Topic: Horowitz
A Feb. 1 FrontPageMag article by John Perazzo goes after the Center for Public Integrity study finding that the Bush administration made numerous false statements regarding Iraq, but he -- like the Media Research Center before him -- never addresses any actual evidence in the study and misleads on CPI's purported liberal leanings.
Perazzo makes blanket statements that "prior to the March, 2003, U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, there was not a single country whose intelligence agency doubted that Saddam was in the process of developing Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), and/or that he already possessed them," and that "the most prominent members of the Democratic Party were uniformly confident in that same assessment." He then states that the study's conclusion that Bush lied about the Iraq threat "utterly unfounded." But the CPI study cites evidence -- which Perazzo doesn't acknowledge -- suggesting that Bush administration officials should have known that Saddam didn't possess WMD at the time Bush officials was claiming he did. Perazzo further offers no evidence that "most prominent members of the Democratic Party" and foreign intelligence officials had access to this same information.
The bulk of Perazzo's article is dedicated to playing guilt by association, suggesting that because CPI has received money from George Soros' Open Society Institute, which "donates millions of dollars to a host of leftist organizations," that CPI is therefore "leftist" as well. This ignores the fact that, as we detailed, CPI funded an investigation of Al Gore before the 2000 election that was ultimately published by WorldNetDaily, which WND brags led to his election loss.
CPI also uncovered one of conservatives' favorite Clinton scandals, his alleged use of the Lincoln bedroom to reward his campaign contributors. Funny that Perazzo, like the MRC before him, never mentions that.
