Blast from the past

Glenn Greenwald denounced TV "journalist" Jon Meacham. This belongs in comments but there are already 305 of them, so I will just note that Greenwald went easy on Meacham. He quotes Meacham from 2004

Let's remember, [Saddam] sent mixed signals about his own WMD to his own people. . . . He was not saying, "I don't have anything at all "

Of course Saddam did say that he didn't "have anything at all" in his official over 12,000 plust page report to the UN Security council.

On December 7, 2002, Iraq submitted its 12,000 page declaration, which claimed that it had no current WMD programs. Intelligence analysts from the United States and other nations immediately began to scrutinize the document, and senior U.S. officials quickly rejected the claims.

He had been claiming he didn't have any WMD at all for years. Those claims were so thoroughly dismissed that, I have no doubt, that Meacham had sincerely forgotten them.

The Bush administration asserted that the report was a material breach of resulution 1441 and that it was authorised to invade Iraq (which wouldn't have followed anyway). There was a huge debate about whether Saddam Hussein's lying claim that he "didn't have anything at all" justified an invasion. Then Meachem confidently and specifically asserted that the notorious ultra controversial claim never happened.

Shouldn't Mr Meachem be invited to seak a new line of work ?