How Fauci Channeled Cheney
20 Years After Dick Cheney Lied the US into Invading Iraq, His Spirit Lives on with Covid Origins Propaganda
Twenty years ago, the “Cheney-Bush junta" -- as Gore Vidal called it -- launched its propaganda campaign to invade Iraq, effectively casting the dye for much of the historic period since.
On Sunday, Sept. 8, 2002, the New York Times ran on its front page the story "U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts" by Michael Gordon and Judith Miller.
The same day, then Vice President Dick Cheney appeared on Meet the Press [video at 9 min., see clip] with Tim Russert, hyping the New York Times story as evidence that Hussein was attempting to acquire “the kinds of tubes that are necessary to build a centrifuge and the centrifuge is required to take low-grade uranium and enhance it into highly-enriched uranium which is what you have to have in order to build a bomb." Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice followed Cheney’s lead on other shows.
In 2005, I confronted Miller about her reporting, asking her at if she would name the anonymous lying source who she allegedly relied on to falsely report “the best technical experts and nuclear scientists at laboratories like Oak Ridge supported” the CIA claim that the tubes were for a nuclear weapons program. In fact, it would later be established, the nuclear scientists did not support such an assessment and were effectively muzzled. When I questioned her, Miller refused to name the source that fed her this false information and Marvin Kalb, the moderator of the event, see video, ran interference, stopping further follow-ups. (See my piece “Should Media Expose Sources Who Lied to Them?”)
Many serious analysts early on deduced that the source was Cheney himself, likely through his chief of staff, Scooter Libby.
Even the mainstream Bob Simon of CBS would later remark to Bill Moyers about Cheney: “You leak a story, and then you quote the story. I mean, that's a remarkable thing to do.”
Remarkable is actually an understatement. It’s engaging in a de facto conspiracy to deceive the U.S. public into war.
In April of 2020, a journalist asked at the daily White House press briefing: "Mr. President, I wanted to ask Dr. Fauci: Could you address these suggestions or concerns that this virus was somehow manmade, possibly came out of a laboratory in China?"
Anthony Fauci replied: "There was a study recently that we can make available to you, where a group of highly qualified evolutionary virologists looked at the sequences there and the sequences in bats as they evolve. And the mutations that it took to get to the point where it is now is totally consistent with a jump of a species from an animal to a human.” [Video.]
What Fauci was talking about was the piece “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2” in Nature Medicine.
That article was widely accepted by the major media as eviscerating the possibility of lab origin of Covid, shutting down debate at that critical time and continuing to hinder it to this day.
The thing is, Fauci seems to have had a serious role in that article’s appearing.
One of the few people objecting to the piece when it was first published, in the Spring of 2020 was Meryl Nass, who asked: “Why are some of the US's top scientists making a specious argument about the natural origin of SARS-CoV-2?” She would go on to argue that the signers of the Nature Medicine article were pushed to write it.
In 2021, limited Freedom of Information Act findings showed that Fauci had at minimum effectively coordinated with the named authors of the Nature Medicine article. See Nass’ write-up and subsequent reporting by some mainstream outlets such as USA Today:
Thus, this insidious tactic of helping to plant a story pushing the line you want in a media outlet and then citing it as evidence for your case was employed by both longtime creatures of Washington at historic junctures.
There are other notable parallels. Both Fauci and Cheney have also both been leading beneficiaries of Trumpwashing.
Ashley Rindsberg makes some serious arguments in his piece, “How Dick Cheney created Anthony Fauci,” including about the buildup of US bio“defense” after 9/11 (actually the anthrax attacks) — a trend several observers have noted. Alexis Baden-Mayer traces such arguments back to 1976, when Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld apparently pressured President Ford to order massive inoculations in the Swine Flu scare, which he would be widely mocked for.
While the antiwar forces and “left” criticism of the Iraq WMD propaganda were wholly inadequate, they at least manifested themselves on the national stage to some extent. Covid origins has hardly been recognized as an antiwar issue by most and the “left” at times has actually played a detrimental role, explicitly doing the establishment’s bidding in irrationally denying or minimizing the possibility of lab origin of the pandemic.
One thing that should be kept in mind as one parses through the claims and “exposés” is that some are de facto cover stories.
The Bush administration ramped up their propaganda campaign for the Iraq invasion, as noted at the beginning of this article, in September of 2002.
Why then? Sophisticates at the time would quote Andrew Card: "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August" said Bush’s chief of staff.
With the Bush administration cynically using the one year anniversary of 9/11 as a backdrop to launch their push for invading Iraq, the rationale articulated by Card was actually a remarkably benign motivation, a likely cover, in comparison to the war makers actual thinking.