Deep Throat was the anonymous source who helped Washington Post
reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein break the Watergate story.
For the past 30 years the identity and in some cases the very existence
of Deep Throat has been called into question until Mark Felt recently
revealed himself to be the mystery man.
There have been many opportunities for eager reporters to bring
down the current White House occupant, but no one in the corporate
media seems to want the job. At the end of 2000 Greg Palast, an
American reporter working for the British press, revealed that
Florida Governor Jeb Bush had removed thousands of eligible voters,
most of them black, from the voter registration rolls, thereby
stealing the state for his brother George W.
At that time the media told us about hanging chads and butterfly
ballots, but nothing about the true theft of Florida and the presidency.
When Palast handed the story to CBS, the Washington Post and others,
he was told that Jeb denied everything. In the current political
climate a denial from a subject, a powerful subject that is, means
the end of any reporting.
Bob Woodward is now managing editor at the Washington Post. While
he cut his teeth on the dethronement of a criminal presidency,
he is now in bed with another criminal presidency. Woodward wrote Bush
at War with the full cooperation of the Bush White House. Trusted
by Bush, Cheney, Rove and company, Woodward now perfectly fits
the definition of a compromised journalist.
There is plenty of evidence to bring articles of impeachment against
this president. One member of Congress is trying to bring attention
to information that stares the corporate media in the face but
is rarely if ever acknowledged.
Thanks once again to the British media we have proof of what any
thinking person already knew. The Bush administration lied about
the need to go to war against and occupy Iraq. There was no nuclear
capability, and no WMDs either. The evidence purporting to show
that they did exist were all fabricated.
An internal
memo from Tony Blair’s government said the following about
the Bush administration argument in favor of war with Iraq: Bush
wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by
the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and
facts were being fixed around the policy.
Unlike in the early 1970s, the Washington Post
didn’t even have
to do any work on this story. All the Post had to do was quote
other newspapers. They finally did, but very late and with very
little fanfare. The Post reported the story weeks after the Times
of London did, and to add insult to injury placed it on page A18.
The Post’s own readers angrily emailed their
ombudsman and demanded that their newspaper do its job, only to
be scolded for daring to question that august publication.
Democratic Congressman John
Conyers of Michigan isn’t holding his breath waiting for
the press to tell this story. He is asking at least 100,000 Americans
to sign a letter demanding answers to questions on the Downing
Street memo.
John Conyers sat on the House Judiciary committee
that was on the verge of impeaching Richard Nixon. Conyers must
be feeling
a strange case of déjà vu. He has seen a corrupt White House before,
but in 1974 America still had a functioning press and Democrats
were the majority party in the House of Representatives.
Thanks to Democratic party incompetence, that
hasn’t been the
case since 1994. Conyers and his colleagues have evidence of numerous impeachable offenses
against George W. Bush, but they are unable to make themselves
heard when their leaders won’t buck the system and the media focus
on missing person cases and celebrity criminal trials.
Conyers is doing his job as a member of Congress,
the media’s
job as an investigative force, and the Democratic party’s job in
opposing the Republicans. Not content to wear so many hats, John
Conyers ignored the right wing attack on Felt, and planned to praise
him with a House resolution.
“As one who was a first hand witness to Watergate,
I can only state humbly that Mr. Felt helped bring our country
back from the
brink of a constitutional crisis and an out-of-control White House.”
He also knows that today’s press is unprepared to do its job vis
a vis the Bush administration. "Today it is unclear who will
step up to the plate to expose the wrongdoing of the current administration."
Conyers knows that if we want this job done
right we will have to do it ourselves. There is no “they” to
help us. No political party, and no newspaper will come to our
aid. Progressives must sign Conyers’ letter
and step up to the plate to denounce the terrible crimes that have
been committed against Iraq and against this country. Just don’t
expect to read anything about it in your local newspaper.