Lobe

The Echo Chamber Project interview with Jonathan Landay is now posted here.

The Knight Ridder team of Landay, Warren Strobel and John Walcott have continued to scoop major news organizations in investigating the intelligence surrounding the war in Iraq.

Here's a compilation of their stories. And this blog post provides a timeline on the pre-war reporting on the doubts surrounding whether the Aluminum Tubes could be used for uranium enrichment (i.e. nuclear weapons development).

Jim Lobe, the Washington Bureau chief for Inter Press Service, describes how the mainstream media could have performed during the build-up to the war in Iraq:

The media had a lot of options as to how it was going to cover the run-up to what was almost certainly going to be a war. And they could have done as Knight Ridder did, which was really putting a lot of investigative resources and good people into finding out what was going on behind the scenes -- Why were we going to war? What was the root of all of this? What was going on in the Pentagon in terms of doing the strangest things with intelligence? What was outside of kind of accepted rules of institutional behavior that made this so extraordinary? Or they could decide, as most of the media did, that they would really get involved in kind of the mechanics of war preparation -- Embedding their journalists into parts of the Army that would then be involved in the invasion. And obviously the latter was the easier course.

July 9th, 2004
Transcription by Marion Paquin

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: All right. Why don’t you go ahead and introduce yourself, and your role here at IPS.
JIM LOBE: I’m Jim Lobe. I’m Bureau Chief for Inter Press Service, which is an international wire service that deals mainly with issues and events of interest to developing countries and people who are interested in developing countries.

ECHO CHAMBER PROJECT: So, in other words, your main audience are countries -- like super -- like big countries, or those small, developing countries?

The Echo Chamber documentary interview with Jim Lobe is now posted online here.

Lobe is the Washington Bureau Chief for Inter Press Service, and he has been following the neo-conservative movement for over 30 years. His writings became very popular after 9/11 and were picked up by many non-interventionist websites ranging from the Libertarian Lew Rockwell to Anti-War.com. IPS also has a compilation of Lobe's Neo-Con articles