Gerard Jackson
BrookesNews.Com
Monday 2 February 2004

Lying by omission means denying the truth by only telling part of the story. If, for example, I truthfully tell the police that I saw John Smith leave the scene of a crime while omitting the fact that I saw someone else commit the felony, I'm still lying. This is how the like of Roy Eccleston try to deceive their readers.

While reporting on the New Hampshire primaries Eccleston wrote: "David Kay, who says Iraq did not have a WMD arsenal at the time of the US-led invasion last March, Mr Bush said: 'There is no doubt in my mind the world is a better place without Saddam Hussein.'"

It's pretty hard not to see that Eccleston was insinuating that Kay had exposed President Bush as a liar and that Bush was trying to weasel out of it. Well, let's find out who the real weasel is.

What Eccleston didn't report is that Kay, like Bush and the Democrats, believed that Saddam had WMDs, a view that he publicly stated, not that you would learn this fact from Eccleston. Funny thing, though, Caroline Overington, New York correspondent for The Age, reported this very fact in Iraq search finds no WMD stockpile (410/03). Maybe Eccleston was asleep on top of his laptop.

It seems that the only facts that interest Eccleston are those he can use to malign Bush. His treatment of the Kay Report certainly suggests that this is the case. In Jobs growth shines through for Bush (6/3/03) Eccleston said "...three months of searching by the 1400-member Iraqi Survey Group, no weapons have yet been found, according to the report by David Kay, a former UN weapons inspector now paid by the CIA."

Once again Eccleston was deviously implying that Bush was a liar. Not only did Kay's Report make no such suggestion or insinuation, it actually said that it had found "dozens of WMD-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations during the inspections that began in late 2002." Furthermore, the report contained this important statement: "Saddam had not given up his aspirations and intentions to continue to acquire weapons of mass destruction."

As Kay himself said on FOX News Sunday, 5 October 2003:

"Well, we certainly found that — have not yet found illicit arms. But that's not the only thing the report says. In fact, I'm sort of amazed at what was powerful information about both their intent and their actual activities that were not known and were hidden from UN inspectors seems not to have made it to the press. This is information that, had it been available last year, would have been headline news."

As for the war, in an NBC interview Kay stated that the President's decision to overthrow Saddam was "absolutely prudent." He went on to say that "at the end of the inspection process, we'll paint a picture of Iraq that was far more dangerous than even we thought it was before the war." Of course, Eccleston can always dispute Kay's views and findings — if he feels up to it.

This is what Kay had to say about the media: "I'm sort of amazed that what was powerful information about both Iraq's intent and its actual activities that were not known and were hidden from U.N. inspectors seems not to have made it to the press." I don't believe Kay is "amazed" at all. I think he really knows what the score is with the likes of Eccleston.

On 28 January Kay mad it clear to Congress that intelligence was at fault and not Bush who had to make the final decision on the evidence the CIA gave him. As Kay put it: "It's an issue of the capabilities of one's intelligence service to collect valid, truthful information."

Kay didn't stop with that observation. He also stated that "the intelligence community owes the president [an apology] rather than the president owing [one to] the American people." Going even further, he stated that "it was reasonable [for Bush] to reach the conclusion that Iraq posed an imminent threat."

If Eccleston were an honest reporter he would point out that if President Bush lied about WMDs, so did Clinton, Albright, Sandy Berger, Nancy Pelosi, Jay Rockefeller, Teddy Kennedy, Bob Graham, and so on. Therefore likes of Eccleston are lying to their readers when they deliberately ignore the fact that the Bush line on Saddam's WMDs was the same as Clinton's.

Gerard Jackson is Brookes' economics editor