It is only fair that I note after two posts on the subject (here and here) that the New York Times has finally covered Ron Suskind’s book, The Way of the World. Not on the news page, but in the form of a book review.
If the Times news department had doubts about the book’s accuracy (as one commenter here suggested) they didn’t tell the reviewer, who gives the book high marks.
Speaking of the alleged inaccuracies, it appears to me, from a brief scan on the internet, that most of the claims of inaccuracies relate to one item in the book. The CIA claims that Suskind got two men with the same name mixed up. The review details a number of other allegations that, so far as I know, have not been successfully refuted. One critically important allegation is Suskind’s claim “that more than three months before initiating the Iraq war President Bush and his highest officials received information, via the British, from Iraq’s intelligence chief, Tahir Habbush, that Saddam Hussein had destroyed all his weapons of mass destruction years before — information that the officials ‘buried’ but that turned out to be true.”
I’ve mentioned in the past that one way the Republicans manipulate the press, and through it the public discourse, is to concentrate attention on peripheral issues in order to divert attention from those that are more important. My favorite example is the brilliant way in which they diverted attention from the undisputed fact that Ronald Reagan sold arms to Iran to the murkier question of whether he was aware that the proceeds of the sale were diverted to Nicaragua. The indisputable impeachable offense receded into the background. Books like Suskind’s get the same treatment.
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