Burying the lede

Posted by lex, on March 15, 2008

I was going to write a long, quasi-hysterical rant about the way that a new report(pdf) on Saddam’s terrorist connections were portrayed in the legacy media over the last week. I was going to note that someone inside the intelligence bureaucracy apparently feared the report enough to leak an isolated quote from the executive summary – that there was no “smoking gun” showing a direct, operational linkage between Saddam’s Ba’athist tyranny and al Qaeda – two days prior to the report’s official release as a way of erecting and then immediately demolishing a strawman argument that anyone had actually claimed a direct, operational relationship between Saddam and al Qaeda.

I was going to write something about the fact that, having succesfully seized the narrative by falsely characterizing both the sense of the report and its context, that legacy media tribunes subsequently changed the subject, broadly hinting that the Pentagon had “censored” it, thereby rendering the report not worth reading. After all, they told what it said. Why would you want to read it yourself? Go back to sleep.

I was going to write all that, but Stephen Hayes got there first. And Dan Collins, et al ably deconstruct the attempts of those who would insist upon the Preferred Narrative as more palatable to the complex reality.

So, you know: Read them.

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The Operative: Nothing here is what it seems. He isn’t the plucky hero. The Alliance isn’t some evil empire. This is not the grand arena.

Inara: And that’s not incense.

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Update: Protein Wisdom link fixed.

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