Amy Goodman's pathetic little show only gets worse each week. Foundation money has dictated softer and softer coverage, to be sure, but it was her own choice to go for the title of Pacifica's Mary Hart. She did that by taking her alleged "war and peace report" to the Sundance film festival (a festival that lost pertinence and cachet after 1992) for approximately two weeks of 'news' programs. As we noted of that garbage, "While NPR worked, Amy Goodman jerked off. Last week, Goody took Pravda on the Hudson to the Sundance Film Festival which allowed her to yet again avoid the Iraq Inquiry in London. Friday, Tony Blair was the witness as the Inquiry completed three months of public hearings and yet Goody and her so-called 'war and peace report' have never gone to London to cover the hearings or even devoted a single segment to the hearings via phone-in guests. For three months. Yet she could give the hour to Robert Redford on Monday."
Riddle time: What's worse than Amy Goodman ignoring the Iraq Inquiry?
Answer: Amy Goodman 'covering' it.
November 24th, the Inquiry began public hearings, February 17th, Goodman finally found enough interest to do a segment on it. Kind-of. Sort-of.
For 10 minutes, she addressed the Iraq Inquiry . . .
And a movie.
Does it get more pathetic?
Over five minutes was devoted to In The Loop and its director Armando Iannucci was invited to offer . . . insight . . . into . . .
Well, not much. "The film is -- it's a fiction," explained Iannucci and that may seem obvious but it apparently had escaped Amy Goodman.
She offered two brief clips of the Inquiry -- Tony Blair testifying in the longer one, Clare Short in the shorter. How many film clips did she offer? Four lengthy clips from In The Loop.
Does it get more pathetic?
Actually it does. Iannucci was only one of Goodman's guests. The other one?
He writes for the British newspaper The Guardian.
"Yea!" you exclaim because The Guardian actually covered the Inquiry. Click here for their folder of the paper's coverage.
The Guardian? Maybe you're thinking Goodman brought on Richard Norton-Taylor who wrote or co-wrote so many articles on the Inquiry? Or maybe Andrew Sparrow who not only wrote and co-wrote articles but also live blogged the hearings for the paper? Or maybe Chris Ames who runs Iraq Inquiry Digest and regularly writes columns on the Inquiry for the newspaper? Or Simon Jenkins or any number of people because the newspaper covered it in live blogging, in news articles, in editorials, in columns, in cartoons, in every way possible.
So, naturally, the news that someone with The Guardian was on to discuss the Iraq Inquiry was good news.
Right?
Leave it to Goodman to pick possibly the only columnist for the paper who has refused to write about the Inquiry.
George Monibot has never written a column on the Inquiry nor has he ever blogged at the paper about the Inquiry.
If he's not the most uninformed worker at The Guardian, his answers certainly portrayed him as such.
We'll note the 'full' Inquiry discussion and comment as we go through it. You should grasp very quickly that the ten minute segment entitled "George Monbiot: UK Inquiry 'Toothless' and 'Feeble' in Probing Origins of Iraq War" only spent about two minutes on the Inquiry.
AMY GOODMAN: George Monbiot, start off by responding to the Chilcot inquiry. Is it working? What do you think?
GEORGE MONBIOT: Well, being pulled before the Chilcot inquiry is a bit like being mauled by a sock puppet. They're toothless. They're wooly. They're utterly feeble. It's a panel of pussycats. And they were deliberately chosen by the government for that very purpose. It's the prime minister's office which sets the terms of reference for inquiries in the UK and which chooses the members of the inquiry panel. So it's rather like someone, a criminal suspect who's up before the court for murder, for example, who says, "Well, actually, I don't want to be tried for murder. I'd rather be tried for shoplifting. And I'd like to appoint the judge and the jury for that trial." It's a ridiculous process, which would never be tolerated in the United States or, indeed, in any nation which has got a constitution. But in the UK, where we don't have a written constitution and where there are no practical limits to the prime minister's power, they can get away with it.
Remember that point he's insisting on: It wouldn't be tolerated in the US.
AMY GOODMAN: I think people in the United States might be thinking right now, "Huh. I mean, you're having this inquiry in Britain; nothing like this is happening in the United States."
GEORGE MONBIOT: Well, that's true. Of course, that is true. And it's about time that something did happen. But hopefully it wouldn't be like this. It would be a proper American inquiry, which has got some teeth, which is not appointed by the very people who were responsible for the thing that's being inquired into, and where there's a chance of them actually getting to the truth of the matter, rather than, as they did with Tony Blair, throw out these complete lobs to him, these hospital passes which anybody could catch, where he could just bat them away incredibly easily without breaking into a sweat at all.
George Monbiot is an idiot. He needs to find a topic he knows something about or just sit his tired ass down. It wouldn't happen in the US? It would have teeth? What world does that idiot live in? JFK is assassinated. America gets the Warren Commission. The worst terrorist attack on US soil takes place on 9-11 and we get a whitewash commission. Bush and Cheney don't even testify under oath. They take questions in the Oval Office or not. Like Goodman, Monbiot appears to have trouble distinguishing fact from fiction -- or in their cases, fact from film.
Monbiot doesn't know a damn thing -- not at all surprising to anyone who knows a thing or two about that columnist. But Goody lets him prattle on because she's not too smart herself. In fact, it appears the more she bleaches her hair, the dumber she gets. Or are we not supposed to notice that either?
AMY GOODMAN: And the significance of Clare Short's testimony, not to mention her significance in the lead-up to the war, George Monbiot?
GEORGE MONBIOT: Well, the problem she's got, really, is that she didn't resign until after the war had already begun. And what she should have done was to resign at the same time as Robin Cook. Once the parliamentary decision had been taken, once Blair had said, "There's no turning back now. We're going in," Cook resigned at exactly the right moment and retained his credibility. Short had a difficulty in that she didn't resign then. She sort of flinched and resigned later, which makes her testimony slightly less powerful than it would otherwise have been. However, she's absolutely right to highlight the lack of discussion within Parliament and the lack of discussion within the cabinet and the complete absence of a credible reason for launching the war, which of course makes this a war of aggression, in direct contravention of the United Nations Charter and of other instruments of international law, and which means that it was classified by the Nuremberg tribunal as an instance of the supreme international crime.
Clare Short testified February 2nd. And those familiar with her testimony may have been puzzled by Monbiot's 'summary' of it.
If you're among those puzzled, grasp that what he's done is restate her points in this passage: "There was never a meeting that said what's the problem, what are we trying to achieve, what are our military, diplomatic options. We never had that coherent discussion of what it is that the problem was and what it was that the government was trying to achieve and what our bottom lines were. Never. There was no emergency. No one had attacked anyone. There wasn’t any new WMD. We could have taken more time and done it right." Reading that, you should grasp that all he did was grab that passage and restate it to Goodman. And if you paid attention, you caught that he was restating what Clare Short said . . . in the clip Amy Goodman played during Monbiot's segment.
Do you get that?
You might also try saying: Elizabeth Wilmshurst. Who? An attorney who resigned in protest before the Iraq War started. She testified January 26th. Along with her former superior Michael Wood ("Legal Adviser, Foreign and Commonwealth Office). They both gave explosive testimony and it's strange that Monbiot didn't mention either of them -- until you grasp, as one editor at The Guardian put it to us, "George has an irrational phobia of any topic too 'in the news'." Which really doesn't allow him to be informed enough to comment, now does it?
He didn't pay attention to the hearings. He never wrote a piece about them. But this is who Amy Goodman books to discuss the Iraq Inquiry?
Someone who knows nothing?
Clare should have stepped down before the Iraq War started, huffs Monbiot.
He's been saying that for how many years now? He just dusted it off and presented it as if he were commenting on the Inquiry. In her testimony, Clare Short addressed that and more. But he doesn't know that and can't comment on it because he didn't care enough to follow her testimony.
And Amy Goodman doesn't know because she doesn't do any work at all. (Yeah, we caught her hawking Michael Moore's bad film on WBAI and claiming that Wal-Mart 'still' does something that even Moore's film -- in an endnote -- reveals is no longer done. What an idiot.)
It may be hard for some to believe today but in 2003 and 2004, especially before Air America emerged, there was a big push for England's Guardian to do a US paper. It was thought that they could start out with a weekly edition and quickly build up. They'd be a national paper. This idea was pushed and pimped by a great many and, in terms of Pacifica Radio, you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who pushed it more than Amy Goodman. And she's had many, many guests (not just Monbiot) from the paper (which she frequently mistakenly identifies as "The Guardian of London") on her program.
She is familiar with the paper. So how does she end up booking the one person at the paper who hasn't followed the Inquiry?
Are we really supposed to believe -- we who have actively called out her silence on the Inquiry for months now -- that it was just an accident?
It didn't play like an accident. And there was no effort, the next day, for her to bring on anyone who actually was an expert.
So what we're left with is Goodman as the purveyor of Trash TV. She books a faux 'expert' to talk about an Inquiry he's neither written of nor followed because (a) she doesn't really give a damn about the Inquiry and (b) she really doesn't give a damn about her audience.
And it's the latter point that's now killing her show. We called out CODEPINK for some time, explaining they were pro-Obama and anti-peace when push came to shove and, to all the doubters and nay-sayers, time and Media Benjamin's own mouth proved us right (see Scott Horton's interview with her for Anti-War Radio). Goodman's own actions tell on her as well. She pretends she's going to explore the Iraq Inquiry but she reduces it to a ten minute segment and then spends approximately eight minutes of that ten minutes on other topics. To really make the entire segment a waste, she books a guest who can't talk about the Inquiry because he hasn't followed it. When an alleged public affairs program decides to program fluff, that's Trash TV.
