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News :: Iraq : Media |
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'NY Times' Fails to Acknowledge Its Role in WMD Hype |
Current rating: 0 |
by William E. Jackson Jr.
(No verified email address) |
21 Feb 2004
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The Paper of Record Blames Intelligence and Administration, but any Indictment of the National Press is Missing |
The New York Times offered a sharp editorial Tuesday critiquing the indisputable role of the White House in distorting the intelligence on Iraq and weapons of mass destruction, and in stampeding Congressional and public opinion by spinning worst-case scenarios -- "inflating them drastically" -- to justify an immediate invasion last March to repel an alleged imminent threat to the United States. Indeed, the logical implication of the editorial might well have been to charge senior officials -- in particular the vice president -- with an impeachable offense.
However, strangely missing from the paper of record was any indictment of the national press, starting with the Times, for its obvious role in gravely misleading the institutions of government and the public when hyping the WMD threat.
Times reporters and editors bear a heavy responsibility, as far back as September 2002, for having raised the nuclear specter that could materialize in the form of a "mushroom cloud." National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and Vice President Dick Cheney took some of their talk-show lines on the nuclear danger from the Times article of Sept. 8, 2002 by Judith Miller and Michael Gordon, "US Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts."
Moreover, over the years, the Times had frequently reported that the threat from Iraq's biological and chemical weapons programs was real and ominous. Defectors and exile groups, such as the Iraqi National Congress led by Ahmad Chalabi, were prime sources for the Times.
Washington Post ombudsman Michael Getler recently reminded us that the press is about the only way to find out more than what the government chooses to tell us ("Not Everyone Was Wrong," Feb. 14). Therefore, it is disingenuous of the Times to now place the burden of blame for bad intelligence at the feet of the intelligence community, as the Bush administration is doing, or even to hold solely responsible the senior policymakers for misuse of same. It seems fair to ask: who hoodwinked whom in the process of what Sen. Bob Graham has called "incestuous amplification?"
Alas, columnists of the Times have adopted the practice of looking the other way, when it comes to the paper's own culpability. In Maureen Dowd's "The Thief of Baghdad" (Feb. 15), she of the rapier pen put forward the proposition that the government-financed Iraqi National Congress (INC), with access to the vice president's office, had duped the administration neo-cons and that bogus stories by exiles and defectors "ricocheted through an echo chamber of government and media."
But just who used whom, and how? It is closer to the truth to point out that, together, the neo-cons in the Pentagon and the vice president's office, and the INC, suckered parts of the government and pliable major news outlets--including the Times. The "political set" at the top knew what they were doing and, aided and abetted by the INC, they manipulated "the intelligence and journalistic sets" -- to use Dowd's terms.
As for the new ombudsman at the Times, the beleaguered Daniel Okrent: Why is he not addressing complaints about the Times' reporting last year on Iraqi WMD? In his most recent column on Sunday, Okrent announced what he had frankly told me at the beginning of his tenure: "I determined early on that looking into articles published before I started in the job on Dec. 1 would make me disappear into an endless tunnel."
Or take recent Times news articles, by two very able reporters, on the role of defectors and exile groups in fooling U.S. intelligence agencies about the alleged presence of WMD in Iraq (James Risen, "Data From Iraqi Exiles Under Scrutiny," Feb. 12; Douglas Jehl, "Stung by Exiles' Role, C.I.A. Orders a Shift in Procedures," Feb. 13).
Risen: "Since occupation of Iraq, many officials in the American intelligence community have said that much of the information provided to Washington by the INC before the war was suspect, and some have questioned whether the group provided disinformation to the United States." Quoting a State Department official, Risen reported that the exile group seemed more interested in providing information to the press than to the department: "Generally, they were going right to the media with their stuff."
Jehl: "American intelligence officials who before the war were sifting through claims that Iraq had illicit weapons were generally not told that much of the information came from defectors linked to exile organizations that were promoting an American invasion." Note: "The defectors' claims were included in both the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002" and the February 2003 presentation to the UN Security Council by Secretary of State Colin Powell.
Missing from these stories was any specific acknowledgment of the Times' extraordinary reliance upon the very same sources! Like the White House, their reporting would seem to place the blame solely on the intelligence community. But surely, Judith Miller and other Times reporters knew, even if CIA analysts did not know the origin of suspect information, that it was provided by exile organizations promoting an American invasion of Iraq.
Incredibly, nevertheless, Miller places the onus on U.S. intelligence for the gross discrepancies between what she reported on Iraqi WMD before the war, and the largely blank sheet of the Iraqi Survey Group submitted by David Kay: "The fact that the United States so far hasn't found WMD in Iraq is deeply disturbing," she told Michael Massing in his article "Now They Tell Us," in the New York Review of Books (Feb. 26). "It raises real questions about how good our intelligence was. To beat up on the messenger is to miss the point." This from a messenger who, in 2002-2003, persisted in publishing shaky and deceptive information that abetted the designs of her high-level administration and INC sources.
But 11 months after the war began, there have been no editors' notes or corrections that single out the "bum-steer" reports on weapons of mass destruction written mostly by star WMD correspondent Miller, say, between September 2002 and September 2003. Frequently, front-page exclusives were based on INC source information proffered by U.S. government "officials," or funneled by defectors and the exile group to the Times directly.
No wonder that it was often impossible to know where the Times left off and the government began, or vice versa, in one "news" report after another on WMD in Iraq. Miller recently said on a radio program: "My job was to tell readers of the NYT ... what people inside the government who had very high security clearances, who were not supposed to talk to me, were saying to one another about what they thought Iraq had and did not have" in WMD.
Miller argued on the same show, in effect, that she bears no responsibility for having fed faulty information to the public because other Times reporters cleaned up after her, presumably creating some sort of peculiar balance between a truth and an untruth in the paper's pages. In the same interview she referred to "a constant, collective effort, and to just look at my work, and say, well, she wrote this and then she didn't get back to it, that doesn't mean the paper didn't."
By reporting as news the views of defectors, wherever they came from, the Times as the "paper of record" gave them a certain legitimacy in the march to war and the immediate aftermath of the invasion. It remains incumbent upon the Times as an institution to explicitly acknowledge the factual undermining of their claims made in its pages concerning momentous events. The failure to follow up strongly suggests a lack of interest in correcting reports that were later contradicted by the evidence.
William E. Jackson Jr. was executive director of President Jimmy Carter's General Advisory Committee on Arms Control, 1978-80. After affiliations with the Brookings Institution and the Fulbright Institute of International Relations, he writes on national security issues from Davidson, N.C.
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Chalabi, Garner Provide New Clues to War |
by Jim Lobe
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
21 Feb 2004
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WASHINGTON - For those still puzzling over the whys and wherefores of Washington's invasion of Iraq 11 months ago, major new, but curiously unnoticed, clues were offered this week by two central players in the events leading up to the war.
Both clues tend to confirm growing suspicions that the Bush administration's drive to war in Iraq had very little, if anything, to do with the dangers posed by Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMD) or his alleged ties to terrorist groups like al-Qaeda -- the two main reasons the U.S. Congress and public were given for the invasion.
Separate statements by Ahmed Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), and U.S. retired Gen Jay Garner, who was in charge of planning and administering post-war reconstruction from January through May 2002, suggest that other, less public motives were behind the war, none of which concerned self-defense, pre-emptive or otherwise.
The statement by Chalabi, on whom the neo-conservative and right-wing hawks in the Pentagon and Vice President Dick Cheney's office are still resting their hopes for a transition that will protect Washington's many interests in Iraq, will certainly interest congressional committees investigating why the intelligence on WMD before the war was so far off the mark.
In a remarkably frank interview with the London 'Daily Telegraph', Chalabi said he was willing to take full responsibility for the INC's role in providing misleading intelligence and defectors to President George W. Bush, Congress and the U.S. public to persuade them that Hussein posed a serious threat to the United States that had to be dealt with urgently.
The Telegraph reported that Chalabi merely shrugged off accusations his group had deliberately misled the administration. ''We are heroes in error'', he said.
''As far as we're concerned, we've been entirely successful'', he told the newspaper. ''That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important. The Bush administration is looking for a scapegoat. We're ready to fall on our swords if he wants''.
It was an amazing admission, and certain to fuel growing suspicions on Capitol Hill that Chalabi, whose INC received millions of dollars in taxpayer money over the past decade, effectively conspired with his supporters in and around the administration to take the United States to war on pretenses they knew, or had reason to know, were false.
Indeed, it now appears increasingly that defectors handled by the INC were sources for the most spectacular and detailed -- if completely unfounded -- information about Hussein's alleged WMD programs, not only to U.S. intelligence agencies, but also to U.S. mainstream media, especially the 'New York Times', according to a recent report in the New York 'Review of Books'.
Within the administration, Chalabi worked most closely with those who had championed his cause for a decade, particularly neo-conservatives around Cheney and Rumsfeld -- Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith and Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby.
Feith's office was home to the office of special plans (OSP) whose two staff members and dozens of consultants were tasked with reviewing raw intelligence to develop the strongest possible case that Hussein represented a compelling threat to the United States.
OSP also worked with the defense policy board (DPB), a hand-picked group of mostly neo-conservative hawks chaired until just before the war by Richard Perle, a long-time Chalabi friend.
DPB members, particularly Perle, former CIA director James Woolsey and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, played prominent roles in publicizing through the media reports by INC defectors and other alleged evidence developed by OSP that made Hussein appear as scary as possible.
Chalabi even participated in a secret DPB meeting just a few days after the Sep. 11, 2001 attacks on New York and the Pentagon in which the main topic of discussion, according to the 'Wall Street Journal', was how 9/11 could be used as a pretext for attacking Iraq.
The OSP and a parallel group under Feith, the Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group, have become central targets of congressional investigators, according to aides on Capitol Hill, while unconfirmed rumors circulated here this week that members of the DPB are also under investigation.
The question, of course, is whether the individuals involved were themselves taken in by what Chalabi and the INC told them or whether they were willing collaborators in distorting the intelligence in order to move the country to war for their own reasons..
It appears that Chalabi, whose family, it was reported this week, has extensive interests in a company that has already been awarded more than 400 million dollars in reconstruction contracts, is signaling his willingness to take all of the blame, or credit, for the faulty intelligence.
But one of the reasons for going to war was suggested quite directly by Garner -- who also worked closely with Chalabi and the same cohort of U.S. hawks in the run-up to the war and during the first few weeks of occupation -- in an interview with 'The National Journal'.
Asked how long U.S. troops might remain in Iraq, Garner replied, ''I hope they're there a long time'', and then compared U.S. goals in Iraq to U.S. military bases in the Philippines between 1898 and 1992.
''One of the most important things we can do right now is start getting basing rights with (the Iraqi authorities)'', he said. ''And I think we'll have basing rights in the north and basing rights in the south ... we'd want to keep at least a brigade''.
''Look back on the Philippines around the turn of the 20th century: they were a coaling station for the navy, and that allowed us to keep a great presence in the Pacific. That's what Iraq is for the next few decades: our coaling station that gives us great presence in the Middle East'', Garner added.
While U.S. Military strategists have hinted for some time that a major goal of war was to establish several bases in Iraq, particularly given the ongoing military withdrawal from Saudi Arabia, Garner is the first to state it so baldly.
Until now, U.S. Military chiefs have suggested they need to retain a military presence just to ensure stability for several years, during which they expect to draw down their forces.
If indeed Garner's understanding represents the thinking of his former bosses, then the ongoing struggle between Cheney and the Pentagon on the one hand and the State Department on the other over how much control Washington is willing to give the United Nations over the transition to Iraqi rule becomes more comprehensible.
Ceding too much control, particularly before a base agreement can be reached with whatever Iraqi authority will take over Jun. 30, will make permanent U.S. bases much less likely.
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