Thanks Mr. Mitchell for speaking up, even though you will get some bricks thrown your way by some of your fellow journalists. Not being a journalist, my belief is that the higher one got in the MSM hierarchy, the harder it was to speak the truth because so much personally is at stake if you don't toe the line...your job, your status, your perks, whatever it is that journalists (in print as well as electronic media) FEAR LOSING by speaking the truth. At that point whatever they learned about integrity in journalism school got thrown out the window.

Your book will be a must-read for me.

This belated mea culpa by a member of the very media that helped us lie our way into two barbaric Invasions, is bogus. Mitchell tells us nothing we haven't known now since the Criminal Clique led by Cheney and Bush stole the Presidency in the so-called "election" of 2000, and then for good measure stole it again four years later. Mr Mitchell would do well to start with the most basic truth here, which is not that "governments lie." The first and most important truth is that Bush and his gang are CRIMINALS. They should ALL be imprisoned. NOW!

Mitchell also fails to address two related but patently obvious truths: (1) 85% of Americans wanted this war, despite the fact that anyone with half a brain could've seen through the tissue of lies that were presented as "justification" for the Invasions at the outset. So, Mr Mitchell, let's be honest here and include the mind-numbingly stupid "American People" as co-conspirators in the current catastrophe. Let's not let them off the hook. After all, in a "democracy" (assuming for a second that America was capable of creating such an exotic political fruit), "the People" bear ultimate responsibility for the wrongdoing committed in their name. (2) Second Mr Mitchell, you ignore the fact that this war (like all wars) serves corporate interests; and the media are nothing if not corporate to the core. So, the idea that the Media Moguls were "sleepwalking" through this disaster is also bogus. They embraced it; they wanted it; they sold it. They knew at every step of the process that it was a barbaric lie but they didn't give a rat's ass about the loss of life, treasure and national credibility involved. As the Great Republic gave way to a swindling Imperial Clique, the media made sure that they too would feed at the public trough, extracting the maximum pound of flesh before moving on (as they are starting to do now) to the "moral high ground." The American media exist to sell cars; they have no other function. It's all propaganda, all the time.

Perhaps it caught you off guard Mr Mitchell, given that for years now our grade-schoolers have been force-fed the self-evident lie that Evil Always wears a Nazi Uniform.

Lets also see some more blame passed around. The failure of our senators and representatives. Americans, even after the devastation was completely obvious to all, still put Bush jr back in office. So as Buckley said, the PEOPLE are to blame more than even Bush.

And if you think, even for a moment, that dems or progressives are somehow less guilty, just look at who they chose to run in 2004- Kerry- a man who voted for the fiasco, and now the supporters of Clinton. Who would overlook her role in this- gladly too, just to buy another brand-name.

Buskley is most definately right.

Yes, the American media just acted as the propaganda wing of the White House in the run up to the Iraq war, and they even helped to fool women as supposedly savvy and experienced as Mrs. Clinton into thinking the invasion of Iraq was justified.

But what is new? The American press IS the propaganda wing of the US government, always has been, and always will be. That is what it is for.

The newspapers make a lot of their income by selling advertising space for new and used cars and for real estate. Mass use of cars presupposes a way of life in which people live in suburbs and travel to work and to the marketplace. Thus the newspapers implicitly welcome the invasion of a country that has large reserves of oil, because this plays a part in enabling the continuation of a way of life that makes money for the newspapers and provides nice jobs for reporters.

Why rock the boat?

The bright side is that the Internet does make it impossible to completely suppress alternative points of view, though corporate ownership of all the largest information sites makes it less likely that casual readers will encounter subversive ideas.

My son just returned from Iraq and he rates the press just below lawers and above pimps. The press in the field are Iraq hires he believes most were Aquida Agents, and the few U S Reporters were playing a game of gotcha on U S Troops and the upper Management of the Military did not have the Balls to address this problem. His patrol would not accept reporters on patrol and the only thing that saved them was they were damm good at what they did. I would like to hear what Editors of major news outlets have to say in defense of the situation!

What is notable is that the Bush administration acted on intelligence gathered by the previous (Clinton) administration. It took insight to see that this was heading to a lot of not very useful trouble and it seems that Obama had that.

Walter Isaacson, who headed CNN when the war began, later informed Bill Moyers that "big people in corporations were calling up" when the network showed civilian casualties, declaring, "You're being anti-American here."

The choice not to run real photos of the war was defended with all sorts of reasons like, "we don't want to upset readers or desensitize them". But in a world were visual images pack an emotional punch, the decision to NOT use regular graphic photos was a clear show of support for the war. The government knew this and gave all sorts of reasons why coffins aren't shown. But they knew that a steady stream of photos of unloaded coffins would stick in people's head unlike the numbers would or words would.

It would be interesting to go back to the editors and photo editors of these major publication and see if any of them will admit that their photo policy was clearly a vote FOR war and was NOT a neutral act. I believe that war photos, by their very nature have a point of view, and the view is usually, "war is a terrible, terrible thing". The editors knew that and chose not to run photos because of that.