Karl Rove--Remember him?--Is Back and Cranking Up the Propaganda Machine

They are back in business--"they" meaning the Christo-fascists of the White House war party. And the Newspaper of Record is back on board:

February 10, 2007
Editor & Publisher

'NYT' Reporter Who Got Iraqi WMDs Wrong Now Highlights Iran Claims
by Greg Mitchell

Saturdays New York Times features an article, posted at the top of its Web site late Friday, that suggests very strongly that Iran is supplying the deadliest weapon aimed at American troops in Iraq. The author notes, Any assertion of an Iranian contribution to attacks on Americans in Iraq is both politically and diplomatically volatile.

What is the source of this volatile information? Nothing less than civilian and military officials from a broad range of government agencies.

Sound pretty convincing? Well, almost all the sources in the story are unnamed. It also may be worth noting that the author is Michael R. Gordon, the same Times reporter who, on his own, or with Judith Miller, wrote some of the key, and badly misleading or downright inaccurate, articles about Iraqi WMDs in the run-up to the 2003 invasion.

Gordon wrote with Miller the paper's most widely criticized -- even by the Times itself -- WMD story of all, the Sept. 8, 2002, aluminum tubes story that proved so influential, especially since the administration trumpeted it on TV talk shows.

When the Times eventually carried an editors note that admitted some of its Iraq coverage was wrong and/or overblown, it criticized two Miller-Gordon stories, and
noted that the Sept. 8, 2002, article on page one of the newspaper "gave the first detailed account of the aluminum tubes. The article cited unidentified senior administration officials who insisted that the dimensions, specifications and numbers of tubes sought showed that they were intended for a nuclear weapons program."

This, of course, proved bogus.

The Times mea-culpa story dryly observed: "The article gave no hint of a debate over the tubes," adding, "The White House did much to increase the impact of The Times article." This was the famous "mushroom cloud" over America article.

Gordon also wrote, following Secretary of State Colin Powell's crucial, and appallingly wrong, speech to the United Nations in 2003 that helped sell the war, that "it will be difficult for skeptics to argue that Washington's case against Iraq is based on groundless suspicions and not intelligence information."

Now, more than four years later, Gordon reveals: The Bush administration is expected to make public this weekend some of what intelligence agencies regard as an increasing body of evidence pointing to an Iranian link, including information gleaned from Iranians and Iraqis captured in recent American raids on an Iranian office in Erbil and another site in Baghdad. Gordon's unnamed sources throughout the story are variously described as "Administration officials," "intelligence experts" and "American intelligence." . . .