Let’s remember, shall we, that this country wouldn’t be in the mess it’s in right now without the active and will participation of most major news outlets. From Miller at the Times and her active proselytizing for the mythical WMD and her buddy Chalabi to Russert at MSNBC the major media has pretty consistently steered a path around the truth.

Here’s as good a dissection of Russert’s lies as I’ve seen. Word twisting has become SOP for these guys, one has to wonder why. It’s up at Huffpost. Read the whole thing, it’s good.

Two-and-a-half years before Mohamed ElBaradei and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) won the Nobel Peace Prize, friends of the Administration were trashing them in the media. Pushing for war with Iraq, these hawks insisted that inspections don’t work. In early March 2003, Tim Russert pushed their case further, by repeating lies to “prove” inspections don’t work. Those lies speak volumes about media coverage of the WMD story then and now.

Russert’s lie: (repeated three times) Inspectors never found any nuclear weapons program in Iraq until 1995, when Saddam’s son-in-law defected and revealed secret nuclear program unknown to the inspectors. It was sheer luck, not the inspections, that kept Saddam from building 21 nuclear bombs by 2003.

Russert’s message: Today inspectors say they find no evidence of nuclear weapons. But experience shows that Saddam can develop nuclear weapons right under the inspectors’ noses. Bombs could still be in Iraq, so the danger - and the justification for war - remains.

The truth: After the Persian Gulf War in 1991, the first intrusive inspections in Iraq led to discovery and destruction Saddam’s remaining nuclear weapons program. In 1995, Saddam’s son-in-law revealed a second crash nuclear program (using a fatally flawed design) that U.S. bombs smashed during the Persian Gulf War, prior to the inspectors’ arrival. Before 1991, Iraq relied on European technicians, equipment and manufacturing expertise for its nuclear weapons program, (which, after seven years, remained unsuccessful.) Lacking foreign assistance thereafter, Iraq remained incapable of building any nuclear device.