By Karen Kirk:
In the march to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, there were few dissenting voices. Most of the news leading up to the war was about the Bush administration’s false claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein could unleash on us at any time.
But at the Knight Ridder Washington Bureau, there were a few journalists who discovered the truth — that there wasn’t evidence of weapons of mass destruction. They wrote stories that most newspapers, even those owned by Knight Ridder, wouldn’t run, preferring to reprint reports from Judith Miller of the prestigious New York Times, who was being fed, and repeating, misinformation from high government officials and sources inside Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress.
A couple of years later, Miller spent 85 days in jail protecting her source, the recently pardoned Scooter Libby, who had identified Valerie Plame as a member of the CIA. Miller was forced to resign from the Times in 2005 after persistent questions and concerns about her actions.
Now, in the new movie “Shock and Awe,” director Rob Reiner is telling the story of how reporters Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel and veteran war correspondent Joe Galloway, under the direction of Bureau Chief John Walcott, got to the truth.
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