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October
10, 2002 9:25 a.m.
Hit
to Kill
PBS
goes ballistic over missile defense.
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n a program
that airs tonight (Oct. 10), the producers of the PBS show Frontline
have targeted missile defense with the precision of a heat seeker mounted
on an exo-atmospheric kill vehicle. Which is odd, given their apparent
conviction that missile defense is a technological impossibility.
They also think it's
a moral nightmare. If only we hadn't spent billions developing anti-ballistic
weapons, says the narrator on "Missile
Wars," maybe we could have prevented September 11 from happening.
Here's the money
quote, delivered on camera by one Joseph
Cirincione, a former Democratic staffer on the Hill who now lobbies
against missile defense (and opposes
military action against Iraq) at the Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace: "I think the proponents of missile defense have a lot to answer
for in terms of why we were so unprepared for September 11th."
This is both a false
choice and a ridiculous assertion, akin to saying the National Institutes
of Health botched last fall's anthrax episode because they'd been distracted
by research on breast cancer. In fact, the United States, its soldiers,
and its allies are threatened simultaneously by terrorism and missile
attack — two different, but potentially related, phenomenon.
But it turns out
Frontline isn't impressed by threats, either. The show lays out
an elaborate case against the threat of missile attack from rogue nations
such as Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. It says these are nothing but figments
of the GOP's twisted imagination. With the Cold War over and Ronald Reagan's
Strategic Defense Initiative adrift during the Clinton years, says the
narrator, "Key to the Republican strategy was finding a post-Soviet
missile threat." Got that? Missile defense isn't a response to an
actual threat — the threat is a phony problem used to justify missile
defense (and lucrative defense-industry contracts).
Frontline
does manage to interview several supporters of missile defense, including
Newt Gingrich, Richard Perle, and Paul Wolfowitz. But it also seeks to
undercut and discredit them at nearly every turn. When will conservatives
learn that they shouldn't give interviews to Frontline? They simply
aren't treated with fairness.
Here's the closing
line to the program: "National missile defense has become a theology
in the United States, not a technology." The final image shows a
rocket blazing upward and looking like a star in the heavens. The moment
is foreshadowed a bit earlier by a clip of Trent Lott invoking God at
a press conference — a gratuitous swipe at a man's religious belief.
The goal, of course, is to persuade viewers that missile-defense supporters
are a bunch of cranks and yahoos.
The whole thing is
a set-up job. The program is bankrolled by the usual left-wing foundations
— Ford, MacArthur, Turner — and the stars of the program (such
as Cirincione) work at organizations supported by these same funders.
The "technical advisors" to the production company are Philip
Coyle, a responsible but not unbiased critic of missile defense, and William
Broad, a New York Times reporter who is openly hostile to missile
defense (he is the author of a 1992 book, Teller's War: The Top-Secret
Story Behind the Star Wars Deception). There is, of course, no counterweight
to their presence. Finally, Frontline is produced "in association
with The New York Times." This is hardly a shock, but it must
be said that no newspaper claiming objectivity should associate itself
with such a blatant piece of advocacy.
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