NOW They Tell Us

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

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Date: Wed, 11 Feb 2004 10:40:14 -0500
From: Randall <rvh40 () insightbb com>
Subject: NOW They Tell Us
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[Article is too long to be reprinted here. Click the link to read it all]

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16922

Volume 51, Number 3 · February 26, 2004 Feature
Now They Tell Us
By Michael Massing
1.
In recent months, US news organizations have rushed to expose the Bush
administration's pre-war failings on Iraq. "Iraq's Arsenal Was Only on
Paper," declared a recent headline in The Washington Post. "Pressure
Rises for Probe of Prewar-Intelligence," said The Wall Street Journal.
"So, What Went Wrong?" asked Time. In The New Yorker, Seymour Hersh
described how the Pentagon set up its own intelligence unit, the Office
of Special Plans, to sift for data to support the administration's
claims about Iraq. And on "Truth, War and Consequences," a Frontline
documentary that aired last October, a procession of intelligence
analysts testified to the administration's use of what one of them
called "faith-based intelligence."

Watching and reading all this, one is tempted to ask, where were you all
before the war? Why didn't we learn more about these deceptions and
concealments in the months when the administration was pressing its case
for regime change—when, in short, it might have made a differrence? Some
maintain that the many analysts who've spoken out since the end of the
war were mute before it. But that's not true. Beginning in the summer of
2002, the "intelligence community" was rent by bitter disputes over how
Bush officials were using the data on Iraq. Many journalists knew about
this, yet few chose to write about it.

Before the war, for instance, there was a loud debate among intelligence
analysts over the information provided to the Pentagon by Iraqi
opposition leader Ahmed Chalabi and defectors linked to him. Yet little
of this seeped into the press. Not until September 29, 2003, for
instance, did The New York Times get around to informing readers about
the controversy over Chalabi and the defectors associated with him. In a
front-page article headlined "Agency Belittles Information Given by
Iraqi Defectors," Douglas Jehl reported that a study by the Defense
Intelligence Agency had found that most of the information provided by
defectors connected to Ahmed Chalabi "was of little or no value."
Several defectors introduced to US intelligence by the Iraqi National
Congress, Jehl wrote, "invented or exaggerated their credentials as
people with direct knowledge of the Iraqi government and its suspected
unconventional weapons program."


________________________________________________________________________

Why, I wondered, had it taken the Times so long to report this? Around
the time that Jehl's article appeared, I ran into a senior editor at the
Times and asked him about it. Well, he said, some reporters at the paper
had relied heavily on Chalabi as a source and so were not going to write
too critically about him.

The editor did not name names, but he did not have to. The Times's
Judith Miller has been the subject of harsh criticism. Slate, The
Nation, Editor & Publisher, the American Journalism Review, and the
Columbia Journalism Review have all run articles accusing her of being
too eager to accept official claims before the war and too eager to
report the discovery of banned weapons after it.[1] Especially
controversial has been Miller's alleged reliance on Chalabi and the
defectors who were in touch with him. Last May, Howard Kurtz of The
Washington Post wrote of an e-mail exchange between Miller and John
Burns, then the Times bureau chief in Baghdad, in which Burns rebuked
Miller for writing an article about Chalabi without informing him.
Miller replied that she had been covering Chalabi for about ten years
and had "done most of the stories about him for our paper." Chalabi, she
added, "has provided most of the front page exclusives on WMD to our
paper."

When asked about this, Miller said that the significance of her ties to
Chalabi had been exaggerated. While she had met some defectors through
him, she said, only one had resulted in a front-page story on WMD prior
to the war. Her assertion that Chalabi had provided most of the Times's
front-page exclusives on WMD was, she said, part of "an angry e-mail
exchange with a colleague." In the heat of such exchanges, Miller said,
"You say things that aren't true. If you look at the record, you'll see
they aren't true."

This seems a peculiar admission. Yet on the broader issue of her ties to
Chalabi, the record bears Miller out. Before the war, Miller wrote or
co-wrote several front-page articles about Iraq's WMD based on
information from defectors; only one of them came via Chalabi. An
examination of those stories, though, shows that they were open to
serious question. The real problem was relying uncritically on defectors
of any stripe, whether supplied by Chalabi or not.

This points to a larger problem. In the period before the war, US
journalists were far too reliant on sources sympathetic to the
administration. Those with dissenting views—and there were moore than a
few—were shut out. Reflecting this, the coverage was highly ddeferential
to the White House. This was especially apparent on the issue of Iraq's
weapons of mass destruction— the heart of the President's casse for war.
Despite abundant evidence of the administration's brazen misuse of
intelligence in this matter, the press repeatedly let officials get away
with it. As journalists rush to chronicle the administration's failings
on Iraq, they should pay some attention to their own.


2.
On August 26, 2002, Vice President Dick Cheney gave a speech that was
widely interpreted as signaling the administration's intention to wage
war on Iraq. There "is no doubt," Cheney declared, that Saddam Hussein
"has weapons of mass destruction" and is preparing to use them against
the United States. Saddam, he said, not only had biological and chemical
weapons but had "resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons." If
allowed to continue on this course, he added, Saddam could subject his
adversaries to "nuclear blackmail." Accordingly, the United States had
no choice but to take preemptive action against him.

The reference to nuclear weapons was especially telling. While Iraq was
widely believed to have biological and chemical weapons, there was much
more uncertainty regarding its nuclear program. In 1998, when UN
inspectors left the country, it was generally agreed that Iraq's nuclear
program had been dismantled. The question was, what had happened in the
four years since? In his speech, Cheney flatly stated that Iraq had
resumed its quest for a bomb, but neither he nor any other Bush official
offered any supporting evidence.


________________________________________________________________________

At the time of Cheney's speech, Times reporters Judith Miller and
Michael Gordon were investigating the state of Iraq's arsenal. Both had
reported on Iraq for many years and brought certain perspectives to the
assignment. Gordon, the paper's chief military correspondent, had after
the Gulf War teamed up with retired general Bernard Trainor to write The
Generals' War: The Inside Story of the Conflict in the Gulf (1995). A
detailed account of the military's conduct of the war, it strongly
criticized the US decision to leave Saddam in power. From his many years
of reporting on intelligence matters, Gordon knew how shocked US
analysts had been after the Gulf War to find how far along Iraq had been
in its effort to develop a nuclear weapon.

Miller, the coauthor of Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf (1990)
and Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War (2001), was
intimately acquainted with Saddam Hussein's genius for deception. In
February 1998, she (together with William Broad) had written a
4,900-word report about Iraq's secret program to produce bioweapons and
its success in concealing them from the outside world. According to the
story, many former weapons inspectors and other experts with whom Miller
and Broad talked believed that Baghdad "is still hiding missiles and
germ weapons, and the means to make both."

Later that year, Miller met one of the first defectors who gave her
information—Khidhir Hamza, a scientist who, until the late 19980s, had
been a senior official in Iraq's nuclear program. After fleeing Baghdad
in 1994, Hamza had made his way to Washington, where in 1997 he went to
work for the Institute for Science and International Security, a small
think tank, which arranged for Miller and fellow Times reporter James
Risen to interview him. The result was a front-page story relating
Hamza's account of the "inner workings" of Saddam's push for a bomb
prior to the Gulf War, and recounting Hamza's belief that Saddam
retained the infrastructure to duplicate that effort.

While seeing Hamza, Miller told me, she also was in touch with Ahmed
Chalabi, and in 2001 he arranged for her to visit Thailand to interview
another defector, a civil engineer named Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri.
The resulting front-page story related al-Haideri's claim to have
personally renovated "secret facilities for biological, chemical and
nuclear weapons." These facilities were said to exist "in underground
wells, private villas and under Saddam Hussein Hospital in Baghdad."
Charles Duelfer, a former inspector, was quoted as saying that
al-Haideri's account was consistent with other reports showing that Iraq
had "not given up its desire" for WMD.

In 2002, Miller went to Turkey to interview yet another defector, Ahmed
al-Shemri. A member of the Iraqi Officers Movement, another opposition
group, al-Shemri (a pseudonym) claimed to have worked in Iraq's chemical
weapons program, and he told Miller that Saddam had continued to produce
VX and other chemical agents even while international inspectors were in
Iraq. Iraq, he added, continued to store such agents at secret sites
throughout the country.


________________________________________________________________________

By late summer of 2002, then, Miller had developed a circle of sources
who claimed to have firsthand knowledge of Saddam's continued push for
prohibited weapons. And as she and Gordon made the rounds of
administration officials, they picked up a dramatic bit of information
about Iraq's nuclear program. During the previous fourteen months, they
were told, Iraq had tried to import thousands of high-strength aluminum
tubes. The tubes had been intercepted, and specialists sent to examine
them had concluded from their diameter, thickness, and other technical
properties that they had only one possible use—as casings forr rotors in
centrifuges to enrich uranium, a key step in producing an atomic bomb.

...

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