‘WaPo’ senior editor doesn’t bat an eye at Israeli defense minister’s claim that Iran ‘waited 4,000 years to have a nuclear bomb’

by on June 21, 2012 13
3sharesFacebook
19tweetsTwitter
0stumbledStumbleUpon
0sharesReddit
0recommendGoogle
Weymouth
Washington Post senior editor Lally Weymouth
(Photo: CharlieRose.com)

Six years ago, Washington Post senior editor Lally Weymouth was criticized by the Electronic Intifada for conducting a softball interview with Ehud Olmert. Not much has changed since then.

Weymouth, whose family owns and publishes the Post, got the opportunity to interview Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak this week in Tel Aviv. Weymouth’s piece made some news, with Haaretz highlighting what Barak said on Syria, but it was a softball interview.

The Israeli campaign to shift the world’s focus from Palestine to Iran has worked, at least on the Washington Post–the vast majority of Weymouth’s questions focus on the Iranian nuclear program.

Here’s some of what Weymouth asked Barak:

Are you worried that a third nuclear site may be discovered?

Can Israel launch a military strike against Iran, and can it succeed?

Do you believe that one good thing about the downfall of Assad would be that it could break the axis between Syria and Iran?

Do you think the U.S. administration understands that you have a difficult choice to make about Iran?

And so on. The most telling question reflects the dominant narrative about Iran in the US media: that Iran is slowly moving towards developing a nuclear weapon.

Weymouth commented to Barak: “I saw one report speculating that Iran can produce highly enriched uranium at Fordow.” Weymouth is referring to a Associated Press article reporting that

Inspectors have located radioactive traces at an Iranian underground bunker, the U.N. atomic agency said Friday — a finding that could mean Iran has moved closer to reaching the uranium threshold needed to arm nuclear missiles.

But Barbara Slavin, an Iran expert writing for Al-Monitor, poured cold water on the alarming tone of the AP report:

A report today by the Associated Press that nuclear inspectors have found traces of uranium enriched beyond 20 percent at Iran’s Fordow enrichment plant appears to reflect changes in the design of centrifuge cascades rather than a deliberate Iranian effort to get closer to weapons-grade uranium.

David Albright, a former arms inspector and president of the Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington-based organization that closely tracks nuclear proliferation, told Al-Monitor in an email that the higher level of enrichment “is likely due to improved cascade design. The cascades at Fordow making 19.7 percent LEU [low-enriched uranium] have 17 stages instead of 15 as in the old cascade design. An effect is to overshoot 20 percent when 3.5 percent LEU is fed into the tandem cascades at the old feed rate for 15 stage cascades.”

Also telling is the fact that Weymouth let Barak’s hyperbole go unchallenged. Barak told Weymouth that Iran “waited 4,000 years to have a nuclear bomb.” You read that right. I wonder if Weymouth thought anything of that comment–you wouldn’t know it from the interview.

For any hint of this thing called the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, you would have to read to the end. Weymouth asks Barak, “What do you think will happen to the peace process?” But Weymouth doesn’t mention the occupation, settlements or the blockade of Gaza in her questions.

The interview is an exercise in Israeli hasbara, with Weymouth as the facilitator. What’s encouraging, though, are some of the comments:

FreeTalking:

This interview reads like a Sean Hannity interview of Sarah Palin.

donkris:

Another weak, softball interview of an Israeli official by Weymouth. She did not ask one question about Israel’s nuclear arsenal and the hypocrisy of Israel demanding anything of Iran. She did not refer to the continued building of illegal settlements on stolen Palestinian land as an impediment to the two state solution. She did not mention the acts of terror against the Palestinian civilians in the occupied lands by the “price tag” settlers. And on and on. A worthless interview, more of a propaganda piece.

johnbird1:

Here we go again. Just listen to the drums of war, with the same beat we heard when Bush lied the nation into war against Iraq over non existent WMDs. Why wasn’t Barak asked about the fact that both American and Israeli intelligence agencies believe that Iran gave up its nuclear weapons program years ago? Why no questions about Israel’s massive nuclear weapons program capable of incinerating all 70 million Iranians if that country were to be so suicidal as to attack Israel?

About Alex Kane

Alex Kane is an assistant editor for Mondoweiss and the World editor for AlterNet. Follow him on Twitter @alexbkane.
Posted in Iran, Israel/Palestine, Media, Middle East, US Politics | Tagged , ,

{ 13 comments... read them below or add one }

  1. lysias says:
    June 21, 2012 at 4:02 pm

    OT, disgraceful editorial in today’s Washington Post attacking Assange, Correa, and threatening Ecuador if it grants asylum to Assange: Asylum for Julian Assange?:

    Mr. Assange probably has little to gain from this maneuver. Whether or not he is granted asylum, he will be subject to arrest whenever he leaves the embassy building in London. Mr. Correa, on the other hand, could make himself a hero with the global anti-American left by embracing Mr. Assange’s cause. The WikiLeaks man claims, after all, that he is resisting extradition to Sweden because he believes he will be subsequently turned over to the United States and exposed to the death penalty. That no U.S. charges or extradition case are open against him is irrelevant to this fantasy.

    Mr. Assange is also indifferent to, if not supportive of, Mr. Correa’s own record on free speech. Since the beginning of this year, the Ecuadoran government has shut down 14 radio and television stations, including eight since the beginning of June. Mr. Correa’s personal lawsuits against one of the country’s leading newspapers and several investigative journalists have been condemned by every major human rights group and international press freedom monitor. In response, Mr. Correa has launched a campaign in the Organization of American States to hamstring regional press protections.

    There is one potential check on Mr. Correa’s ambitions. The U.S. “empire” he professes to despise happens to grant Ecuador (which uses the dollar as its currency) special trade preferences that allow it to export many goods duty-free. A full third of Ecuadoran foreign sales ($10 billion in 2011) go to the United States, supporting some 400,000 jobs in a country of 14 million people. Those preferences come up for renewal by Congress early next year. If Mr. Correa seeks to appoint himself America’s chief Latin American enemy and Julian Assange’s protector between now and then, it’s not hard to imagine the outcome.

    The neoconservative Washington Post Editorial Board has been responsible for a lot of bad editorials, but I think this is the worst that I’ve seen.

  2. DICKERSON3870 says:
    June 21, 2012 at 5:54 pm

    RE: “[Lally] Weymouth’s piece made some news, with Haaretz highlighting what Barak said on Syria, but it was a softball interview. . . The interview is an exercise in Israeli hasbara, with Weymouth as the facilitator. . .” ~ Alex Kane

    SPEAKING OF LALLY WEYMOUTH, SEE: “Amazing Story Of Why Washington Post Is So Weirdly Neocon”, By M.J. Rosenberg, TPM Cafe, 09/20/10

    (excerpts) Yesterday the Washington Post published Lally Weymouth’s interview with British Vice Prime Minister Nick Clegg which wasn’t too bad until she became prosecutor, not interviewer, when the subject of Israel came up. (Weymouth is the daughter of former Post publisher Katherine Graham and mother of current publisher and CEO, Katherine Weymouth).
    I wondered how Lally Weymouth, the Post heir, became such a right-wing Zionist. . .
    . . . this is an amazing story – link to nymag.com
    . . . Sad that it is about her 42 year old boyfriend’s funeral — he really was a tragic case. . .
    . . . the problems of Weymouth’s boyfriend started when, as a Senate Intelligence Committee staffer, he was busted for a heroin purchase. But that did not stop him from being hired by Rupert Murdoch as editor of the New York Post or, in any way, slow his rise within the fanciest of bipartisan social and political circles. Nor did it affect his right-wing politics.
    “After a period of rehabilitation, for his body, his psyche, and his reputation, Breindel signed on at the [N.Y.] Post’s editorial page in 1986. And immediately, he came out shooting bullets. Homeless people, poor people, gay people, the mentally ill, single mothers. All were subjected to Breindel’s uncharitable lashings. There were never even subtle shadings in his writing that indicated he was someone who knew what it was like to stumble, to give in to temptation, or simply to suffer from some common human failing…”
    Favorite part, about the funeral itself. Even at the saddest of moments, Marty goes off.
    “All of the speakers, even the pols, kept to the imposed three-to-four-minute time limit. Except Marty Peretz. Distraught over the loss of his friend and unhappy about sharing the moment, the Harvard professor and owner of The New Republic went on for nearly half an hour. . .”

    SOURCE – link to tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com

    • DICKERSON3870 says:
      June 21, 2012 at 6:15 pm

      P.S. RE: “[Lally] Weymouth’s piece made some news. . . but it was a softball interview. . . ”

      MY COMMENT: Today’s “mainstream media” in the U.S. are more in the infotainment business than they are in the the hard news business, because that is hat maximizes profits (or possibly in the case of today’s newspapers, at least minimizes losses).

      SEE:“Katharine Weymouth [Lally's daughter] Steps in It Again”, By Jack Shafer, Slate, 09/15/09
      A ‘Washington Post’ piece gets spiked after its publisher expresses a preference for happier stories.

      (excerpts). . . Earlier this summer, Weymouth got in Dutch when a Post plan to sell off-the-record access to reporters and government officials at “salons” at Weymouth’s home was made public by ‘Politico’. Weymouth and Post Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli quickly canceled the events after much confusion over whether the paper had put its soul up for sale or whether miscommunication on the part of the management team was to blame.
      In the latest Weymouth miscue, she appears to have told freelancer Matt Mendelsohn, a friend of hers, that advertisers desired “happier stories, not ‘depressing’ ones” like the one he had been working on about a young woman whose arms and legs were amputated. His piece was ultimately killed by the Post’s Sunday magazine. The editor who killed it, Sydney Trent, told the Post‘s Howard Kurtz that the spike had been delivered “because it was clear the newspaper wanted to move in a different direction. That handwriting was very clearly on the wall.”
      Mendelsohn doesn’t blame Weymouth directly. . .
      . . . The controversy has both Weymouth and Brauchli standing on their chairs insisting that the church-state boundary at the paper was never, ever breached.
      Brauchli tells the Post, “We are not driven by what one of our business-side colleagues, or even our publisher, thinks about a piece. We follow a journalistic compass.” From Weymouth: “I would never interfere in an editorial decision and I had no intention of interfering.”
      Can you believe for a moment that Katharine Weymouth’s ideas don’t drive what the Post prints? Or, to put a finer point on it, that her ideas shouldn’t drive what the Post prints? Weymouth is the one in charge. . .

      ENTIRE ARTICLE – link to slate.com

      • DICKERSON3870 says:
        June 21, 2012 at 6:33 pm

        RE: “…because that is hat maximizes profits…” – me (above)

        SHOULD HAVE BEEN: …because that is what maximizes profits…

      • DICKERSON3870 says:
        June 21, 2012 at 6:53 pm

        RE: “Today’s ‘mainstream media’ in the U.S. are
        more in the infotainment business than they are in the the hard news business, because that is what maximizes profits (or possibly in the case of today’s newspapers, at least minimizes losses).” – me (above)

        FOR INSTANCE, SEE: “The Washington Post’s dependence on the government it covers”, By Glenn Greenwald, Salon.com, 4/10/11
        How can media corporations be adversarial to the same political officials on whom their profits rely?

        The ‘Washington Post’ this morning published a lengthy article detailing the fortune — and now the trouble — generated for its parent company, The Washington Post Co., as a result of its acquisition of Kaplan Higher Ed. While ‘The Post’ continues to lose money, Kaplan — particularly its sprawling network of for-profit “universities” which the company began building in 2000 — generates huge profits for the company, profits on which the Post Co. depends almost completely for its sustainability.
        Indeed, the newspaper has become little more than a side vanity project for the Post Co. and the Graham family which continues to dominate it; it is now, at its core, in the business of profiting off of lower-income students who pay for diplomas, often obtained via online classes. “The fate of The Post Co. has become inextricably linked with that of Kaplan, where revenue climbed to $2.9 billion in 2010, 61 percent of The Post Co.’s total,” the article detailed; “the company is more dependent than ever on a single business,’ [CEO Donald] Graham wrote in last year’s annual report, adding that the newspaper had never accounted for as large a share of overall company revenue as Kaplan does today.”
        The article is largely devoted to recounting the corruption and abuses which pervade the for-profit education industry in general and Kaplan in particular (saddling poor people with debt in exchange for nothing of real value). But what I found most notable is how dependent is this industry — including The Washington Post Co. — on staying in the good graces of the Federal Government. Because these schools target low-income students, the vast majority of their income is derived from federal loans. . .

        ENTIRE ARTICLE – link to salon.com

  3. Citizen says:
    June 21, 2012 at 7:58 pm

    Was the old vintage WAPO the same? If now, when did it change?

  4. RoHa says:
    June 21, 2012 at 8:55 pm

    ‘Barak told Weymouth that Iran “waited 4,000 years to have a nuclear bomb.” ‘

    Oh, they’re cunning, these swarthy, unshaven, wild-eyed, Jew-hating, Muslim fanatical terrorists. They think in the long term, and never give up their plots.

  5. traintosiberia says:
    June 22, 2012 at 12:44 am

    It has taken Israel 300 0( or 5000 depnding on the ) years to produce the WMD. Iran is slow being a muslim nation, is taking 4000 years or is a demon doing it faster compared to Isarel. Iran cant win.

  6. Avi_G. says:
    June 22, 2012 at 4:52 am

    Strange that Iran was Israel’s good friend just a few decades ago. For a country that has waited 4000 years to destroy Israel, it sure has a lousy sense of timing.

    Why do I say that?

    Well, in the 1970s, Iran sold Israel pistachios in exchange for weapons and other military hardware.

    So if Iran really wanted to destroy Israel, all it had to do was poison all those shipments of pistachios.

    Ironically, Israel is still importing pistachios from Iran:

    US envoy slams Israel over ‘illegal importation of pistachios from Iran’.

    link to ynetnews.com