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So hard to get the truth about Ukraine. Reminds me of the Iraq legacy of lies. Media failed us.
Actually most leaders in both parties failed us then in the lead up to the invasion.
I have been looking for the 2004 article in Mother Jones. I believe it was called A Legacy of Lies. It tells of our leaders going on TV and scaring us about the dangers posed by Iraq.
I saved part of it, found it in a post from 2009. Almost unbelievable. DU was about the only place I learned about the real situation. When I came in 2002 my eyes were opened wide.
These two people stunned me in their exaggerations. Heck, they started back in the 90s with the fear tactics.
Iraq was a legacy of lies told and lies believed. A confused time. A tragic time.
Faced with the need to justify an economically devastating and internationally unpopular embargo of Iraq, the Clinton administration engaged in a pattern of stretching and distorting weapons data to bolster their claim that Saddam Hussein was still hiding an illicit arsenal. The Clinton White House never used that "intelligence" to push for an invasion of Iraq, as Bush so effectively did. But in its desperate quest to salvage a crumbling Iraq policy, the Clinton White House laid the groundwork for the deceptions of their successors.
In a November 1997 Sunday morning appearance on ABC, Defense Secretary William Cohen held up a five-pound bag of sugar for the cameras to dramatize the threat of Iraqi anthrax: "This amount of anthrax could be spread over a city -- let's say the size of Washington. It would destroy at least half the population of that city. One breath and you are likely to face death within five days."
"It could wipe out populations of whole countries!" Cokie Roberts gasped as Cohen described the Iraqi arsenal. "Millions, millions," Cohen responded, "if it were properly dispersed."
A year later, at a nationally televised town hall meeting on Iraq at Ohio State University, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright brought home the dangers: "Iraq is a long way from Ohio, but what happens there matters a great deal here. For the risk that the leaders of a rogue state will use nuclear, chemical or biological weapons against us or our allies is the greatest security threat we face. The evidence is strong that Iraq continues to hide prohibited weapons and materials."
And there was the trusted Colin Powell. I remember that Kofi Annan pointed out in his book that Powell never really believed his testimony about Weapons of Mass Destruction.
Kofi Annan's memoir: Did Colin Powell doubt his own WMD claims?
Kofi Annan, who was secretary-general of the United Nations during the lead-up to war, is releasing a new memoir — Interventions: A Life in War and Peace — in which he says that Powell had greater doubts than previously believed about the Bush administration's evidence suggesting that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. How skeptical was Powell? Here, a brief guide to Annan's account:
How does Annan know what Powell was thinking?
He says Powell told him, according to The New York Times. Annan, who considers Powell a friend, says that the then-secretary of State dropped by Annan's 38th-floor office at U.N. headquarters in New York City six weeks into the war. He says Powell was ebullient after learning that U.S. forces had found what they thought were the mobile laboratories the Bush administration had claimed Hussein was using to make weapons of mass destruction. Powell, who had made an impassioned case to the U.N. Security Council that Iraq's chemical and biological weapons program justified the invasion, was excited. "Kofi, they've made an honest man of me," Annan quotes Powell as saying.
What else does Annan say about the meeting?
He says that as he sat with Powell, "the relief — and the exhaustion — was palpable." Annan wasn't convinced that Iraq really had all of the weapons the Bush administration — Powell included — had claimed. Still, Annan writes, "I could not help but smile along with my friend" and "could only be impressed by the resilience of this man, who had endured so much to argue for a war he clearly did not believe in."
How does this differ from previous accounts?
In his own memoir, Powell says his February 2003 speech at the U.N. justifying the invasion on the basis of what turned out to be bogus evidence was "a blot, a failure [that] will always be attached to me." He doesn't say he knew the intelligence was false, but he does say, "I am mad mostly at myself for not having smelled the problem. My instincts failed me." Powell has said he was misled, and demanded that the CIA and Pentagon explain why they didn't tell him that they knew that a key informant — Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, also known as "Curveball" — had lied when he said Saddam had mobile bio-weapons labs.
The media is failing us again. It would help if some sensible leaders of either party could manage some air or print time to stand up to the lies about Russia and Ukraine...and tell us the simple truth.
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It may be unintentional on the part of many, but it's more popular to protect the party leaders than face some of the hard truths. 
And we're in complete agreement. 
Looks like you are taking something personally and projecting some false attributes to me.
post-anarchist.
If order for them to have failed us they would have to be trying to bring us facts and informed, unbiased opinion. That's not what their masters pay them to do.
nailed it
