This video contains actual news clips of the "information" leading up to the Iraq war. Language may not be suitable for work.

On his Pressing Issues blog, journalist Greg Mitchell wrote that The Washington Post killed a piece about media failures in covering the Iraq War. The story, “Reviewing This Week’s Mea Culpas on Iraq: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” ran in full on The Nation’s website. Mitchell says that Post killed his piece because it didn’t offer sufficient “broader analytical points or insights,” and takes issue with the fact the Post instead published an article by Paul Farhi that claimed the media “didn’t fail.”

Here's an excerpt from Mitchell's "Reviewing This Week’s Mea Culpas on Iraq: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly":

Now let’s flash forward to this past two weeks, when Iraq (remember Iraq?) re-emerged in the news and opinion sections. But anyone who expected that hair shirts would come into fashion must have been sadly disappointed. The “mea culpas” would not be “maxima.” First, those who accepted some blame.

LIMITED HANGOUT STRATEGY David Frum, the former Bush speechwriter, wrote well over a thousand words at the Daily Beast describing multiple reasons for promoting the war before very briefly concluding, “Those of us who were involved—in whatever way—bear the responsibility.” While adding: “I could have set myself on fire in protest on the White House lawn and the war would have proceeded without me.” Jonathan Chait at New York offered regrets for backing the war but defended believing in Saddam’s WMD and recalled that “supporting the war was cool and a sign of seriousness.” And: “The people demanding apologies today will find themselves being asked to supply apologies of their own tomorrow.”

YOUNG AND DUMBER Ezra Klein apologized in a Bloomberg column, at great length, for supporting the war--when he was eighteen, and “young and dumb.” Charles P. Pierce at Esquire replied, “It is encouraging that he no longer believes in fairy tales.”

MEA (AND A LOT OF OTHERS) CULPA Stephen Hadley, Bush’s national security adviser, wrote at Foreign Policy: “It never occurred to me or anyone else I was working with, and no one from the intelligence community or anyplace else ever came in and said, ‘What if Saddam is doing all this deception because he actually got rid of the WMD and he doesn’t want the Iranians to know?’ Now, somebody should have asked that question. I should have asked that question. Nobody did.”

I never actually expected anyone from the media to apologize for "getting it wrong" on Iraq, but it was a bit heartening to hear those who did share their comments or apologies this year. It's quite a shame that The Washington Post didn't take advantage of the opportunity to do so.

I would like to point out that as far as the "mea culpas," Stephen Hadley, Bush's national security advisor, whom Mitchell quotes above as writing “It never occurred to me or anyone else I was working with, and no one from the intelligence community or anyplace else ever came in and said, ‘What if Saddam is doing all this deception because he actually got rid of the WMD and he doesn’t want the Iranians to know?’ Now, somebody should have asked that question. I should have asked that question. Nobody did.” In this news video clip, Colin Powell in February 2001 stated that Saddam Hussein did not have any WMDs, and that "He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors." In that same video, Condi Rice says basically the same thing in July of 2001.

Hadley's question wasn't asked because until someone decided that we were going to invade Iraq, the facts as everyone knew them were that Saddam's military was in a shambles, and indeed he did not want the Iranians to know that he was unable to protect his country from an invasion. Then just a very short while later, we're supposed to believe that some half-wit named Curveball -- who basically just wanted a green card -- was the guy who knew anything you wanted to know about Iraq. Especially if very specific questions were asked, no doubt. The Bush administration, and much of congress, then ignored warnings from German Federal Intelligence Service and the British Secret Intelligence Service questioning the authenticity of Curveball's claims.

So as long as some continue to peddle the lies even as they apologize or defend their prior statements and actions -- or like the Washington Post refuse to discuss what went wrong with the media's reporting on Iraq -- the war can't really be settled. If we can't ensure full, accurate, and impartial reporting in the media (I'm talking media here, not Fox News) how can we be certain that our nation won't be led to war in the very same way again in the future?

Video and transcript via BillMoyers.com.

The Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel and Jamie Raskin, constitutional law professor and Maryland state senator, join Bill to discuss how the uncontested power of the Supreme Court is changing our elections, our country, and our lives.

“We wanted to bring attention to how this court has empowered the 1% at the expense of the 99%,” says vanden Heuvel. “How it is now working for big business, for corporate power against the interests of ordinary citizens in this country.”

A full transcript of the discussion follows below the fold.

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Amidst a series of recent scandals that have rocked the global banking system, journalist Chris Hayes joins Amy Goodman of DemocracyNow! to discuss his new book, "Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy." The book examines how Wall Street and other major institutions, from Congress to the Catholic Church to Major League Baseball, have been crippled by corruption and incompetence. Hayes is host of the MSNBC weekend show, "Up with Chris Hayes," and is editor-at-large of The Nation magazine. "One of the most insidious aspects of the current distribution of resources in this country and the current inequality we have isn’t just that it’s bad for people on the bottom of the social pyramid but that it makes people at the top worse," Hayes says. "It conditions them to be incompetent and corrupt."

Rush transcript follows:

AMY GOODMAN: A scathing new U.S. Senate report faults the global bank HSBC for money laundering. The 335-page report released Monday said a "pervasively polluted" culture at HSBC allowed the bank to act as financier to clients seeking to route shadowy funds from across the world. Clients included drug cartels in Mexico, banks in Saudi Arabia with ties to al-Qaeda, Iranians who wanted to circumvent U.S. sanctions.

The report on HSBC is the latest in a series of recent scandals that have rocked the global banking system. The British bank Barclays recently admitted its traders tried to manipulate a crucial global interest rate. Meanwhile, JPMorgan Chase has disclosed it lost nearly $6 billion in risky bets—far more than originally projected.

Well, we’re spending the rest of the hour today with the author of a new book that examines how Wall Street and other major institutions, from Congress to the Catholic Church to Major League Baseball, have been crippled by corruption and incompetence. The book is called Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy. It’s written by Chris Hayes. Chris is host of the TV show Up with Chris Hayes on MSNBC and editor-at-large of The Nation magazine.

Chris, welcome to Democracy Now!

CHRIS HAYES: It’s such a great pleasure to be here.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s a really interesting book. What do you mean by "Twilight of the Elites" and meritocracy?

CHRIS HAYES: Twilight of the Elites, we had a little book party, and then it was in this somewhat swanky, you know, hotel bar, and there were these folks there from finance who were looking at it kind of. "What is up with this thing?" They saw the book cover. And he said, you know, "I thought you guys," meaning like us, like, you know, lefties, Occupy Wall Street sympathetic folk—he’s like, "I thought you guys thought we weren’t in twilight." I was like, "Well, it’s an aspirational title."

Twilight of the Elites means that what we have seen in this last decade is this cascade, almost uninterrupted cascade, of institutional failure and, specifically, elite failure. And I think what it—what the system is telling us, what these failures are telling us, is that the current social model and the current mechanisms of elite formation, the extreme levels of inequality we have, are producing an elite that cannot but help but fail, that one of the most insidious aspects of the current distribution of resources in this country and the current inequality we have isn’t just that it’s bad for people on the bottom of the social pyramid but that it makes people at the top worse. It conditions them to be incompetent and corrupt. And so, I think that’s one of the main arguments of the book, is that what we’re seeing in elite failure is produced by the system that produces those elites.

"Meritocracy" is a really fascinating word. It’s coined by a British left-wing social critic named Michael Young in the 1950s. And he writes a book called The Rise of the Meritocracy. This book is kind of in the vein of 1984 or Brave New World. It’s a dystopic work of social criticism about the future, in which he writes about a Britain in the future that manages to use intelligence testing and productivity testing inside firms to select out for the people who were the smartest and the hardest-working and have them run everything. Michael Young says in the book, tongue in cheek, "You know, we realize democracy can be no more than an aspiration, that we can’t have rule by the people, but rule by the cleverest people." Later in his life, Young was horrified to find that this word, "meritocracy," which he had intended as satire, had been adopted as an actual social model. In 2001, he writes in an op-ed in The Guardian, while Tony Blair is campaigning for New Labour on a vision of meritocracy, he’s saying, "No, no, no, no, no! I didn’t mean this as a model; I meant it as a critique and what an awful vision it would be of a society that didn’t take our egalitarian commitment seriously, that didn’t take democracy seriously, and instead decided to outsource the important decisions to people that were selected out for their brains or their other features."

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