On the Bill Moyers documentary last night, he pointed out that Oprah Winfrey did a show about Iraq on October 9, 2002. Her two guests were Judith Miller and Kenneth Pollack. They said things like this:
MILLER: The US intelligence community believes that Saddam Hussein has deadly stocks of anthrax, of botulinium toxin, which is one of the most virulent poisons known to man.
POLLACK: And what we know for a fact from a number of defectors who’ve come out of Iraq over the years is that Saddam Hussein is absolutely determined to acquire nuclear weapons and is building them as fast as he can.
Has she had them back on to explain how they got things so completely wrong? No.
That’s interesting, because when James Frey turned out to have made things up for his book A Million Little Pieces, she made him come back on so she could shame him in front of America:
OPRAH: James Frey is here and I have to say it is difficult for me to talk to you because I feel really duped. But more importantly, I feel that you betrayed millions of readers. I think it’s such a gift to have millions of people to read your work and that bothers me greatly.
Pretty strong language, which Frey certainly deserved. But he didn’t actually help start a catastrophic war.
So, I think progressive organizations should get together and ask Oprah to invite Miller and Pollack back on the show…along with someone like Scott Ritter or British expert Glen Rangwala. I suspect it would be quite an enlightening program.
(Thanks to Sam Husseini for pointing out the Frey parallel.)