6-22-06 Foxnews announces WMD found

Last evening, 6-21-06, there was a coordinated effort to spread misinformation which claimed that Weapons of Mass Destruction were found in Iraq. The propaganda stared, before 8PM EST, with Senator Santorum’s claims that a recently declassified report showed WMDs were discovered in 2003 by US troops. Santorum stated on the floor of the Senate "We have found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, chemical weapons".

This claim was then echoed at 9PM EST by Foxnews’s reporter Sean Hannity as he made claim that WMDs were found in Iraq, supported by guest Ann Coulter, while simultaneously attacking Senators Kennedy and Kerry for stating facts to the contrary.

Shortly thereafter, by 9:30 EST, Foxnews.com’s headline was “WMD found in Iraq” (screen shot below) along with a detailed article written by Foxnews; archived here: however; this seemingly shocking revelation was not acknowledged or even mentioned by the Associated Press, CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, or MSNBC and by the following day not even the Whitehouse was announcing their vilification concerning WMD had been vindicated. Then, to accentuate the blitzkrieg-style hit & run attack of this propaganda strike... Foxnews went silent, removed all evidence that they ever made the claims, and by 6-22-06 no one on Foxnews seemed to be acknowledging that the claims were even made.

The logic of this strategy is as blaring as it is blatantly and childishly simplistic… to get misinformation into the public realm so that pundits and fellow supports will repeat it; to muddy up the argument, to confuse the issue of why we went to war.

In much the same way that the neo-conservatives send out SPAM-like chain-emails announcing, for example, “millions of papers found in Iraq linking Al-Qaeda to Saddam” which of course was not true, in order to get people who support the administration their talking points; this scheme was intended to accomplish the same result.

The declassified report, first mentioned by Senator Santorum, reads more like a hurriedly underlined short list of Republican Party talking points than a report prepared by Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. If one was to actually read the report, here: you will quickly see that the bullet points refer, not to any ongoing WMD program, but to “Pre Gulf War munitions” and “degraded” munitions.

However, the report itself is so incredibly short and so far lacking any details what-so-ever... that it is impossible for the information to be verified or scrutinized. Were these "munitions" merely empty shells with traces of sarin, a gear or small part of an old chemical missile buried in the dirt, or degraded canisters that once contained unusable mustard gas? The “Key Points” of the four page report are only a minuscule 152 words in length; while the first three pages simply list a title, brief introduction, the names of a few members of Congress, and  topped off with a handwritten coversheet.

The 152 words appear to refer only to old tainted, and obviously unusable, pre-1991 munitions that were found scattered around Iraq and unequivocally not to any ongoing WMD threat or "reconstituted weapons program".

This coordinated strategy of hit & run propaganda only proves to illustrate the unequivocal need for the reinstitution of the 'Fairness in Media Act' which was allowed to expire by the Republican Controlled Congress. Anyone calling themselves 'news' must comply with and be held accountable to journalistic standards and practices; especially those who revel in throwing around the slogan "fair and balanced" ... such as Foxnews.