ABSTRACT
Lack of accountability for journalists who had helped create a horrific war based on lies is a major theme of the Iraq invasion. It is known that the main reason for the US-led invasion was not the removal of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) but the removal of Saddam Hussein. Most extraordinary of all is that one of the leading supporters of the spurious claims of WMDs should be that bastion of investigative journalism, the New York Times. It was the Times which in 1971 published the Pentagon Papers, which exposed years of public deception and the truth about how the Vietnam War had been secretly expanded to include the bombing of neighbouring Laos and Cambodia. In 2004, in the months leading up to the US presidential election, New York Times reporters James Risen and Eric Lichtblau unearthed the story of George W. Bush's decision to authorise the National Security Agency (NSA) to spy on the US public.
