“The [Post] editorials during December [2002] and January [2003] numbered nine, and all were hawkish,” wrote Columbia University journalism professor Todd Gitlin. “This editorial mood continued into February, culminating in a blast at the French and Germans headlined ‘Standing With Saddam.’ Apparently it’s not only George W. Bush who doesn’t nuance.” [American Prospect, April 1, 2003]
After the U.S. “preemptive” invasion of Iraq and the failure to discover the imaginary WMD stockpiles, Post editorial-page editor Fred Hiatt was forced to make a rare and grudging apology. Hiatt acknowledged that the Post should have been more skeptical.
“If you look at the editorials we write running up [to the war], we state as flat fact that he [Hussein] has weapons of mass destruction,” Hiatt said in an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review. “If that’s not true, it would have been better not to say it.” [CJR, March/April 2004]
No Accountability
Yet, at the Post and many other U.S. news organizations, there was no sense that accountability was in order when news organizations joined a neoconservative stampede, even one that contributed to the deaths of thousands of American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.
Instead, Hiatt and his opinion pages continued to punish anyone – a politician or a citizen – who disagreed with the wisdom of Bush’s Iraq War.
One of the Post’s most troubling smear campaigns was directed against former Ambassador Wilson, who stepped forward in the months after the invasion as the first Washington Establishment figure to decry Bush’s exaggeration of the threat from Iraq.
The history of what happened to Wilson -- a scandal known as “Plame-gate” -- is now well documented: In 2003, an arrogant administration sought to damage a critic, Wilson, who had offended Vice President Dick Cheney by accusing the White House of having "twisted" Iraq War intelligence.
The Cheney-led counterattack against Wilson sought to portray him as a boastful liar and involved leaking to reporters that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, worked at the CIA. That disclosure was published (in the Washington Post) by right-wing columnist Robert Novak, destroying Plame’s career as a covert intelligence officer and endangering the lives of her network of foreign agents.
Then, as the White House recognized the potential criminality – not to mention the political dangers – of its actions, a cover-up was launched, with Bush insisting that he knew nothing about the anti-Wilson campaign and his top aides lying to or dissembling in front of investigators.
One might have thought a newspaper upholding the Watergate legacy of Woodward and Bernstein would have jumped all over this disgraceful abuse of power by an imperial President and his vengeful entourage. Instead, the Washington Post went after Joe Wilson.
Hiatt and his editorial page cohorts made trashing Wilson and mocking the seriousness of Plame’s exposure almost a regular feature, recycling false White House talking points, including an attempt to question whether Plame was in fact “covert.”
The Post’s editorial page, which had swallowed Bush’s WMD lies hook, line and sinker in 2002-03, apparently couldn’t countenance someone who was right while so many super-smart Post editors and executives were wrong.
Endless Wilson Bashing
Even after Cheney’s former chief of staff, Lewis Libby, was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice for his Plame-gate role in March 2007, Hiatt and his team were still bashing Wilson, declaring in one editorial that the ex-ambassador “will be remembered as a blowhard.”
In haughty tones – like the deprecating commentaries deriding former Ambassador Freeman – the Post wrote:
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