Some Other Tall Tales Brian Williams Might Want to Apologize For

[Octafish]

2. Guy's been polishing, Big Time: ''The Sins of Brian Williams''

The Sins of Brian Williams

They are many – and he’s far from alone

by Justin Raimondo
AntiWar.com, February 06, 2015

NBC anchor Brian Williams just makes stuff up, and the world is shocked – but, then again, if you’ve been a regular reader of Antiwar.com, you already knew what a liar he is.

The Twitteratti are a tizzy over Williams’ blatant fibbery: he’s been telling the same story for years, all about how he was in a helicopter over Iraq that came under attack and he feared for his life. "I was in a place I had no business being," he said the other day, reiterating the lie and even embellishing it. This was too much for those soldiers who had actually been there, and they quickly debunked his tall tale: Stars and Stripes got a hold of it, and Williams was soon issuing groveling-yet-incomplete apologies, claiming he’d "misremembered" the incident. The Twitter mob then descended – but what are they complaining about? After all, this is the very least of the lies Williams has told on air – and, as far as I’m concerned, the least egregious.

Way back in 2007, I pointed out the pernicious role Williams played in the run-up to the Iraq war, loyally echoing the War Party’s triumphalist nonsense. Citing Howard Kurtz’s 2007 book, Reality Show: Inside the Last Great Television News War, I pointed out in this space that Williams was a reliable foot soldier in the neocons’ war on truth. As Kurtz put it:

[font color="green"]"For (Brian) Williams, it all went back to 9/11. As a citizen, he had thought on that fateful day, thank God that Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell were on this team. How together we all seemed. In Williams’s view, there was something about the murderous attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon that, in the eyes of the White House press corps, gave Bush a stature that could not be violated."[/font color]

Williams, said Kurtz, doesn’t "enjoy looking back on the run-up to war," perhaps because he realizes his own key role in making the whole disaster possible. Now there’s a clue as to what motivated him to "misremember" made-up fantasies of personal heroism. It’s all part of the same cover-up: layers of glamorous lies to hide the prosaic reality.

He might have partially redeemed himself in his postwar (2006) interview with President Bush, but he chose not to do that. When Dubya stuck to his justifications for the war by stupidly insisting Iraq had "the capacity" to build WMD, Williams let it slide. [font color="green"]When Bush denied ever claiming a connection between Iraq and the 9/11 attacks, Williams said … nothing.[/font color]

CONTINUED...

http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2015/02/05/the-sins-of-brian-williams/

NBC doesn't let just anybody on-air. They have to be trusted to be a War Inc propagandist, uh, on-air personality.