"How much of an axe do you have to grind with
Secretary Rumsfeld?" Zahn asked. (Note she didn't ask if McGovern
had an axe to grind with Rumsfeld, but rather how much.)
"It's not a matter of axes to grind," McGovern
responded. "It's a matter of telling the truth. And we pledged, in my
day at the CIA, to tell it without fear or favor, to tell it like it is.
And, when I see that corrupted, that is the real tragedy of this whole
business."
Zahn then pressed McGovern to give Rumsfeld credit because the Defense
Secretary stopped security guards from throwing McGovern out.
"Donald Rumsfeld encouraged whoever I think had
their hands on you at the time to let you stay there," Zahn said. "Does
he get any credit for that today?"
Rummy, the Believer
After wrapping up the segment with McGovern, Zahn
turned to CNN military correspondent Jamie McIntyre and repeated her
concerns about McGovern's motives.
"Some fireworks there, as this speech unfolded, Mr.
McGovern claiming he has no axe to grind," Zahn said, reiterating her
negative suggestion about McGovern that Zahn apparently had pulled out
of thin air.
Although Zahn and McIntyre agreed that Rumsfeld was
mistaken on a number of points about Iraq, they kept giving him the
benefit of the doubt about his own motivation.
"It comes down to the question of, was he wrong
because - for the right reasons, or did he intentionally mislead?"
McIntyre said. "And one thing I can tell you about Rumsfeld is he
intensely believes that what he says is true and that he's got the right
version of events."
Just as Zahn never explained why she thought
McGovern had an axe to grind, McIntyre didn't explain how he knows that
Rumsfeld only says what he "intensely believes." Typical, for the
mainstream news media, a negative inference was drawn against a Bush
critic while a positive inference was applied to a Bush ally.
Yet, the actual evidence on Rumsfeld suggests that
he routinely made statements about the Iraq War that any mildly informed
person would know to be false or at least highly dubious. Coupled with
his illogical arguments - like the Zarqawi-in-Baghdad claim - the only
rational conclusion is that the Defense Secretary is a conscious
deceiver, if not an inveterate liar.
But the major U.S. news outlets simply refuse to
make such harsh judgments, instead either choosing to look away when
incriminating evidence is presented or bending over backwards to find
some euphemism.
Both tendencies were on display in the New York
Times in the days after the Rumsfeld-McGovern confrontation.
The day after Rumsfeld's Atlanta speech, the New
York Times could have used the exchange as a peg to write about the long
history of Iraq War deceptions. Instead, the Times printed one paragraph
of a wire story that simply quoted McGovern saying that Rumsfeld had
lied and Rumsfeld responding, "I did not lie."
The Times returned to the confrontation in a May 7
editorial in the context of urging the Republican-run Senate
Intelligence Committee to finally release a report on whether the
administration "deliberately misled the world" in its presentation of
Iraq War intelligence.
But even in that editorial, there was the continued
determination to evade the word "lie." The Times phrased its criticism
this way: "It is bad enough that Mr. Rumsfeld and others did not tell
Americans the full truth - to take the best case situation - before the
war."
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