Ican I found an article while I was in the middle of reading things that jumped out at me because it talked about the very things were talking about.
From New Nation Online Edition
Front Page
US media uncover Bush administration's managing the flow of news from Iraq
By New York Tribune
Dec 3, 2004, 11:57
Allawi's recent visit to the United States was part of an intensive campaign by the Bush administration to manage the flow of news out of Iraq. As a matter of policy, any journalist wanting to visit the Green Zone, had to be escorted at all times; one could not simply wander around and chat with people in bars and cafés, says the latest issue of the New York Review.
The vast world of civilian contractors-of Halliburton's Kellogg, Brown & Root, of Bechtel, and of all the other private companies responsible for rebuilding Iraq-was completely off-limits; employees of these companies were informed that they would be fired if they were caught talking to the press. During the days of the Coalition Provisional Authority, its administrator, L. Paul Bremer, and the top military commander, Ricardo Sanchez, gave very few interviews to US correspondents in Baghdad.
They did, however, speak often via satellite with small newspapers and local TV stations, which were seen as more open and sympathetic. "The administration has been extremely successful in going around the filters, of getting their message directly to the American people without giving interviews to the Baghdad press corps," one correspondent said.
Three top US newspapers-The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times- seemed driven by a sense that they had somehow let down their readers during the run-up to the war, that they had not sufficiently scrutinized the administration's case for war, and they now seemed determined to make up for it. The New York Times, for one, maintained a staff of forty to fifty people in Baghdad, including four or five reporters plus assorted drivers, housekeepers, security guards, and "fixers," those invaluable interpreter/journalists who help visiting reporters understand who's who, arrange interviews, and make sense of it all. With more and more of the country off-limits to Western reporters, these fixers were increasingly sent out into the field to find out what was going on, and some emerged as enterprising reporters in their own right.
In early October, The New York Times's Edward Wong, accompanied by a fixer and a photographer, spent a day being guided through the streets of Baghdad's Sadr City by a mid-level aide to Moqtada al-Sadr. At the time, US warplanes were pounding the district on a nightly basis, but Wong found that the strikes were not having their intended effect. "Loyalty to [Sadr] burns fierce here" in Sadr City, "a vast slum of 2.2 million people, despite frequent American raids and almost nightly airstrikes," he wrote on October 3. "The American military has stepped up its campaign to rout the Mahdi Army, Mr. Sadr's militia, on its home turf here, to drive him to the bargaining table. But it is often impossible here to distinguish between civilians and fighters."
After Prime Minister Allawi asserted that most of Iraq was safe, The Washington Post's Rajiv Chandrasekaran-seeking a statistical measure- got hold of the daily security reports of Kroll, a private firm working for the US government. These reports showed that Iraq was suffering an average of seventy attacks a day by insurgents, up from the forty to fifty that had occurred before the handover of political authority in late June. What is more, the reports showed, the attacks were occurring not only in the Sunni Triangle but in every province of Iraq. "In number and scope," Chandrasekaran wrote on the Post's front page, the attacks compiled in the Kroll reports suggest a broad and intensifying campaign of insurgent violence that contrasts sharply with assessments by Bush administration officials and Iraq's interim prime minister that the instability is contained [in] small pockets of the country.
In the face of Bush administration efforts to portray the Iraqi insurgency as made up exclusively of foreign fighters led by the Jordanian-born terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, several US news organizations offered a more nuanced look. The AP's Jim Krane, for instance, reported in early October that the insurgents seemed to consist of four main groups, including not only "hardcore fighters" aligned with Zarqawi but also conservative Iraqis seeking to install an Islamic theocracy, Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army, and "Iraqi nationalists fighting to reclaim secular power lost when Saddam Hussein was deposed in April 2003." This last group, Krane wrote, was the largest. In other US wars, he noted, "the enemy was clear." In Iraq, "the disorganized insurgency has no single commander, no political wing and no dominant group." As a result, "US troops can't settle on a single approach" to the fighting.
In Washington, too, the press uncovered many significant stories about US policy in Iraq. In one five-day period (October 22 to October 26), The Washington Post's front page featured stories on
a poll showing that US-backed political figures were losing ground to religious leaders; how the war in Iraq had diverted energy and attention from the fight against al-Qaeda; how the CIA was secretly moving detainees out of Iraq-a "serious breach" of the Geneva Conventions; and administration plans to ask for an additional $70 billion to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The biggest bombshell, though, came on October 25, when the Times, in a two-column story on its front page, reported that nearly 380 tons of high-grade explosives had disappeared from a bunker south of Baghdad, and that this had likely occurred after the US invasion. The story was quickly seized on by John Kerry, who for the remaining days of the campaign cited it as further evidence of the administration's mishandling of Iraq. On the day before the election, CNN analyst William Schneider said that the missing-explosives story seemed to be an "important" factor in a last-minute turning of the polls away from Bush.
© Copyright 2003 by ittefaq.com
http://nation.ittefaq.com/artman/publish/article_14312.shtml
It was more than Powell claims of WMD that were proven false, but I don't feel like going there as others have already went there and you just ignore what you want. I don't know whether Powell believed what he said or it not, but I do know if he didn't; he should have because the information was out there.
If I'm given a choice between a positive outlook and a "hate-filled" existence, I'll go for the former every time. 
