Robert Parry: MSM Buries Military Dissent on Iraq

[babylonsister]

MSM Buries Military Dissent on Iraq

By Robert Parry
October 17, 2007

Last summer when two pro-Iraq War pundits returned from a Pentagon-guided tour of Iraq, the New York Times gave them prime op-ed space to re-invent themselves as harsh war critics who had been won over by George W. Bush’s “surge.”

The deceptively packaged op-ed by Brookings analysts Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack – which then was amplified by their many appearances on TV news shows – proved very influential in shaping the congressional war debate.

By contrast, a few weeks later, the Times editors buried a report by seven U.S. non-commissioned officers who were on 15-month tours in Iraq and offered a more negative assessment. The Times’ editors stuck their account, entitled “The War as We Saw It, at the back of the Aug. 19 “Week in Review” section.

(Two of those soldiers – Staff Sgt. Yance T. Gray, 26, and Omar Mora, 28 – have since died in Iraq.)

Now, senior Washington Post editors, who have been major Iraq War enthusiasts from the beginning, have given even more dismissive treatment to an anti-war op-ed written by 12 former Army captains who served in Iraq.

On Oct. 16, the fifth anniversary of Bush’s authorization to use force in Iraq, the Post’s editors accepted the article from the captains but did not deign to publish it on the newspaper’s influential op-ed page. The article, entitled “The Real Iraq We Knew,” was consigned to the Post’s Web site.

The Post’s editors did find room on their Oct. 16 op-ed page for articles about a successful movie producer, the future of Estonia, political orthodoxy on the campaign trail, Turkey’s touchiness about the century-old slaughter of Armenians, and the need to provide more assistance to veterans.

Not to disparage any of those stories, but one might have thought that the on-ground observations of 12 commissioned officers of the U.S. military on a topic as important as the Iraq War would justify bumping one of the other pieces.

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http://www.consortiumnews.com/2007/101707.html