Newspapers across the United States and beyond told readers Wednesday about sensational new statements by a former top assistant to Colin Powell when he was secretary of state. After interviewing Lawrence Wilkerson, the Associated Press reported he "said that wrongheaded ideas for the handling of foreign detainees after Sept. 11 arose from a coterie of White House and Pentagon aides who argued that ‘the president of the United States is all-powerful,’ and that the Geneva Conventions were irrelevant."

AP added: "Wilkerson blamed Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and like-minded aides. Wilkerson said that Cheney must have sincerely believed that Iraq could be a spawning ground for new terror assaults, because ‘otherwise I have to declare him a moron, an idiot or a nefarious bastard.’"

Such strong words are headline grabbers when they come from someone widely assumed to be speaking Powell’s mind. And as a Powell surrogate, Wilkerson is certainly on a tear this week, speaking some truth about power. But there are a few big problems with his zeal to recast the public record: 1) Wilkerson should have spoken up years ago. 2) His current statements, for the most part, are foggy. 3) The criticisms seem to stem largely from tactical critiques and image concerns rather than moral objections. 4) Powell is still too much of a cagey opportunist to speak out himself.

Appearing on the BBC’s "Today" program (the interview is at 0635)…

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Bob Woodward
probably hoped that the long holiday weekend would break the momentum
of an uproar that suddenly confronted him
midway through November. But three days after Thanksgiving, on NBC’s
"Meet the Press," a question about the famed Washington Post
reporter provoked anything but the customary adulation.

"I
think none of us can really understand Bob’s silence for two years
about his own role in the case," longtime Post journalist
David Broder told viewers. "He’s explained it by saying he did not want
to become involved and did not want to face a subpoena, but
he left his editor, our editor, blind-sided for two years and he went
out and talked disparagingly about the significance of the
investigation without disclosing his role in it. Those are hard things
to reconcile."

An
icon of the media establishment, Broder is accustomed to making excuses
for deceptive machinations by the White House and
other centers of power in Washington. His televised rebuke of Woodward
on Nov. 27 does not augur well for current efforts to salvage
Woodward’s reputation as a trustworthy journalist.

The
Woodward saga is a story of a reporter who, as half of the Post duo
that broke open Watergate, challenged powerful insiders
— and then, as years went by, became one of them. He used confidential
sources to expose wrongdoing at the top levels of the U.S.
government
— and then, gradually, became cozy with high-placed sources who
effectively used him…

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The huge gap between Tehran and Washington has
widened in recent months. Top officials of Iran and the United States
are not even within shouting distance. The styles of rhetoric differ,
but the messages in both directions are filled with hostility.When
Thanksgiving arrives, the media coverage is mostly predictable. Feature
stories tell of turkeys and food drives for the needy. We hear about
why some people, famous and unknown, say they feel thankful. And, of
course, holiday advertising campaigns launch via TV, radio and print
outlets.

Like our own responses to Thanksgiving, the repeated media messages are
apt to be contradictory. Answers to basic questions run the gamut: How
much time and money should we spend on the holiday dinner compared to
helping the less fortunate? Is this really the time to count our
blessings – or yield to ads that tell us how satisfied we’ll be after
buying the latest brand-new products and services?

Under the surface, some familiar media themes are at cross purposes
this time of year. Holiday celebrations that speak to the need for
compassion and spiritual connection are frequently marked by efforts
and expenditures that point in opposite directions. Within the media
echo chambers, a lot of the wallpaper is the color of money…

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This week began with the New York Times noting that "all of Washington is consumed with debate over the direction of the war in Iraq." The debate — long overdue — is a serious blow to the war makers in Washington, but the U.S. war effort will go on for years more unless the antiwar movement gains sufficient momentum to stop it.

A cliche goes that war is too important to be left to the generals. But a more relevant assessment is that peace is too vital to be left to pundits and members of Congress — people who have overwhelmingly dismissed the option of swiftly withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq.

Last Thursday, a high-profile military booster in Congress suddenly shattered the conventional wisdom that immediate withdrawal is unthinkable. "The American public is way ahead of us," Rep. John Murtha said in a statement concluding with capitalized words that shook the nation’s capitalized political elites: "Our military has done everything that has been asked of them, the U.S. cannot accomplish anything further in Iraq militarily. IT IS TIME TO BRING THEM HOME."

Murtha’s statement has broken a spell. But the white magic of the USA’s militarism remains a massive obstacle to bringing home the U.S. troops who should never have been sent to Iraq in the first place.

There has been no outbreak of conscience in editorial offices or on Capitol Hill…

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The huge gap between Tehran and Washington has widened in recent months. Top officials of Iran and the United States are not even within shouting distance. The styles of rhetoric differ, but the messages in both directions are filled with hostility.

While visiting Iran’s capital in early summer, during the home stretch of the presidential campaign, I was struck by paradoxes. From all appearances, most Iranians despise the U.S. government but love Americans. Repression, imposed from above, coexists with freedom taken from below. The press is largely dogmatic, but some media outlets show appreciable independence.

I was fascinated to observe a rally of 10,000 people who gathered in a Tehran stadium to vocally support a reform candidate for the presidency, Mostafa Moin. One speaker after another called for political freedom…

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A lot of media outlets are now scrutinizing some of the lies told by the Bush administration before the invasion of Iraq. Yet the same news organizations are bypassing their own key roles in the marketing of those lies. A case in point is the New York Times.

On Saturday, hours after the indictment of Lewis Libby, the lead editorial of the Times ended by declaring that "the big point Americans need to keep in mind is this: There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq." On Sunday, the Times columnist Frank Rich referred to "Colin Powell’s notorious presentation of WMD ‘evidence’ to the UN on the eve of war."

And so it goes in the opinion section of the New York Times. There’s now eagerness to blast the Bush administration for some aspects of false prewar propaganda — while the newspaper continues to dodge its own crucial role in promoting that propaganda.

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While indictment fever gripped the Washington press corps this month, the president’s spin doctor was incapacitated. An ailing Karl Rove could not help the Republican search for a media cure. With temperature rising, the political physician was in no position to cure himself or anyone else.

Now, a media siege is underway at the White House. A dramatic convergence of legal proceedings and presidential politics has forced the Bush administration into a fundamentally defensive crouch.

Fifty weeks ago, when President Bush hailed him as the political strategist who made a second term possible, Rove was the toast of Washington. Now — even though he hasn’t been indicted — it seems he’s toast.

In Washington, where nothing succeeds like political success, an election victory is widely seen as proof of justification. Strip away the razzle-dazzle, and you’re left with a rather simple precept: Whatever works.

And, for almost five years, the Rove media operation worked…

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Many politicians and pundits have told us that “Iraq is not Vietnam.” Certainly, any competent geographer would agree.

Substantively, the histories of Iraq and Vietnam are very different. And the dynamics of U.S. military intervention in the two countries — while more similar than the American news media generally acknowledge — are far from identical.

Iraq is not Vietnam. But the United States is the United States…

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More than any other New York Times reporter, Judith Miller took the lead with stories claiming that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Now, a few years later, she’s facing heightened scrutiny in the aftermath of a pair of articles that appeared in the Times on Sunday — a lengthy investigative piece about Miller plus her own first-person account of how she got entangled in the case of the Bush administration’s "outing" of Valerie Plame as a CIA agent.

It now seems that Miller functioned with more accountability to U.S. military intelligence officials than to New York Times editors. Most of the way through her article, Miller slipped in this sentence: "During the Iraq war, the Pentagon had given me clearance to see secret information as part of my assignment ’embedded’ with a special military unit hunting for unconventional weapons." And, according to the same article, she ultimately told the grand jury that during a July 8, 2003, meeting with the vice president’s chief of staff, Lewis Libby, "I might have expressed frustration to Mr. Libby that I was not permitted to discuss with editors some of the more sensitive information about Iraq."

Let’s replay that one again in slow motion…

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This month we’ve heard a lot of talk about journalists who got tough with President Bush. And it’s true that he has been on the receiving end of some fiercely negative media coverage in the wake of the hurricane. But the mainstream U.S. press is ill-suited to challenging the legitimacy of the Bush administration.

The country’s largest media institutions operate on a basis of enormous respect for presidential power. Major news organizations defer to that power even while venting criticisms. Overall, mass media outlets restrain the momentum of denunciations lest they appear to create instability for the Republic.

Initially, when the lethal character of Bush’s “leadership” became clear in New Orleans, the journalistic focus on federal accountability was quick to bypass the president. For several days, the national political story seemed to mostly revolve around the flak-catching FEMA director, Michael Brown, a cipher who obviously was going to be tossed overboard by the administration…

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