Antiwar.com Blog

Atrios (Via Lew Rockwell) has caught the Washington Post attempting to lie you into another war.

I had noticed a funny thing to make it into print in today’s Antiwar.com top story from the Christian Science Monitor while reading it on my radio show this morning. Dig this:

The US military also issued a statement on Sunday calling the operation in Diwaniyah, dubbed Black Eagle, a “great success” so far. It said it detained 39 militiamen and killed an unspecified number. It also has uncovered “many large caches of weapons,” including factories that make explosively formed penetrators (EFPs), devices that Washington accuses Tehran of supplying to Sadr’s militia.

You remember the EFPs right? The IEDs that are so powerful they got a brand new acronym a couple months back? The ones that, as the Monitor notes above, the U.S. government has accused Iran of supplying to the Iraqi Shi’ite militias that America and Iran are both currently backing? (Gareth Porter explains the truth about them here.)

Well, here was also this Reuters piece from Saturday which included the same information. The Post ran the story, but apparently one of their editors (liars) realized this might reveal the holes in War Party claims that these new “EFPs” must be coming from Iran. After all, here, supposedly, is a whole EFP factory just a few miles south of Baghdad.

The paragraphs revealing Iraqi EFP-self-reliance were then excised from Post version of the story.

“Red alert! Quick! Get out your Pravda penâ„¢ brand exacto-knives and get to work before some damn blogger catches us admitting the truth in contradiction to one more of our half-baked excuses for war against Iran!”

Too Late. You’re caught, discredited Washington Post liars. From Eschaton:

“Washington Post version of the story, as captured by Google News”:

That paragraph is now missing from that WaPo version of the story. But you do have this:

The U.S. military said two U.S. soldiers died in separate roadside bombings in the east and west of Baghdad on Friday. One of the bombs was an explosively formed projectile, a particularly deadly type of device which Washington accuses Iran of supplying Iraqi militants. [AWC bold]

Am I supposed to believe that this was anything but a deliberate, premeditated act meant to deny the truth to people who may cite it as a reason to not have a war and replace it with more government lies?

The Post is forever disgraced and has been. This is just another nail in their coffin.

To any Post reporter who considers himself an actual journalist, why not pick today to resign from that War Party propaganda rag?

What? Do you think their reputation is going to get better from here?

Justin Raimondo discusses the failures of the American media, warmongers who misleadingly identify themselves as libertarians, the threat of war with Iran and the upcoming trial of AIPAC’s Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman for espionage.

MP3 here. (41:43)

Justin Raimondo is the editorial director of Antiwar.com. He is the author of An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard (Prometheus Books, 2000). He is also the author of Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement (with an Introduction by Patrick J. Buchanan), (Center for Libertarian Studies, 1993), and Into the Bosnian Quagmire: The Case Against U.S. Intervention in the Balkans (1996).

He is a contributing editor for The American Conservative, a Senior Fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute, and an Adjunct Scholar with the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and writes frequently for Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Wait, again? The Traffic Blockers aren’t really thinking of using this tired old tactic again, are they? You know, the idiots who made Americans in cars and buses side with George Bush during the run-up to the attack on Iraq by sitting in the middle of or otherwise blocking roads? John Goes says that in Portland, they just might be considering crawling out of their dreadlocked hippie holes to do the same if the US bombs Iran. We couldn’t ask for better unwitting saboteurs.

Peace activists are always hearing how our military is fighting overseas in order to preserve our right to dissent at home, but look what happened to Professor Walter F. Murphy, emeritus of Princeton University, when he tried to board a plane (via War and Piece):

On 1 March 07, I was scheduled to fly on American Airlines to Newark, NJ, to attend an academic conference at Princeton University, designed to focus on my latest scholarly book, Constitutional Democracy, published by Johns Hopkins University Press this past Thanksgiving.”

When I tried to use the curb-side check in at the Sunport, I was denied a boarding pass because I was on the Terrorist Watch list. I was instructed to go inside and talk to a clerk. At this point, I should note that I am not only the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence (emeritus) but also a retired Marine colonel. I fought in the Korean War as a young lieutenant, was wounded, and decorated for heroism. I remained a professional soldier for more than five years and then accepted a commission as a reserve office, serving for an additional 19 years.

I presented my credentials from the Marine Corps to a very polite clerk for American Airlines. One of the two people to whom I talked asked a question and offered a frightening comment: “Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that.” I explained that I had not so marched but had, in September, 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the Web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the Constitution. “That’ll do it,” the man said.

I’m almost afraid to ask how widespread this is, but I suspect it isn’t limited to American Airlines. So now we have to answer for our political opinions to every Epsilon-Minus semi-moron who checks baggage at the airline counter. Rose Wilder Lane must be spinning in her grave.

Reason magazine continues to discredit both itself, and libertarianism, by featuring its Middle East “expert”-in-residence Michael Young, a minor chord in the neocon echo chamber. Reason, Young, and the racist swamp of “Little Green Footballs” — what a ménage à trois!

The Independent Institute‘s Ivan Eland explains the constitutional limitations of the President‘s foreign policy powers, Speaker Pelosi‘s trip to Syria, the future of the occupation of Iraq and relations between various states in the Middle East.

MP3 here. (29:14)

Ivan Eland is Senior Fellow and Director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at The Independent Institute in Oakland, Calif. Having received his Ph.D. in national security policy from George Washington University, Dr. Eland has served as Principal Defense Analyst at the Congressional Budget Office, Evaluator-in-Charge for the U.S. General Accounting Office (national security and intelligence), and Investigator for the House Foreign Affairs Committee. He has testified on NATO expansion before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and CIA oversight before the House Government Reform Committee.

Dr. Eland is the author of Putting “Defense” Back into U.S. Defense Policy: Rethinking U.S. Security in the Post-Cold War World and forty-five studies on national security issues. His articles have appeared in Arms Control Today, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Emory Law Journal, The Independent Review, Issues in Science and Technology, Mediterranean Quarterly, Middle East and International Review, Middle East Policy, Nexus, and Northwestern Journal of International Affairs. His popular writings have been published in the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Houston Chronicle, Dallas Morning News, San Diego Union-Tribune, Washington Post, Miami Herald, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Newsday, Sacramento Bee, Orange County Register, and Chicago Sun-Times. He has appeared on ABC’s “World News Tonight,” CNN’s “Crossfire,” Fox News, CNBC, CNN-fn, MSNBC, NPR, PBS, CBC, BBC, and other national and international TV and radio programs.

His column appears Tuesdays on Antiwar.com.