Why you should read left-wing media

The lefty blogosphere is all a-twitter over this article from the Times (U.K.):

"The RAF and US aircraft doubled the rate at which they were dropping bombs on Iraq in 2002 in an attempt to provoke Saddam Hussein into giving the allies an excuse for war, new evidence has shown.

"The new information, obtained by the Liberal Democrats, shows that the allies dropped twice as many bombs on Iraq in the second half of 2002 as they did during the whole of 2001, and that the RAF increased their attacks even more quickly than the Americans did."

Of course I'm always happy for the corporate media to print articles like this, why, it might even make it into the U.S. media (then again, it might not). But "new information"? Perhaps the exact mathematical precision of the data, but certainly not the gist of the story, which was well-known to anyone reading the left-wing press in 2002.

For example, here are some excerpts from an article in the Sept. 12, 2002 issue of Workers World newspaper, written in the aftermath of a fact-finding trip to Iraq made by Ramsey Clark, the article's author Brian Becker, and others in August of that year:

"This writer went to Iraq on Aug. 25 as part of a fact-finding anti-war delegation led by former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark. The delegation flew into Iraq's "no-fly zones" in the north and south of the country for five days. In those five days, the U.S. bombed Iraq on five separate occasions.

"True to form, the U.S. media said almost nothing about these daily bombings. Each day after we returned from the site of the latest bombing we would check the web sites of the Western media. Nary a peep about the lawless aggression waged from the skies by U.S. warplanes. Instead, the U.S. media focused its coverage on 'why Saddam Hussein is such a great threat to world peace.'

"When the U.S. press does mention the regular bombings of Iraq, it usually buries the information in a small article far from the front page. The Pentagon is almost always quoted, explaining that the attacks were in self-defense. They say it was against military targets and against Iraqi radar, which was flipped on to trace U.S. and British warplanes overflying Iraq's airspace in two large areas in both northern and southern Iraq."

As an indication of the extent of what the U.S. was doing at the time, Becker writes about a trip to Mosul:

"The civilian airport had been without radar since the 1991 Gulf War. It had been largely non-functional until recently, when the government decided to defy the no-fly zone and resume daily flights into the city from Baghdad. The assumption was that U.S. aircraft would not shoot down civilian airliners.

"U.S. warplanes have not yet shot down any passenger planes, but on Aug. 27 two powerful missiles took out the airport's radar that guides the civilian airliners in their takeoff and landing and as they travel through the surrounding air space.

"The delegation went through the wreckage of the totally destroyed radar, which lay in crumpled ruins not far from the runway. The radar was very old, made up of balkanized parts from earlier rudimentary radar systems. Clearly, it was not a sophisticated military-type radar."

The "News and Commentary" links at the right contain a variety of left-wing news sources; I haven't checked but I strongly suspect that most if not all of them were also discussing the increased bombing in the "no-fly" zones before the war, and correctly characterizing it as both a provocation (as noted by the memo discussed in the Times), and also as a means of "softening up" Iraq and rendering it even more helpless before the attacks which were to come.

One interesting side note. Upon returning from the trip to Iraq described above, Ramsey Clark appeared on CNN, where, on August 29, he was accused by Wolf Blitzer of having been "used by Saddam Hussein" (a similar accusation was thrown at Dan Rather after his pre-invasion interview of Hussein). The world now knows, of course, that the truth is that Wolf Blitzer, and virtually every other member of the U.S. media, was being "used" by George Bush. I wonder if anyone has ever asked Blitzer that question, and what his answer was (or would be) if they did.