As Post fires liberal columnist, Bush war architect gets ink
Published: June 19, 2009
Updated 5 months ago
On Thursday, the Washington Post confirmed it had fired liberal online columnist Dan Froomkin. On Friday, they gave a guest column to Bush war architect Paul Wolfowitz.
To be fair, Wolfowitz isn’t being paid, and his column is a guest editorial. But the paper’s promotion of a man who was a key architect of President George W. Bush’s policy on Iraq — and one of its most ardent hawks — is sure to raise eyebrows among the liberals and those critical of the Post’s coverage in the run-up to the Iraq war.
Wolfowitz’s column? How Obama needs to take a harder line on Iran. It’s titled, “No Comment is Not an Option.”
“Like the rest of the world, President Obama must have been surprised by the magnitude of the protests in Iran,” Wolfowitz writes. “Iranians are protesting not just election fraud but also the growing abuses of the Iranian people by a dictatorial regime. Now is not the time for the president to dig in to a neutral posture. It is time to change course.”
The former deputy secretary of defense under Donald Rumsfeld was dispatched to lead the World Bank in 2005. He departed under a cloud after it emerged he’d had a relationship with a highly paid member of the communications staff.
Dan Froomkin, meanwhile, was a paid freelance columnist for the Post who wrote critical columns about the Bush Administration — and, more lately, about Obama Administration policies that seemed to run counter to his progressive values. In a statement Thursday, he said he was “terribly disappointed” the Post had decided to end his column.
“I was told that it had been determined that my White House Watch blog wasn’t ‘working’ anymore,” he wrote. “But from what I could tell, it was still working very well. I also thought White House Watch was a great fit with The Washington Post brand, and what its readers reasonably expect from the Post online.”
Washington Post Media Communications Director Kris Coratti said the blog wasn’t a good use of Post resources.
“I think the easiest way to put it is that our editors and research teams are constantly reviewing our columns, blogs and other content to make sure we’re giving readers the most value when they are on our site while balancing the need to make the most of our resources,” Coratti said in a statement to Politico Thursday. “Unfortunately, this means that sometimes features must be eliminated, and this time it was the blog that Dan Froomkin freelanced for washingtonpost.com.”
The departure of his blog has raised eyebrows. Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald, also a progressive, said he was vexed because Froomkin was actually an Obama critic who stuck to his values rather than expressing blind fealty to the Democratic party.
“One of the rarest commodities in the establishment media is someone who was a vehement critic of George Bush and who now, applying their principles consistently, has become a regular critic of Barack Obama — i.e., someone who criticizes Obama from what is perceived as “the Left” rather than for being a Terrorist-Loving Socialist Muslim,” Greenwald wrote. “It just got a lot rarer.”
Wolfowitz has received harsh reviews since his departure from office. In The New Yorker, veteran investigative reporter Seymour Hersh revealed that the hawkish neoconservative was instrumental in setting up an intelligence office to bypass traditional US intelligence services in an effort to tie al Qaeda to Iraq.
“Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz believed that, while the established security services had a role, they were too bureaucratic and too traditional in their thinking,” Hersh wrote. “They set up what came to be known as the ‘cabal’, a cell of eight or nine analysts in a new Office of Special Plans (OSP) based in the U.S. Defense Department… created in order to find evidence of what Wolfowitz and his boss, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, believed to be true—that Saddam Hussein had close ties to Al Qaeda, and that Iraq had an enormous arsenal of chemical, biological, and possibly even nuclear weapons that threatened the region and, potentially, the United States.”
Wolfowitz also once famously called the 9/11 attacks on New York City and the Pentagon an “opportunity.”
“9/11 really was a wake up call and that if we take proper advantage of this opportunity to prevent the future terrorist use of weapons of mass destruction that it will have been an extremely valuable wake up call,” he said.
Froomkin said in his statement that his purpose was “pursuing accountability.”
“As I’ve written elsewhere, I think that the future success of our business depends on journalists enthusiastically pursuing accountability and calling it like they see it,” he said. “That’s what I tried to do every day. Now I guess I’ll have to try to do it someplace else.”
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Zionist anti-American neo-con cock sucker — you belong on a fucking waterboard, you filthy blood thirsty subhuman mother fucker.
trippin: I can’t think of anything you missed…why is is that I feel like saying the same thing a dozen times a day anymore? The language is strong, but so is the motivation.
I don’t feel it is ethical to give someone editorial space to justify their own policies. They are a news-maker, not a commentator. It was the same crap that NYT did when they hired noted jackass and grinning psychopath Bill Kristol.
So let me get this straight. The Post removes a popular blog that has been strong on calling out problems with both the former and current Presidents. Instead, to improve the content of their publication, they give us a serial liar who helped push us down the garden path to war in Iraq. Frankly, when this type of change occurs, it’s time to follow the money. News outlets are in a bind so just who has paid off the Post?
Zionist Bankster! He’s a good source for information, isn’t he? He should be tried and upon conviction, strung up with the rest. Obama is aiding and abetting thes criminals too.
The answer to this is simple logic. The people behind this criminal also have their hooks in someone at the Post. A manipulation in an attempt to sway public opinion that they didn’t commit treasonous crimes. Only question is, is the press still free?
Put this war criminal in jail where he belongs!
Paul Wolfowitz is a coward and a liar. Paul Wolfowitz said we would be out of Iraq in six months at the most. Paul Wolfowitz said the cost of the Iraqi war would be paid for with Iraqi oil dollars. Paul Wolfowitz NEVER served in the mlitary, but he fires General’s who don’t agree with him. If he is receivng no pay from the ‘Post’ it is twice what he is worth. The blood of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands Iraqis is on this mans hands.
Paul Wolfowitz belongs in GITMO.
This asshole is a zionist anti-American piece of war mongering filth whose sole purpose in life is to further the interests of Israel. He is a trator, a liar, and a thief. I don’t know why he’s allowed to write a column about anything, he should be in jail awaiting trial for war crimes.
I would LOVE to be the person waterboarding this lying piece of swine shit!!!
ok, you guys have clearly left out several descriptors!
genocide. crimes against humanity and war criminal.
So this freakin’ schmuck STILL wants another war???
STILL wants us to bomb the crap out of people who have done NOTHING to us?
DEMOCRATIC people????
If only we could throw him into an industrial strength meat grinder and record his very newsworthy comments as he’s chewed into dog food.
Why doesn’t he just go away? Maybe Israel and get them in wars they don;t need just as he has done to the USA. He doesn’t seem hygenic to me. Anybody who sucks on a hair comb probably still needs potty training.
The world is upside down. I’m embarrased this P.O.S. is Jewish.
Wolfowitz is a DOUCHE BAG. We’ve largely got him to thank for the shit-show war and economic situation in which we find ourselves.
I hope that the Post is flooded with complaint emails and calls. He is a criminal.
I swear there is a sizable fraction of the country that lusts and longs after living in a fascist neocon state. Many of them own and operate the “liberal media.”
Whatever Wolfowitz tells you to believe is true, believe the exact opposite; whatever he claims the correct course of action should be–do the exact opposite.
Wolfowitz is a neocon criminal and the Washington Post kisses all neocon criminals’ a$$ and therefore has no credibility whatsoever–in fact, they are complicit in the war crimes committed by Wolfowitz and the rest of his neocon “cabal.”
I consider these neocons to be enemies of the American people. Why is it that so many have had such an influence over our foreign policies? And why is it that so many just happen to be dual Israeli-American citizens? I honestly believe that these neocons and those Americans that support them have placed the interests of Israel over the interests of the American people, which may make them heros in Israel, but they have betrayed the trust of the American people.
I will repeat what I always say. Quit the Washington Post, dump your cable TV provider, and support liberal media. However, no one will do it, they will only complain.
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=593EEB17D15D528C
One wonders why no association has been made with the “Plumbers Unit ” under Nixon. and the OSP Unit under Bush. Doug Feith, a certified chickenhawk, always appears on the American Enterprise stage along with many others of the Bush regime. I would like them to appear before an open forum to answer the hard questions and not the softball questions AEI gives them. I would also like follow up questions when they use obfuscation to cover their evil deeds.
Let’s not forget that Wolfowitz is also a crook. Remember when he secured a cushy, high-paying job for his girlfriend at the World Bank?