Who's the hack? I nominate The New Yorker's
Jeffrey Goldberg. He's the new Remington,
though without the artistic talent. Back in 1898,
William Randolph Hearst was trying to fan war
fever between the United States and Spain. He
dispatched a reporter and the artist Frederic
Remington to Cuba to send back blood-roiling
depictions of Spanish beastliness to Cuban
insurgents. Remington wired to say he could
find nothing sensational to draw and could he
come home. Famously, Hearst wired him,
"Please remain. You furnish the pictures and I'll
furnish the war." Remington duly did so.
I wouldn't set The New Yorker's editor, David
Remnick, in the shoes of a Kong-sized monster
like Hearst. Remnick is a third-tier talent who
has always got ahead by singing the correct
career-enhancing tunes, as witness his awful
reporting from Russia in the 1990s. Art
Spiegelman recently quit The New Yorker,
remarking that these dangerous times require
courage and the ability to be provocative, but
alas, "Remnick does not feel up to the
challenge."
That's putting it far too politely. Remnick's
watch has been lackluster and cowardly. He is
also the current sponsor (Marty Peretz of The
New Republic was an earlier one) of Goldberg,
whose first major chunk of agitprop for The New
Yorker was published on March 25 of last year.
Titled "The Great Terror," it was billed as
containing disclosures of "Saddam Hussein's
possible ties to al Qaeda."
This was at a moment when the FBI and CIA
had just shot down the war party's claim of a
meeting between Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi
intelligence agent in Prague before the 9/11
attacks. Goldberg saved the day for the Bush
crowd. At the core of his rambling, 16,000-word
piece was an interview in the Kurdish-held Iraqi
town of Sulaimaniya with Mohammed Mansour
Shahab, who offered the eager Goldberg a
wealth of detail about his activities as a link
between Osama bin Laden and the Iraqis,
shuttling arms and other equipment.
The piece was gratefully seized upon by the
Administration as proof of The Link. The coup
de grâce to Goldberg's credibility fell on
February 9 of this year in the London Observer,
administered by Jason Burke, its chief reporter.
Burke visited the same prison in Sulaimaniya,
talked to Shahab and established beyond doubt
that Goldberg's great source is a clumsy liar,
not even knowing the physical appearance of
Kandahar, whither he had claimed to have
journeyed to deal with bin Laden; and
confecting his fantasies in the hope of a shorter
prison sentence.
Another experienced European journalist, whom
I reached on the Continent at the end of this
week and who visited the prison last year
agrees with Bourke's findings. "I talked to
prisoners without someone present. The
director of the prison seemed surprised at my
request. With a prison authority present the
interview would be worthless. As soon as we
talked to this particular one a colleague said
after 30 seconds, 'this is worthless. The guy
was just a story teller.'"
The European journalist, who doesn't want to
be identified, said to me charitably that
Golbberg's credulity about Shab "could have
been a matter of misjudgment but my even
stronger criticism is that if you talked, as we
did and as I gather Goldberg did, to anybody in
the PUK [the Kurdish group controlling this area
of northern Iraq] about this particular Islamic
group all of them would tell you they are
backed by Iran, as common sense would tell,
you. Look where they are located. It's 200
meters across one river to Iran. That's what I
find upsetting. Misjudging a source can happen
to all of us, but Goldberg did talk to generals in
the PUK. I think it's outrageous that New Yorker
ran that story."
Finally, I hear that a New York Times reporter
also concluded after talking to the prisoners
that there was one who was obviously lying and
who would say anything anyone would like to
hear about Al Ansar and Saddam, Saddam and
Al Qaeda. I have not been able to talk to this
reporter, though it would not have been
surprising for the Times to have tried to check
up on Goldberg's "scoop".
An American with a lot of experience in
interviewing in prisons adds, "It's tricky
interviewing prisoners in the first place -- their
vulnerability, etc -- and responsible journalists
make some sort of minimal credibility
assessment before they report someone's
statements. but the prisoner said exactly what
Jeffrey Goldberg wanted to hear, so Goldberg
didn't feel that he needed to mention that the
prisoner was nuts."
On February 10, amid widespread cynicism
about the Administration's rationales for war,
Remnick published another Goldberg special,
"The Unknown: The C.I.A. and the Pentagon
take another look at Al Qaeda and Iraq." This
6,000-word screed had no pretensions to being
anything other than a servile rendition of
Donald Rumsfeld's theory of intelligence: "Build
a hypothesis, and then see if the data
supported the hypothesis, rather than the
reverse." In other words, decide what you want
to hear, then torture the data until the data
confess.
This last piece of Goldberg's was a truly
disgraceful piece of brown-nosing (of Rumsfeld,
Tenet et al.), devoid of even the pretensions of
independent journalism. "Reporter at Large"?
Remnick should retire the rubric, at least for
Goldberg, and advertise his work as "White
House Handout." I should note that Goldberg
once served in Israel's armed forces, which may
or may not be a guide to his political agenda.
At all events, mention of the IDF allows me to
shift from the polluted stream of Goldberg's
disingenuous fantasies to purer streams.
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