Now They Tell Us, part 2/2
5.
The press's submissiveness was most apparent in its coverage of the inspections process. Responsibility for that process lay with two organizations: the International Atomic Energy Agency, which monitored Iraq's nuclear activities, and the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, which oversaw its biological and chemical programs. UNMOVIC, which was based in New York and headed by Hans Blix, got considerable coverage; the IAEA, which was based in Vienna and headed by Mohamed ElBaradei, got little.
"We were constantly frustrated," Melissa Fleming, an IAEA spokesperson, told me. "The whole focus was on UNMOVIC, which was in New York." According to IAEA staff members, the press gave far too much weight to what US experts or administration officials said. Jacques Baute, the head of the IAEA's Iraq inspection team, complained that the agency had a hard time getting its story out. And that story, he explained, was that by 1998 "it was pretty clear we had neutralized Iraq's nuclear program. There was unanimity on that."
The IAEA's success in dismantling Iraq's nuclear program was spelled out in the periodic reports it sent to the UN Security Council—reports that remained posted on its Web site. And, it was broadly agreed, any effort to restart that program after 1998 would have very likely been detected by the outside world. As the Carnegie Endowment noted in a recent report ("WMD in Iraq: Evidence and Implications"),
Iraq's nuclear program had been dismantled by inspectors after the 1991 war, and these facilities— unlike chemical or biological ones —tend to be large, expensive, dependent on extensive imports, and very difficult to hide "in plain sight" under the cover of commercial (that is, dual-use) facilities.
These facts, it added, were "largely knowable" in the fall of 2002, when the debate over inspections was taking place.
Bush officials, however, were loudly proclaiming otherwise. "A return of inspectors would provide no assurance whatsoever of [Saddam's] compliance with UN resolutions," Vice President Cheney declared in his August 26 speech. "On the contrary, there is a great danger it would provide false comfort that Saddam was somehow 'back in his box.'"
Many journalists echoed this line. Seeking out former weapons inspectors for comment, they generally "gravitated to the most negative ones," Jacques Baute said. An example was David Kay. According to the IAEA, his background in nuclear and weapons matters was very limited—he has a Ph.D. in international affairs—and he spent no more than five weeks as an inspector in Iraq in 1991. This was far less time—and far longer ago—than was the case for many other inspectors.
Recently, Kay, after stepping down as the top US weapons investigator in Iraq, said that he thought Iraq had largely abandoned the production of illicit weapons during the 1990s and that one key reason was the tough UN inspections. Before the war, however, Kay often declared his contempt for inspections to reporters—including Judith Miller. On September 18, 2002, for instance, in an article headlined "Verification Is Difficult at Best, Say the Experts, and Maybe Impossible," Miller quoted a variety of officials and former inspectors about the nearly insurmountable obstacles inspectors would face if they returned to Iraq. David Kay, identified as "a former inspector who led the initial nuclear inspections in Iraq in the early 1990's," was quoted as saying of the inspectors that "their task is damn near a mission impossible." Miller also cited Khidhir Hamza, the defector she had written about in 1998. Identified as having "led part of Iraq's nuclear bomb program until he defected in 1994," he was quoted as estimating that "Iraq was now at the 'pilot plant' stage of nuclear production and within two to three years of mass producing centrifuges to enrich uranium for a bomb." Iraq, he added, "now excelled" in hiding nuclear and other unconventional weapons programs.
In fact, Hamza never produced any convincing sources for these statements. Contrary to Miller's description, he had resigned from Iraq's nuclear program in 1990 and had no firsthand knowledge of it after the Gulf War. After coming to the United States, he had gone to work for David Albright's Institute for Science and International Security, but by 1999 his claims about Iraq's weapons programs had become so inflated that Albright felt he could no longer work with him, and Hamza left the institute. The following year he came out with a book, Saddam's Bombmaker: The Terrifying Inside Story of the Iraqi Nuclear and Biological Weapons Agenda (written with Jeff Stein), that, Albright says, "made many ridiculous claims." In light of this, he adds, he was surprised to see that Judith Miller continued to rely on Hamza. "Judy should have known about this," Albright says. "This is her area."
"Hamza had no credibility at all," one IAEA staff member told me. "Journalists who called us and asked for an assessment of these people— we'd certainly tell them." Miller said she believed Hamza was a credible source because he was very useful to the administration. After the war, she noted, the administration sent him to Iraq to work on atomic energy matters. Yet the administration's reliance on defectors like Hamza was itself highly controversial and deserving of scrutiny. Few journalists provided it, though. In the months leading up to the war, Hamza was a popular source for journalists and a frequent guest on TV news shows. (In fairness, it should be noted that Judith Miller, along with Julia Preston, wrote an article for the Times in late January that, based on a two-hour interview with Hans Blix, described his differences with the Bush administration over its "assertions about Iraqi cheating" and "the notion that time was running out for disarming Iraq through peaceful means.")
In late November 2002, UN inspectors finally returned to Iraq. Shortly after, Iraq submitted to the UN a 12,000-page declaration stating it had no weapons of mass destruction. Iraq's failure to account for large stocks of banned weapons uncovered prior to 1998 fed suspicions that it still had such weapons. Nonetheless, IAEA inspectors felt confident that they could get a reliable reading of the status of Iraq's alleged nuclear program. They had more than a hundred sites they wanted to visit, based on interviews with defectors, data collected from previous inspections, satellite photos, and information provided by the CIA and other US intelligence agencies. Over the summer, IAEA specialists had detected in satellite photos new construction at sites where nuclear activity had taken place in the past. Visiting them, however, inspectors found no suspicious activity. The inspectors also took samples from rivers, canals, and lakes, testing for the presence of certain radioisotopes. None was found.
Finally, the inspectors investigated Iraq's attempted purchase of aluminum tubes. They examined rocket production and storage sites, studied tube samples, and interviewed key Iraqi personnel. From this they determined that the tubes were consistent with use in conventional rockets, as Iraq had maintained.
On January 9, 2003, Mohamed ElBaradei issued a preliminary report on the inspectors' work. "To date," it noted,
no new information of significance has emerged regarding Iraq's past nuclear programme (pre-1991) or with regard to Iraq activities during the period between 1991 and 1998. To date, no evidence of ongoing prohibited nuclear or nuclear-related activities has been detected, although not all of the laboratory results of sample analysis are yet available.
On the aluminum tubes, ElBaradei reported that they
appear to be consistent with reverse engineering of rockets. While it would be possible to modify such tubes for the manufacture of centrifuges, they are not directly suitable for it.
In short, the IAEA, after weeks of intensive inspections, had found no sign whatever of any effort by Iraq to resume its nuclear program. Given the importance the administration had attached to this matter, this would have seemed news of the utmost significance. Yet it was largely ignored. The Times, which had so prominently displayed its initial story about the aluminum tubes, buried its main article about ElBaradei's statement on page A10. (The paper did briefly mention ElBaradei's conclusion about the tubes in a front-page story that focused mainly on Iraq's lack of cooperation with the inspectors.) One of the few papers to give his statement significant treatment was The Washington Post. Following up on his earlier article on the tubes, Joby Warrick incorporated the IAEA findings into a detailed analysis of the claims and counterclaims surrounding the tubes. The article cited weapons inspectors, scientists, and other experts, all of whom cast strong doubt on the administration's arguments.[3]
The IAEA, Melissa Fleming observed, "was inundated with calls, but they were less of an investigative nature than about what the inspectors were finding on a daily basis. In general reporters showed little interest in more complex subjects like the aluminum tubes." Mark Gwozdecky, the IAEA's top spokesperson, added: "Nobody wanted to challenge the President. Nobody wanted to believe inspections had anything of value to bring to the table. The press bought into that."
6.
The reception accorded Mohamed ElBaradei's statement contrasted sharply with that given Colin Powell's speech at the United Nations on February 5, 2003. The secretary of state gave a high-tech presentation of intercepted tapes, satellite photos, videos, and diagrams to demonstrate what he called "a policy of evasion and deception" by Iraq dating back to 1991. Iraq's arsenal, Powell asserted, included mobile laboratories to produce bioweapons, unmanned aerial vehicles to deliver them, and chemical munitions plants. On the nuclear issue, Powell said that "Saddam Hussein is determined to get his hands on a nuclear bomb. He is so determined that he has made repeated covert attempts to acquire high-specification aluminum tubes from 11 countries, even after inspections resumed." Powell also asserted the existence of a "sinister nexus" between Iraq and al-Qaeda, citing as evidence the activities of Ansar al-Islam, a militant Islamic group based in northeastern Iraq. The group, he said, operated a poison-making camp in the region and had strong links to Iraqi intelligence.
The speech, while viewed skeptically by most foreign governments, received high approval ratings in American polls—and rapturous reviews from the American press. On CNN, after General Amer al-Saadi, Saddam Hussein's scientific adviser, appeared to offer a point-by-point rebuttal of Powell's charges, anchor Paula Zahn brought on former State Department spokesman James Rubin to comment. Introducing Rubin, Zahn said, "You've got to understand that most Americans watching this were either probably laughing out loud or got sick to their stomach. Which was it for you?"
"Well, really, both," Rubin replied. The American people "will believe everything they saw," he said. "They have no reason to doubt any of [Powell's] sources, any of the references to human sources, any of the pictures, or any of the intercepts."
The next day's New York Times carried three front-page articles on Powell's speech, all of them glowing. His presentation took "the form of a nearly encyclopedic catalog that reached further than many had expected," wrote Steven Weisman. According to Patrick Tyler, an "intelligence breakthrough" had made it possible for Powell "to set forth the first evidence of what he said was a well developed cell of Al Qaeda operating out of Baghdad." The speech, he wrote, was "a more detailed and well-documented bill of particulars than many had expected."
The Washington Post was no less positive. "Data on Efforts to Hide Arms Called 'Strong Suit of Speech'" went one headline. "Agency Coordination Helps Yield Details on Al Qaeda 'Associate'" went another. In an editorial titled "Irrefutable," the paper asserted that, after Powell's performance, "it is hard to imagine how anyone could doubt that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction." The Op-Ed page ran four pieces about the speech—all of them full of praise. "An Old Trooper's Smoking Gun," stated the headline atop Jim Hoagland's column. Even the normally skeptical Mary McGrory pitched in with a favorable assessment, headlined, "I'm Persuaded."
Tucked inside each paper, however, were articles that questioned the quality of Powell's evidence. In the Times, for instance, C.J. Chivers reported (on page A22) that Kurdish officials in northern Iraq were puzzled by Powell's claims of a poison-making facility in the area. A few days later, after visiting the purported camp, he found it to be a "wholly unimpressive place" that lacked even plumbing. In the Post, Joby Warrick raised questions about Powell's claims regarding the aluminum tubes. (This time, though, those questions were relegated to page A29). Newsweek accompanied its article on the speech with five boxes evaluating Powell's key claims; each raised significant doubts. On his charge that Iraq had mobile biogerm labs, for instance, the magazine observed that experts believed such labs "would be all but unworkable" and that US intelligence, "after years of looking for them, has never found even one."
In the weeks following the speech, one journalist—Walter Pincus of The Washington Post—developed strong reservations about it. A longtime investigative reporter, Pincus went back and read the UN inspectors' reports of 1998 and 1999, and he was struck to learn from them how much weaponry had been destroyed in Iraq before 1998. He also tracked down General Anthony Zinni, the former head of the US Central Command, who described the hundreds of weapons sites the United States had destroyed in its 1998 bombing. All of this, Pincus recalled, "made me go back and read Powell's speech closely. And you could see that it was all inferential. If you analyzed all the intercepted conversations he discussed, you could see that they really didn't prove anything."
By mid-March, Pincus felt he had enough material for an article questioning the administration's claims on Iraq. His editors weren't interested. It was only after the intervention of his colleague Bob Woodward, who was researching a book on the war and who had developed similar doubts, that the editors agreed to run the piece—on page A17. Despite the administration's claims about Iraq's WMD, it began, "US intelligence agencies have been unable to give Congress or the Pentagon specific information about the amounts of banned weapons or where they are hidden...." Noting the pressure intelligence analysts were feeling from the White House and Pentagon, Pincus wrote that senior officials, in making the case for war, "repeatedly have failed to mention the considerable amount of documented weapons destruction that took place in Iraq between 1991 and 1998."
Two days later, Pincus, together with Dana Milbank, the Post's White House correspondent, was back with an even more critical story. "As the Bush administration prepares to attack Iraq this week," it began, "it is doing so on the basis of a number of allegations against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein that have been challenged—and in some cases disproved —by the United Nations, European governments and even US intelligence reports." That story appeared on page A13.[4]
The placement of these stories was no accident, Pincus says. "The front pages of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times are very important in shaping what other people think," he told me. "They're like writing a memo to the White House." But the Post's editors, he said, "went through a whole phase in which they didn't put things on the front page that would make a difference."
7.
The Post was not alone. The nearer the war drew, and the more determined the administration seemed to wage it, the less editors were willing to ask tough questions. The occasional critical stories that did appear were, like Pincus's, tucked well out of sight.
The performance of the Times was especially deficient. While occasionally running articles that questioned administration claims, it more often deferred to them. (The Times's editorial page was consistently much more skeptical.) Compared to other major papers, the Times placed more credence in defectors, expressed less confidence in inspectors, and paid less attention to dissenters. The September 8 story on the aluminum tubes was especially significant. Not only did it put the Times's imprimatur on one of the administration's chief claims, but it also established a position at the paper that apparently discouraged further investigation into this and related topics.
The reporters working on the story strongly disagree. That the tubes were intended for centrifuges "was the dominant view of the US intelligence community," Michael Gordon told me. "It looks like it's the wrong view. But the story captured what was and still is the majority view of the intelligence community—whether right or wrong." Not only the director of central intelligence but also the secretary of state decided to support it, Gordon said, adding,
Most of the intelligence agencies in the US government thought that Iraq had something. Both Clinton and Bush officials thought this. So did Richard Butler, who had been head of UNSCOM and who wrote a book about Iraq called "The Greatest Threat." So it was a widely shared assumption in and out of government. I don't recall a whole lot of people challenging that.
Yet there were many people challenging the administration's assertions. It's revealing that Gordon encountered so few of them. On the aluminum tubes, David Albright, as noted above, made a special effort to alert Judith Miller to the dissent surrounding them, to no avail.
Asked about this, Miller said that as an investigative reporter in the intelligence area, "my job isn't to assess the government's information and be an independent intelligence analyst myself. My job is to tell readers of The New York Times what the government thought about Iraq's arsenal." Many journalists would disagree with this; instead, they would consider offering an independent evaluation of official claims one of their chief responsibilities.
I asked Miller about her December 20, 2001, article about Saeed al-Haideri, the Chalabi-linked defector who claimed that Saddam Hussein had a network of hidden sites for producing and storing banned weapons— sites said to include the ground under Saddam Hussein Hospital. In a subsequent piece about the Bush administration's use of defectors, Miller had stated that al-Haideri's interviews with US intelligence had "resulted in dozens of highly credible reports on Iraqi weapons-related activity and purchases." Yet neither UN inspectors nor the Iraq Survey Group was able to confirm any of those reports. Al-Haideri, Miller acknowledges, "might have been totally wrong, but I believe he was acting in good faith, and it was the best we could do at the time."
To this day, neither Miller nor the Times as a whole has reported on the failure to confirm al-Haideri's claims. Miller says that while the paper hasn't reported on al-Haideri's specific allegations, it did do "fifteen stories on weapons not found in Iraq." Yet, in view of the prominence the Times had given al-Haideri's claims, its failure to follow up on them suggests a lack of interest in correcting reports that were later contradicted by the evidence. (By contrast, the BBC show Panorama, which in September 2002 had reported some of al-Haideri's claims, noted pointedly in a follow-up program aired in November 2003 that the Iraq Survey Group had searched for but "found none of the laboratory facilities described by Mr. Haideri, including a bunker under a hospital.")
Looking back at her coverage of Iraq's weapons, Miller insists that the problem lies with the intelligence, not the reporting. "The fact that the United States so far hasn't found WMD in Iraq is deeply disturbing. It raises real questions about how good our intelligence was. To beat up on the messenger is to miss the point."
If nothing else, the Iraq saga should cause journalists to examine the breadth of their sources. "One question worth asking," John Walcott of Knight Ridder says, "is whether we in journalism have become too reliant on high-level officials instead of cultivating less glamorous people in the bowels of the bureaucracy. "In the case of Iraq, he added, the political appointees "really closed ranks. So if you relied exclusively on traditional news sources—assistant secretaries and above—you would not have heard things we heard." What Walcott calls "the blue collar" employees of the agencies—the working analysts or former analysts—were drawn on extensively by Knight Ridder, but by few others.
Since the end of the war, journalists have found no shortage of sources willing to criticize the administration. (Even Colin Powell, in a recent press conference, admitted that, contrary to his assertions at the United Nations, he had no "smoking gun" proof of a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.) The Washington Post has been especially aggressive in exposing the administration's exaggerations of intelligence, its inadequate planning for postwar Iraq, and its failure to find weapons of mass destruction. Barton Gellman, who before the war worked so hard to ferret out Iraq's ties to terrorists, has, since its conclusion, written many incisive articles about the administration's intelligence failures.[5]
The contrast between the press's feistiness since the end of the war and its meekness before it highlights one of the most entrenched and disturbing features of American journalism: its pack mentality. Editors and reporters don't like to diverge too sharply from what everyone else is writing. When a president is popular and a consensus prevails, journalists shrink from challenging him. Even now, papers like the Times and the Post seem loath to give prominent play to stories that make the administration look too bad. Thus, stories about the increasing numbers of dead and wounded in Iraq —both American and Iraqi—are usually consigned to page 10 or 12, where they won't cause readers too much discomfort.
—January 29, 2004
Notes
[1] See Jack Shafer, "The Times Scoops That Melted," Slate, July 25, 2003; Russ Baker, "'Scoops' and Truth at the Times," The Nation, June 23, 2003; William E. Jackson Jr., "Miller's Latest Tale Questioned," Editor & Publisher Online, September 23, 2003, at www.editorandpublisher.com; Charles Layton, "Miller Brouhaha," AJR, August/ September 2003; and John R. MacArthur, "The Lies We Bought," CJR, May/June 2003.
[2] See "Aluminum Tubing Is an Indicator of an Iraqi Gas Centrifuge Program: But Is the Tubing Specifically for Centrifuges?" ISIS, updated October 9, 2002, at www.isis-online.org.
[3] See also Bob Drogin and Maggie Farley, "After 2 Months, No Proof of Iraq Arms Programs," Los Angeles Times, January 26, 2003, for a thorough account of how UN inspectors were "unable to corroborate Bush administration claims" about Iraq's weapons.
[4] See Harry Jaffe, "Why Doesn't the Post Love Walter Pincus?" The Washingtonian, September 2003, and Ari Berman, "The Postwar Post," TheNation.com, September 17, 2003.
[5] See, especially, "Depiction of Threat Outgrew Supporting Evidence," August 10, 2003, p. A1. Co-written with Walter Pincus, the article describes in impressive detail how the administration twisted the intelligence on the aluminum tubes. |
