The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette calls itself on its masthead “One of America’s Great Newspapers.” I’d call the PG one of the government’s great newspapers, judging from two articles sharing a page in the March 10, 2001, issue.
“CIA Overrated Soviet Military,” by Jonathan S. Landay of Knight Ridder Newspapers, reports that “a newly declassified” “summary of a 1989 CIA internal review said that every major intelligence assessment from 1974 to 1986…‘substantially’ overestimated the Kremlin’s plans to modernize and expand its strategic nuclear arsenal.”
Landay parrots the summary’s official line, depicting those “mistaken analyses” about “the Soviet threat” as innocent errors resulting from outdated information. Only in the last sentence of his 14-paragraph article does he offer a (quite plausible) dissenting view:
“Melvin Goodman, a former senior CIA Soviet analyst, said the study bolstered criticism that intelligence assessments of the Soviet threat were deliberately inflated to justify increases in U.S. defense spending and nuclear forces, as well as SDI.” (Typical journalistic obfuscation—does Goodman himself believe the criticism he cites?)
I doubt Landay bothered to try finding out who, if anyone, “deliberately inflated” those assessments. Cold War propaganda about an alleged “Soviet threat” is just too comforting to abandon.
Below that CIA article appears “U.S. Considers Trimming Iraq No-fly Zones” by John Diamond of the Chicago Tribune. (“One of America’s Great Newspapers” does little national or international reporting of its own.) His story about the Bush administration’s proposed “plan to scale back enforcement of the no-fly zones over Iraq” relies solely on hawkish government sources such as “one senior Pentagon official,” who doesn’t want “Saddam…‘to jerk us around’ ”; “[a]nother defense official”, who doesn’t want the U.S. “ ‘to appear impotent’ ”; “some lawmakers…concerned about what they view as an easing of economic sanctions on Iraq”; and Secretary of State Colin Powell, who “told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee…‘that we reserve the right to strike militarily’ ” against Iraq for any reason.
Not a word about the illegality of the U.S. and British-imposed no-fly zones, about the Iraqi civilians killed in no-fly zone bombing raids, or about the many more Iraqi civilians (mostly children) who have died from economic sanctions. But then, few mainstream journalists report against the conservative status quo, and even fewer newspapers will print those reports.
March 12-13, 2001 (revised March 17, 2001)
DAVID V. MATTHEWS 