SMEARS
<font size=4>The New York Times publishes an article that is just outrageous.
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By Cori Dauber
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It was already known that the new Iraqi PM had CIA ties.
Well now it turns out that some sources (unnamed, of course) suggest that he may have been involved in a bombing campaign inside Iraq in the '90s. Of course it might not have been him. And there may have been extensive civilian casualties. Or not. It's hard to rememeber that far back. You know how it is.
Are you just kidding me? And the Times goes to press with this half-baked crap on the front page? <font size=3>http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/09/politics/09ALLA.html?pagewanted=2
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Here's how the article starts:<font color=blue>
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Iyad Allawi, now the designated prime minister of Iraq, ran an exile organization intent on deposing Saddam Hussein that sent agents into Baghdad in the early 1990's to plant bombs and sabotage government facilities under the direction of the C.I.A., several former intelligence officials say.
Dr. Allawi's group, the Iraqi National Accord, used car bombs and other explosive devices smuggled into Baghdad from northern Iraq, the officials said. Evaluations of the effectiveness of the bombing campaign varied, although the former officials interviewed agreed that it never threatened Saddam Hussein's rule
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Frankly, the only sin there is that it didn't.
But right away the trouble starts:<font color=blue>
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No public records of the bombing campaign exist, and the former officials said their recollections were in many cases sketchy, and in some cases contradictory. They could not even recall exactly when it occurred, though the interviews made it clear it was between 1992 and 1995.
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And the trouble keeps getting worse:
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The Iraqi government at the time claimed that the bombs, including one it said exploded in a movie theater, resulted in many civilian casualties. But whether the bombings actually killed any civilians could not be confirmed because, as a former C.I.A. official said, the United States had no significant intelligence sources in Iraq then.
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Little tip: never trust a word Saddam's regime ever said about civilian casualties. So basically at this point the Times is passing on a rumour from Saddam's regime. What else you got?
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One former Central Intelligence Agency officer who was based in the region, Robert Baer, recalled that a bombing during that period "blew up a school bus; schoolchildren were killed." Mr. Baer, a critic of the Iraq war, said he did not recall which resistance group might have set off that bomb.
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So Baer is at least a named source, and he does remember a bombing -- but he can't remember whether the PM's group actually had anything to do with it. But the use of Baer here is utterly disingenuous. He may well be a critic of the war, but he's a far more vocifierous critic of the CIA's feckless efforts in Iraq during the '90s. If he's angry about any bombings in Iraq, he's angry because they were done incompetently and without a backup plan, not because someone was trying to use violence to overthrow Saddam. He was the CIA's liason to the Kurds, for God's sake.
The article continues:<font color=blue><font size=3>
Other former intelligence officials said Dr. Allawi's organization was the only resistance group involved in bombings and sabotage at that time.
But one former senior intelligence official recalled that "bombs were going off to no great effect."
"I don't recall very much killing of anyone," the official said.
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Good of the Times to print evidence contradicting its central thesis, but now there's a guy who says there was a bombing, a guy who can't remember if the PM was involved, a guy who says the bombings didn't do anything.
How is this yet publishable as a news story?
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When Dr. Allawi was picked as interim prime minister last week, he said his first priority would be to improve the security situation by stopping bombings and other insurgent attacks in Iraq — an idea several former officials familiar with his past said they found "ironic."
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Ha ha ha, isn't the Times full of sophisticated irony. Except that the situations aren't quite the same -- are they? Yes, sometimes the people called "freedom fighters" really were freedom fighters.
The article continues with some of the background on the group, the Iraqi National Accord, and that seems fair game, although it isn't really new.
So what we have here is the promise of spectacular revelations designed to make the new Iraqi leader, the symbol of Iraq's making progress toward standing on its own two feet, the symbol of real progress towards a new Iraq, look tainted. (Although this takes some shifting of context, since sabotage during the time of Saddam's regime, it seems to me, would have been not just acceptable but appropriate.)
But there's no there there. The sources are unnamed. Their memories are incomplete. They can't say for sure what happened, who did it, whether it really happened.
They can't confirm one another's stories by a long shot. (What happened to needing two sources confirming one another?)
But that doesn't stop the Times.
What they have here is a hash. A series of fragments, of intriguing bits that are suggestive.
But they seem to suggest something negative, so they go ahead and publish anyway, long before they have the amount and quality of evidence that is supposed to qualify for a documented story (much less the evidence to back up the opening paragraphs.)
It's hard not to see this as driven by some kind of agenda. Because it certainly isn't "ripe." |
