For these past two days, the media has been hysterically promoting what Retired Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez said at a recent speech. The part they actually put into the stories are the part where he calls Iraq “a nightmare with no end in sight”. But that can’t possibly be his entire speech, right? Right. Bluto from The Dread Pundit found the rest of Sanchez’s speech that the media wishes to ignore. The Army Times reports:

The former top commander of forces in Iraq lambasted reporters Friday for having “agenda-driven biases” he called “a threat to democracy,” and then laid out the Bush administration and Congress for bad planning and no clear end state for the war in Iraq…

He berated the room of about 30 to 40 reporters, saying he had been portrayed as a “liar” by people who had never met him. Many of the reporters, in Arlington, Va., for a Military Reporters and Editors conference, had covered the trials that came from photos leaked to the media showing pyramids of naked Iraqi prisoners, a hooded man convinced that if he fell off a crate he would be electrocuted, and dogs snapping inches away from a prisoner…

He said deployment cycles aren’t working with current troop levels, that it will take decades to fix the “military’s full-spectrum readiness,” and that if the U.S. were to withdraw from Iraq, it would lead to “chaos that would lead to instability in the Middle East.” And, he said the Powell Doctrine — which requires a clear exit strategy as part of a war plan — was violated.

He said some poor strategic decisions in Iraq had become “defeats because of the media,” and that some reporters feed from a “pigs’ trough.”…

He said the partisan politics of Congress are “killing soldiers,” and that the focus needs to be not at Capitol Hill, but in Iraq. And, he said, the media’s coverage of partisan politics was driving a wedge in democracy. He called for newspapers to run corrections more prominently and noted that television and Internet outlets often don’t run corrections at all.

Bottom line? Besides the part they wanted to actually report, Sanchez went nuclear on the media and plans for withdrawal. He called the media’s “agenda driven” reporting a “threat to democracy”. He said a withdrawal would lead to “chaos that would lead to instability in the Middle East”. But the media failed to report that. It reported criticisms of Bush’s strategy, but ignored Sanchez’s equally damning remarks about the agenda-driven media and the withdrawal Congress wants.

Bias? What bias?

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