An Apology For Media Complicity Selling The Iraq Invasion - Better Late Than Never?

Hat tip to Kel at The Osterly Times for this.

We need to be seeing much more of this kind of thing from corporate mainstream media.

CNN's Jack Cafferty admits he was wrong about Iraq:

TIME's publishing reporter Andrea Sachs recently spoke with Cafferty:
TIME, September 15, 2007:

No one has ever accused CNN commentator Jack Cafferty of being a shrinking violet. He routinely sounds off in his own tart, curmudgeon-like way on CNN's popular news show The Situation Room. Now Cafferty has written his first book, It's Getting Ugly Out There: The Frauds, Bunglers, Liars and Losers Who Are Hurting America (Wiley).

[Sachs]: One new poll says that a majority of people favor impeachment for President Bush. Your reaction?

[Cafferty]: I'm not the least bit surprised. There's a case for taking a look at what the Administration may or may not have done that rises to level of high crimes and misdemeanors. Impeachment was put into the Constitution for a reason. I think it was perhaps one of the most arrogant things I've ever seen in my life for [House Speaker] Nancy Pelosi, on the day after Democrats won control of the House, to make this announcement as though this was Moses coming down with the tablets, that impeachment's been taken off the table. Well who the hell is she to take it off the table? It's part of the Constitution. I think there is reason to suspect that things have been done that may not be kosher, and I think the government's responsibility is to determine that. That's part of why they're there. That's what Congress does. That's the checks and balances. So whether he deserves to be impeached or not, I guess we'll never know, because they're not going to bother to look at it.
...

[Sachs]: Has anything you've ever said on the air really gotten you in trouble?

[Cafferty]: Once. I called Donald Rumsfeld a war criminal the night before the midterm election. The president of the network and the executive producer of the Situation Room and two or three other management gerbils assaulted me en masse, immediately as I got off of the air, saying, "You can't say that." Apparently, what happened was our correspondent at the Pentagon started getting these phone calls from people in the Pentagon, saying, "Cafferty just called Rumsfeld a war criminal." I had to go on the air and say, "You know, I've stepped over the line." That being said, I will go to my grave as Jack Cafferty, Private Citizen, believing that these people committed war crimes.

[emphasis added]

Thanks, Jack...

Would that the "president of the network and the executive producer of the Situation Room and two or three other management gerbils" had the same guts and honesty and morality to be able to admit their complicity.

Perhaps the invasion of Iraq would never have happened, and we wouldn't have a million or more dead Iraqis and tens of thousands of dead or maimed American soldiers? And yes, that question is also an assignment of blame.