Editor and Publisher reports on the trial, in Denmark, of journalists charged with the crime of publishing classified government reports. (That phrase has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?):
International press freedom advocates testified Tuesday in defense of three Danish journalists on trial for publishing classified intelligence reports about Iraq’s former weapons program.
What’s really surprising, though, is the content of the Danish intelligence reports that the defendant newspaper published:
In February and March 2004, Bjerre and Larsen wrote a series of articles based on leaked reports from the Danish Defense Intelligence Service. The reports said there was no evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction during Saddam Hussein’s rule — one of the main reasons cited as a reason for the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.
We are seeing, I think, the systematic rehabilitation of Saddam Hussein’s reputation. It is fast becoming the conventional wisdom on the left that Saddam was a benign, progressive dictator–sort of an Arab Fidel Castro. The airbrushing continues, perhaps, with the claim that Iraq never did have WMDs.
Still, it would be quite remarkable if the Danish intelligence service really said that Saddam never had WMDs, since he used them repeatedly, both in the war against Iran and against his own citizens, and U.N. inspectors supervised the destruction of Saddam’s “extensive CW [chemical weapons] arsenal” before vacating Iraq in 1998, while leaving large quantities of chemical and biological agents unaccounted for, according to UNMOVIC reports.
I suppose we could take a perverse satisfaction in Denmark’s intelligence agencies being even more in the dark than our own, but I suspect the error is Editor and Publisher’s, and represents just one more step in the MSM’s attempted rehabilitation of Saddam Hussein.
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