By William E. Jackson, Jr.
Mar. 23 — One year after the Iraq war began, Knight Ridder
last week exposed a three-sided echo chamber — including the press
— that magnified the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) threat for
public consumption from 2001 onward. It may not be possible for news
outlets to ignore the implications of the investigative report by Jonathan
Landay and Tish Wells, released on Mar. 16.
When The San Jose Mercury News ran the story (under the headline “Global
Misinformation Campaign was Used to Build Case for War”), the paper
admitted that it had “published three stories written by the New
York Times based on Iraqi National Congress-provided materials.”
The Miami Herald and The Charlotte Observer did similar internal reviews.
Some other papers are still examining their archives.
The expose has had the effect of setting off a paroxysm of re-examination
within many newspapers across the country as they filter through hundreds
of news stories, based in part or in whole on defector/exile tales,
to try to winnow out bogus information on the alleged threat from Saddam’s
illicit weapons and ties to terrorist organizations. (How they go about
sorting out the administration’s own embroidered exaggerations
and deceptions is another matter.) Partly for that reason, some newspapers
delayed running the Mar. 16 story.
John Walcott, chief of Knight Ridder’s Washington bureau, explained
to Editor & Publisher: “We felt that it was important to give
our own institution the same kind of scrutiny we’ve tried to give
the Bush Administration and its handling of intelligence about Iraq.
We always owe that to our readers and to the people we write about but,
in this case, when the media played such an important role in making
the case for a pre-emptive war, we thought it was especially important.”
Drawing on a June 2002 letter from the INC to the Senate Appropriations
Committee, the Knight Ridder investigation revealed that over 100 articles
appeared in leading newspapers, news agencies and magazines based upon
exaggerated or fabricated information provided by the INC. Knight Ridder
reviewed an INC summary of stories found in major English-language news
outlets worldwide for the period, October 2001-May 2002. (The crucial
gap from the summer of 2002 to today is not filled in.)
Editor & Publisher asked for reactions from editors and reporters
at many of the cited major American and British news outlets. Those
who responded, for the most part, asked not to be quoted.
The dean of national security correspondents in Washington, Walter Pincus
of The Washington Post, described the Knight Ridder piece as “essentially
a press story.” He had been given the INC list of public relations
claims, but it was billed as showing the type of false intelligence
the Chalabi group was passing to the Pentagon and the Vice President’s
office. Since the INC press contact list was represented to him as showing
something different than what it was, he chose not to write about it.
Bob Drogin of the Los Angeles Times had also been given a copy. The
New York Times had a copy of the relevant INC document, reported on
parts of it, but failed to do a story with the focus of Knight-Ridder’s.
A consensus view among reporters from several major news outlets is
that the main story was the INC was using US tax dollars to, at the
minimum, “spin” the press. Knight Ridder’s revelations
do not prove that the INC succeeded in planting fabricated information
in the press — even if there is reason to suspect this is what
happened. What they document is that the INC claims credit for a bunch
of stories.
Nevertheless, a lot of confusion in the “fog of war” could
have been avoided if Ben Bradlee’s exhortation of Mar. 17 had been
taken to heart by all editors and reporters long ago: “The best
journalists are the best lie detectors: The reporters who instinctively
are alert to the possibility that their sources don’t know what
they are talking about [or] are leaving out vital details that would
tend to discredit their stories, or they are deliberately lying.”
The INC, in the letter to the Senate Appropriations Committee from which
Knight Ridder drew its news outlet revelations, identified two officials,
one then in the office of Vice President Cheney (John Hannah) and one
in the office of Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld (William Luti), to which
it had fed information directly. (The names of others who served as
liaisons to Chalabi and the INC will come out.) The information had
bypassed established US intelligence channels and reached the recipients
even after the CIA and the DIA had questioned the accuracy and motives
of the suppliers. Some key allegations found their way into major documents
the Administration used to make the case for war.
This is where the trail becomes really interesting. If more comprehensive
records can be produced to document a list of individual appointments,
with meeting agendas, that Chalabi and members of his organization had
with the Vice President and his staff from 2001-2003, it will become
even clearer how out-of-channel intelligence made its way to the war
cabinet chaired by Dick Cheney. It can be presumed that they were not
discussing the search for missing Iraqi antiquities.
Another question suggests itself: Was the NSC staff, namely Condoleezza
Rice and her deputy, Stephen Hadley, in fact out of the loop and unaware
of the raw, unvetted intelligence from defectors that was flowing to
Cheney’s office? Rice continues to point the finger of blame at
George Tenet and the CIA as the main source for “the facts as we
understood them” from intelligence analysis at the time. What a
devastating revelation it would be if Rice was forced to admit that
she was in on the stovepipe intelligence conduit. Then the rogue elephant
in the West Wing — the INC — would be outed.
Independent of the CIA, it seems that President Bush, like the press,
received a lot of poor intelligence that went into his head and his
speeches. In essence, an exile intelligence unit penetrated the White
House, spreading disinformation as an alien agent.
Source: Editor & Publisher
