[QUOTE=Socialism Sucks]http://www.insightmag.com/global_user_elements/printpage.cfm?storyid=670120
Yes indeed, what about those WMDs??
Exerpt from Last Man Standing By Erik Wemple
full article at http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/archives/media/2004/media0723.html
A longtime right-wing scribe, Timmerman authored a piece in the May 11 issue of Insight on the News magazine, titled “Saddam’s WMD Have Been Found.” The story called on the Bush administration to trumpet its success in finding the elusive arsenal: “With evidence of Iraq’s WMD programs and weapons in hand...why has the White House not yet blown the whistle?”
The story appeared in the final edition of Insight, a nationally distributed property of News World Communications Inc., the company controlled by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon that also owns the Washington Times. The magazine was folded in an April cost-cutting initiative. But with scoops like this, perhaps someone will revive it.
Timmerman’s case for a Bush slam-dunk on unconventional weapons rests in part on the following discoveries touted in the Insight piece:
? A prison laboratory “complex” where Iraqi scientists “may have” submitted humans to testing of biological weapons agents.
? “New research on [biological weapons]?applicable agents...”
? Plans for new long-range missiles.
If those weapons scandals aren’t convincing enough, Timmerman’s smoking gun is worthy of boldface type:
“Reference strains’ of a wide variety of biological-weapons agents were found beneath the sink in the home of a prominent Iraqi [biological-weapons] scientist.”
Can we add a bottle of Liquid Drano to Hussein’s arsenal, too?
Given those finds, Timmerman, who was a senior writer at Insight, doesn’t understand why Bush has ceded so much ground on WMD. “My point in that article, and where the administration makes a mistake, is that we have found enough evidence and found enough weapons themselves in Iraq for the administration to no longer have this self-deprecatory attitude,” says Timmerman.
And the Kensington, Md.?based reporter wonders why his peers are treating the evidence like radioactive material. “Why isn’t Dan Rather reporting this? Why isn’t Peter Jennings reporting this?” asks Timmerman. “It has been generally ignored, just as any story that’s deemed favorable to the president is ignored by the formerly mainstream press.” (Timmerman believes that what is known as the “mainstream press” has lost touch with Americans through partisan reporting.)
On no issue, however, do the knocks against the liberal media fall quite as flat as they do on Iraq. The press, after all, largely supported the administration in the run-up to war, swallowing its exaggerated intelligence on nuclear stockpiles and mushroom clouds. And in recent months, the press has begun making amends: Both the news and editorial desks of the New York Times have issued meae culpae; the New Republic printed an issue detailing its regrets on having supported the war; and the Washington Post’s editorial page last October asked itself, “Were we wrong?” only to conclude that it wasn’t.
So why don’t these news organizations take a look at the Timmerman docket and satisfy themselves that the invasion’s mission has been accomplished? Joseph Cirincione, an oft-quoted nonproliferation expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has an answer: “[Timmerman’s] credibility on this issue is zero. [The administration] told us that Saddam had 300 to 500 tons of chemical weapons, and now we’re supposed to take a vial as proof that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? Nonsense.”
Perhaps Timmerman’s ideological brethren need a bit more time to find the weapons. In April 2003, he wrote, “U.S. and U.N. officials tell Insight that the Iraqis most likely have hidden vital equipment and material in underground tunnels or behind fake walls in hospitals and private homes, in the desert and in mountains and even in rivers...”
Timmerman, 50, has spent decades on the national-security beat cultivating sources for such revelations. According to his bio on the Insight Web site, Timmerman has been “tracking terrorists for 20 years.” In 1982, says the bio, he was taken hostage by Yasser Arafat’s Fatah guerrillas in Lebanon, enduring 24 days of captivity in an underground cell. He spent the balance of the ‘80s as a roving reporter in the Middle East, claiming, for instance, to have been one of the first correspondents on the scene of the April 1983 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Lebanon. “Ken is just a superb investigative reporter. He looks for the angles and the missed opportunities that others create,” says Paul Rodriguez, Insight’s managing editor.
Timmerman has written six books, including Shakedown: Exposing the Real Jesse Jackson, a New York Times best seller.
As a reporter for Time magazine in 1994, Timmerman says, he unearthed a scoop on how Chinese technicians were gleaning military technology from a McDonnell Douglas plant for the B-1 bomber. He proved prescient: The company was later indicted for export-control violations and settled with the government in 2001. Timmerman later wrote that Time “pooh-poohed my investigation and, after a written complaint from an administration official, fired me rather than run the story.”
Time did not return a call for comment. “They showed their political nepotism and close ties to the Clinton administration,” says Timmerman.
