Nation Topics - MSNBC | The Nation

Comments on a American news media, which the author contends are not reporting on the deaths of prisoners in American hands since the beginning of 2005. Suggestion that major news media are not looking into the number of prisoners who have died at the U.S. military controlled prisons and Guantánamo camp in Cuba; Major news agencies that have not reported on the deaths of detainees, including CNN, Fox, and MSNBC; Indication from LexisNexis that the "New York Times" is nearly alone in mentioning deaths; View that American deaths from September 11 are reported, but not the Iraqi deaths from war.

The author comments on the Bush Administration's reaction to the statement by weapons inspector David Kay that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction prior to the 2003 war. As an MSNBC analyst before the war, former United Nations weapons inspector David Kay often seemed more like a cheerleader for the Bush Administration's Iraq policy than he did an impartial expert on Iraq's weapons programs. Now, seven months later, Kay has resigned, concluding that Iraq had no active nuclear weapons program and possessed no biological or chemical weapons. The justification used by Kay and other weapons experts who supported the US case a year ago is that even the UN inspectors believed Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. But in fact, chief inspector Hans Blix went out of his way before the war to say that the UN inspectors did not know whether Iraq still had proscribed weapons. When such tactics failed to quell rising questions, the White House moved to refine its dissembling strategy, promising to look into what went wrong with the intelligence-gathering process but only after the Iraq Survey Group has completed its work at some unspecified time in the future, most likely after the November election, in pursuing such delaying tactics, the Administration seems to be more interested in coveting up its lies and deceptions than it is in American national security.

Offers observations on cancellation of the MSNBC cable television talk show 'Donahue.' War may or may not be inevitable, but a one-sided discussion of United States policy toward Iraq appears to be all but guaranteed on network television. Whatever the merits of 'Donahue', the behind-the-scenes maneuvers that led to its cancellation illustrate the extent to which basic commitments to honest dialogue on the networks are collapsing as the threat of war becomes more real. With 'Donahue' shuffled out to allow for the expansion of a show called 'Countdown: Iraq,' the fight-wing spin machine kicked into gear to claim that liberals could not cut it on cable. In the weeks after Donahue went on air, it was possible to imagine that he might actually be allowed to do a show that mattered. As summer turned to fall, however, the administration of United States President George W. Bush started to turn up the rhetoric about Iraq, and executives at MSNBC and its corporate parent, General Electric-owned NBC, pressured Donahue to dumb down the discussion and to limit dissent.

The article presents the author's views. Outing the same sex affinities of public figures against their will is a very serious matter. Among responsible journalists who are gay, it is considered verboten unless the person who is to be outed meets the stringent criteria of what is known in the trade as the Barney Frank rule. The first indication that the White House might be violating the Frank rule came in late February, when MSNBC reported that U.S. President Bill Clinton's loyalists had been leaking derogatory rumors about members of independent counsel Kenneth Starr's staff, including matters of "sexual preference."