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The Forum > Article Comments > Information might want to be free, but who foots the bill? > Comments

Information might want to be free, but who foots the bill? : Comments

By Brian McNair, published 22/6/2011

As newspaper circulations decline can news as we know it be financed from the revenues from websites?

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I feel the need to comment. I love newspapers - there is more in-depth coverage possible and they stop me from spending my time in front of a screen.

My problem is that I agree with many previous commenters - papers are becoming full of junk articles, huge amounts of spin, and a very shallow attempt at covering the news of the day. Unfortunately the internet is the same. A further problem with sourcing news on the internet, for the unwary, is that many news sources are even more poorly researched than the papers and associated websites.

I am therefore in a quandry - there is very little news left to read or watch on TV.
Posted by Phil Matimein, Thursday, 23 June 2011 3:32:59 PM
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Malthusista,

You should ask the people of Halajba whether they trusted Saddam when he claimed he had no weapons of mass destruction. You would obviously have to talk to those who were not among the thousands killed by chemical agents in attacks on the town in 1988. Or you could talk to one of the hundreds of thousands of Iranian soldiers who were gassed during the Iran-Iraq war, that is if their lungs stll work.

Hindsight is 20-20.

Saddam had a track record of possesing and aquiring WMD. Besides his thousands of tons of chemcal weapons (Sarin, VX and mustard gas), Iraq had at one time produced 30,000 litres of biological agents, such as botulism and anthrax for weaponisation.

Saddam did his best to hide these programs. He lied about what they had produced, and he did not cooperate fully with the inspectors at any stage of the process.

In hindsight it turns out that Saddam was telling the truth. But what reasonable person could have been expected to take his word for it? Especially given his record of obstructing the UN inspectors. Not even Hans Blix was unequivocal when his early reports came out. He criticised Saddam for the 'cat and mouse' games that the Iraqis were playing with his inspection teams.

Whilst I have some sympathy for your claims that the Bush and Blair manipulated the intlligence, I'm less than convinced that either of them KNEW there were no WMD left in Iraq. And if neither of them knew this for a fact, how could any jouranlist know?

Turning up at an Iraqi warehouse for a regime organised inspection of suspected sites to find no WMD hardly proves their lack of existence. How could mainstream journalists prove that there were no WMD stockpiles in Iraq, especially given the fact that Saddam had a massive secret police and intelligence organisation whose job it was to prevent people from finding about things he wanted kept quiet?
Posted by PaulL, Thursday, 23 June 2011 10:29:30 PM
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PaulL,

You watched the YouTube video I gave the link to above (again at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8k3GuVTfWLw ) haven't you?

Have you seen "Fair Game" which is a factual depiction of the US Government's deceit of its people and of the rest of the world to justify the invasion of Iraq?

If you had seen either you would know that Hussein's past use of chemical weapons against Kurds and Iranians at a time when the US, particularly Donald Rumsfeld (http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB82/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUPb-3zkh0c) was on good terms with Saddam Hussein did not form part of the US's case as to why it was necessary to invade Iraq in 2003.

It was claimed by the US Government that it was necessary to invade Iraq because Iraq was building nuclear weapons with uranium imported from Africa. "Fair Game" shows that the US Government knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that Saddam Hussein's program to build nuclear weapons was broken in the 1990's. They knew from Joe Wilson, Valerie Plame's journalist husband, who went to Niger to investigate claims that large shipments of Uranium were being sent from Niger to Iraq that no Uranium was being shipped from Niger.

The claim that there was a risk of Iraqi nuclear weapons was a lie.

Given that it was already known that the US had lied about the circumstances which led to the earlier 1991 war against Iraq (the "incubator babies lie" (http://911review.com/precedent/decade/incubators.html) and US ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie's role in setting up Iraq to provide the US with a convenient pretext to attack Iraq (http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/ARTICLE5/april.html) then the US and Australian surely owed the public that they place the WMD claims under closer scrutiny. Instead they, particularly the Murdoch media, unquestionlingly pushed the lies being peddled by the US Government in 2003.
Posted by malthusista, Friday, 24 June 2011 1:54:13 AM
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Apologies for the error of omission in my previous post. The word 'newsmedia' should have been included in the last paragraph. It should have been written as follows:

Given that it was already known that the US had lied about the circumstances which led to the earlier 1991 war against Iraq (the "incubator babies lie" (http://911review.com/precedent/decade/incubators.html) and US ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie's role in setting up Iraq to provide the US with a convenient pretext to attack Iraq (http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/ARTICLE5/april.html) then the US and Australian newsmedia surely owed to the public that they place the WMD claims under closer scrutiny. Instead they, particularly the Murdoch media, unquestioningly pushed the lies being peddled by the US Government in 2003.
(ends)

What is being fed to us today about Libya and Syria by the Murdoch newsmedia, the Fairfax press, the ABC and even much of the supposed 'far-left' and 'alternative' media are no less lies than what was fed to us in 2003, 2001, and 1991.

For the truth about world events I recommend, amongst other sites, http://globalresearch.ca . If you find the articles as helpful as I did, then please consider making a donation to Global Research (as well as to OLO) before paying to cross any paywall to read lies.
Posted by malthusista, Saturday, 25 June 2011 11:29:44 AM
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