussein was in power, that country will be more capable of contesting U.S. hegemony in the region.

Given what we left behind in Iraq, it remains beyond anyone, even the nasty men who started the war in 2003, to claim victory or accomplishment or achievement there, and except for the odd pundit seeking to rile his audience, none do.

What We Left Behind at Home

The other story that played out over the months since I returned from Iraq is my own. Though the State Department officially cleared “We Meant Well” for publication in October 2010, it began an investigation of me a month before the book hit store shelves. That investigation was completed way back in December 2011, though State took no action at that time to terminate me.

I filed a complaint as a whistleblower with the Office of the Special Counsel (OSC) in January 2012. It was only after that complaint — alleging retaliation — was filed, and just days before the OSC was to deliver its document discovery request to State, that my long-time employer finally moved to fire me. Timing is everything in love, war, and bureaucracy.

The charges it leveled are ridiculous (including “lack of candor,” as if perhaps too much candor was not the root problem here). State was evidently using my case to show off its authority over its employees by creating a parody of justice, and then enforcing it to demonstrate that, well, when it comes to stomping on dissent, anything goes.

My case also illustrates the crude use of “national security” as a tool within government to silence dissent. State’s Diplomatic Security office, its internal Stasi, monitored my home email and web usage for months, used computer forensics to spelunk for something naughty in my online world, placed me on a Secret Service Threat Watch list, examined my finances, and used hacker tools to vacuum up my droppings around the web — all, by the way, at an unknown cost to the taxpayers. Diplomatic Security even sent an agent around to interview my neighbors, fishing for something to use against me in a full-spectrum deep dive into my life, using the new tools and power available to government not to stop terrorists, but to stop me.

As our government accumulates ever more of what it thinks the American people have no right to know about, there will only be increasing persecutions as prosecutions. Many of the illegal things President Richard Nixon did to the famous Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg are now both legal (under the Patriot Act) and far easier to accomplish with new technologies. There is no need, for instance, to break into my psychiatrist’s office looking for dirt, as happened to Ellsberg; after all, the National Security Agency can break into my doctor’s electronic records as easily as you can read this page.

With its aggressive and sadly careless use of the draconian Espionage Act to imprison whistleblowers, the Obama administration has, in many cases, moved beyond harassment and intimidation into actually wielding the beautiful tools of justice in a perverse way to silence dissent. More benign in practice, in theory this is little different than the Soviets executing dissidents as spies after show trials or the Chinese using their courts to legally confine thinkers they disapprove of in mental institutions. They are all just following regulations. Turn the volume up from six to ten and you’ve jumped from vengeance to totalitarianism. We’re becoming East Germany.

What I Left Behind

There has been a personal price to pay for my free speech. In my old office, after my book was published in September 2011, some snarky coworkers set up a pool to guess when I would be fired — before or after that November. I put $20 down on the long end. After all, if I couldn’t be optimistic about keeping my job, who could?

One day in October, security hustled me out of that office, and though I wasn’t fired by that November and so won the bet, I was never able to collect. Most of those in the betting pool now shun me, fearful for their own fragile careers at State.

I’ve ended up talking, usually at night, with a few of the soldiers I worked with in Iraq. Some are at the end of a long Skype connection in Afghanistan, others have left the military or are stationed stateside. Most of them share my anger and bitterness, generally feeling used and unwanted now that they need a job rather than rote praise and the promise of a parade.

“We Meant Well” is, I think, pretty funny in parts. I recall writing it as an almost out-of-body experience as I tried to approach the sadness and absurdity of what was happening in Iraq with a sense of irony and black humor. That’s long gone, and if I were to write the story today, the saddest thing is that it would undoubtedly come out angry and bitter, too.

A Member of a Club That Would Have Me

Having left behind friends I turned out not to have, a career that dissolved beneath me, and a sense of humor I’d like to rediscover, I find myself a member of a new club I don’t even remember applying for: The Whistleblowers. I’ve now met with several of the whistleblowers I’ve written about with admiration: Tom Drake, Mo Davis, John Kiriakou and Robert MacLean, among others.

As ex- or soon-to-be-ex-government employees all, when we meet, we make small talk about retirement, annuities and the like. No one speaks of revolution or anarchy, the image of us the government often surreptitiously pushes to the media. After all, until we blew those whistles, we were all in our own ways believers in the American system. That, in fact, is why we did what we did.

My new club-mates represent hundreds of years of service — a couple of them had had long military careers before joining the civilian side of government — and we cover a remarkably broad swath of the American political spectrum. What we really have in common is that, in the course of just doing our jobs, we stumbled into colossal government wrongdoing (systematized torture, warrantless wiretapping, fraud and waste), stood up for what is right in the American spirit, and found ourselves paying surprising personal prices for acts that seemed obvious and necessary. We are guilty of naiveté, not treason.

Each of us initially thought that the agencies we worked for would be concerned about what we had stumbled upon or uncovered and would want to work with us to resolve it. If most of us are now disillusioned, we weren’t at the outset. Only by the force of events did we become transformed into opponents of an out-of-control government with no tolerance for those who would expose the truth necessary to create Thomas Jefferson’s informed citizenry. In meeting my club-mates, I learned that whistleblowers are not born, but created by a government with much to hide and an unquenchable need to hide it.

One of those whistleblowers, Jesselyn Radack, wrote a book about her experiences called “Traitor: The Whistleblower and the American Taliban.” At the dawn of the War on Terror, Radack, an attorney at the Department of Justice (DOJ), wrote a memo stating that John Walker Lindh, the “American Taliban” captured in Afghanistan, had rights and could not be interrogated without the benefit of counsel.

The FBI went ahead and questioned him anyway, and then DOJ tried to disappear Radack’s emails documenting this Constitutional violation. Ignoring her advice, the government tossed away the rights of one of its own citizens. Radack herself was subsequently forced out the DOJ, harassed, and had to fight simply to keep her law license.

As proof that God does indeed enjoy irony, Radack today helps represent most of the current crop of government whistleblowers (including me) in their struggles against the government she once served. Radack and I are now working with Academy Award-nominated filmmaker James Spione on a documentary about whistleblowers.

What Will Be Left Behind

So what’s left for me in my final days as a grounded State Department worker assigned to timeout in my own home? Given my situation, there is, of course, no desk to clean out; there are no knickknacks collected abroad over my 24 years to package up. All that’s left is one last test to see if the system, especially the First Amendment guaranteeing us the right to free speech, still has a heartbeat in 2012.

Though I could be terminated by State within a few weeks, I am otherwise only months away from a semi-voluntary retirement. Since I’m obviously out the door anyway, State’s decision to employ its internal security tools and expensive, taxpayer-paid legal maneuvers at this late date can’t really be about shortening my tenure by a meager four months. Instead, it’s clearly about mounting my head on a pike inside the lobby of State’s Foggy Bottom headquarters as a warning to its other employees not to dissent, or mention wrongdoing they might stumble across. Better, so the message goes, to sip the Kool Aid and keep one’s head down, while praising the courage of Chinese dissidents and Egyptian bloggers. The State Department is all about wanting its words, not its actions, to speak loudest.

Running parallel to the State Department termination process is an investigation by the Office of the Special Counsel into my claim of retaliation, which State is seeking to circumvent by tossing me out the door ahead of its conclusion. State wants to use my fate to send a message to its already cowed staff. However, if the Special Counsel concludes that the State Department did retaliate against me, then the message delivered will be quite a different one. It just might indicate that the First Amendment still does reach ever so slightly into the halls of government, and maybe the next responsible Foreign Service Officer will carry that forward a bit further, which would be good for our democracy.

One way or another, sometime soon the door will smack me in the backside on my way out. But whether the echo left behind inside the State Department will be one of justice or bureaucratic revenge remains undecided. My book is written and my career is over either way. However, what is left behind matters not just for me, but for all of us.

[Disclaimer: The views expressed here are solely those of the author in his private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of the Department of State, or any other entity of the U.S. Government. It should be quite obvious that the Department of State has not approved, endorsed, embraced, friended, liked, tweeted or authorized this post.]

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His death is not just a terrible loss to journalism: it is a loss to America. Even though the United States is at war with two Middle Eastern countries, and stands on the brink of war with a third, most Americans, including our politicians and many so-called “experts,” know almost nothing about it – which is one of the reasons we embarked upon the disastrous Iraq war. Like all great reporters, Shadid penetrated the darkness. He took us not just into streets and cafes, but into hearts and minds. He showed the impact of decisions made by politicians and generals in far-away lands on housewives and young girls and street vendors, on small human beings just trying to live decent lives. He was our eyes.

In his extraordinary 2005 book “Night Draws Near: Iraq’s People in the Shadow of America’s War,” Shadid wrote about one of those small people, a woman named Karima Salman, and her family. This is from my Salon review of the book:

“Karima, a desperately poor mother of eight, lived in a squalid, cockroach-infested apartment in Baghdad. The first story Shadid tells about her takes place before the war. Most of her family and friends had already fled Baghdad. She was exhausted, lonely, unable to pay the rent, faced with skyrocketing food prices. Her 21-year-old son, Ali, who had been working as a plumber, had been sent north days earlier to man an antiaircraft battery.

At their parting, movingly recounted by Shadid, Karima and Ali simply exchanged the basic phrases of Islam. “There is no God but God,” she told Ali as he boarded a bus. “Muhammad is the messenger of God,” Ali replied, completing the phrase. Her final words to him were prayers of farewell: “God be with you. God protect you.” As she recounted their parting, tears ran down her cheeks. “A mother’s heart rests on her son’s heart,’ she told Shadid. ‘Every hour, I cry for him.”

“Faith for Karima and her family was not a matter of religious zealotry,” Shadid writes. “It was not even piety, really. It gave their lives cadence … It spoke with clarity, offered simplicity, and served as a familiar refuge in troubled times.” As Karima sat with her five daughters on old mattresses on a tile floor and waited for the war to begin, ‘in her voice was the hopelessness that forced so many in the once-proud city to put their faith and future in God’s hands. ‘We only have God,’ she told me. ‘Thanks be to him’ … To Karima, the war that had begun was a play; on its grand stage, people were mere actors. ‘Life’s not good, it’s not bad,’ she told me, as we sipped the bitter coffee. ‘It’s just a play.’”

The fate of small people like Karima and her family, unknown, of no political consequence, is easy to forget as nations rush to war and powerful men plan and redraw maps. “Ordinary people are, as Karima recognized, only pawns on a giant board; if one or one thousand of them are swept off, no one notices.” It is one of the functions of journalism, perhaps the noblest, simply to bear witness to these forgotten ones.

Anthony Shadid bore that witness. He died at the age of 43 on the front lines of his profession, of an asthma attack while reporting inside violence-ravaged Syria. He joins the honored list of reporters who gave their lives to give the world the truth. Every journalist, and every American who cares not just the consequences of American wars, but about humanity, owes him a debt. His loss is incalculable.

Also in Salon, the story of Shadid’s last book: Anthony Shadid yearned for home.