Robert Parry: (Sour Grapes) Washington Post Downplays Iraq War Crimes

Parry addresses the transparently defensive editorial response of the war-mongering and war apologist Washington Post found here.

By the way, for anyone interested, here is my post at WaPo.com in response to their editorial that I put up early this morning when the op/ed first became available:


http://www.consortiumnews.com/2010/102610.html

Washington Post Downplays Iraq War Crimes

By Robert Parry
October 26, 2010

The judges at Nuremberg after World War II had a much deeper understanding of the horrors of war than the neocon editors at the Washington Post do. Assessing the barbarity unleashed by the Nazis, the Nuremberg Tribunal identified “war of aggression” as “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.

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Yet, the Post’s editors, who aided and abetted President George W. Bush in building public support for his war of aggression against Iraq, have never been willing to stand up and take full responsibility for those deceptive editorials that parroted Bush’s WMD lies and contributed to the bloodbath that followed.

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The Post editors also sought to shift responsibility for the death toll away from the Bush administration – and themselves – by noting that “the vast majority of Iraqi civilian deaths were caused by other Iraqis, not by coalition forces.” But that argument misses the point understood by the Nuremberg Tribunals – that it is the original war of aggression that unpacks all the other evils of war, including the breakdown of civil order and the invitation to various ethnic and religious rivals to seek advantage and revenge.

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Dismissing the News

The Post's Tuesday editorial dismissed the significance of the nearly 400,000 secret military field reports released by WikiLeaks. Though one might have expected a newspaper to praise this bonanza of ground-level truth, the Post instead mocked the documents as adding little new. “In fact the mass leak, like a dump of documents on Afghanistan in the summer, mainly demonstrates that the truth about Iraq already has been told,” the Post declared.

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Downing Street Downer

Readers might remember that the Post’s editorial board adopted a similarly dismissive attitude toward the so-called “Downing Street Memos,” which were leaked in Great Britain in 2005. They revealed that the British government was aware in mid-2002 that President Bush was set on invading Iraq over its alleged weapons of mass destruction and that the intelligence was being “fixed” around the policy.

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:kick:

from their for-profit ed division & melinda gates is on their board.

which explains why you will always find the wapo shilling for ed deform.

No surprise, but thanks for this!