It is pure intellectual dishonesty to conflate the argument over Chalabi into asserting that there were voices claiming Saddam had no WMDs, but were "suppressed". Who? Who were these voices? Where did they make themselves heard?
There is more than one way to skin a cat, and more than one way to "suppress" unwelcome or unwanted news, especially when the one wishes for the suppression is an American administration. But, please note, I didn't say "suppressed," I said, "was just not listened to," though sometimes these amount to the same thing. Some voices were certainly there, sometimes they were buried on, e.g., p. A18, other times they were buried by ridicule and/or incredulity on the part of journalists or admin spokesmen--as the article carefully itemizes.
In any case, it appears you didn't read the article, or at least not much of it. I know, it was a little long--Massey was trying to be fair, I think, and trying to be as complete as he could in the confines of the space he had. So here are a few excerpts to try to address your question of "who" (EDIT: in addition to the examples I see Carl gave). Though the excerpts don't really substitute for Massey's story.
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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 more than a few—were shut out. Reflecting this, the coverage was highly deferential to the White House. This was especially apparent on the issue of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction— the heart of the President's case 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....
From the start, however, the Times story raised doubts among many nuclear experts. One was David Albright. A physicist and former weapons inspector who directed the Institute for Science and International Security (the same group for which the defector Khidhir Hamza had worked), Albright favored a tough position on Iraq, believing Saddam to have WMD and advocating strict measures to contain him. In the summer of 2001, however, after the aluminum tubes were intercepted, he had been asked by an official to find out some information about them, and in doing so he had learned of the doubts many experts had about their suitability for use in centrifuges. Some specialists with ties to the US Department of Energy and the International Atomic Energy Agency had concluded that the tubes were more likely destined for use in conventional artillery rockets, as Iraq itself had claimed. Officials at the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research would later concur.... Six paragraphs into an article that summarized the White House's case against Iraq, Miller and Gordon noted that senior officials acknowledged "that there have been debates among intelligence experts about Iraq's intentions in trying to buy such tubes." But, they quickly noted, those officials insisted that "the dominant view" in the administration was that the tubes were intended for use in centrifuges to enrich uranium. While some experts in the State and Energy Departments "had questioned whether Iraq might not be seeking the tubes for other purposes," the article stated,
other, more senior, officials insisted last night that this was a minority view among intelligence experts and that the CIA had wide support, particularly among the government's top technical experts and nuclear scientists. "This is a footnote, not a split," a senior administration official said. Yet Albright, having talked with a large number of those experts and scientists, knew that many did not support the CIA assessment. "Understanding the purpose of these tubes was very difficult," he told me... That's what I asked Judy to do—to alert people that there's a debate, that there are competent people who disagreed with what the CIA was saying. I thought for sure she'd quote me or some people in the government who didn't agree. It just wasn't there.
The Times, he added, made a decision to ice out the critics and insult them on top of it. People were bitter about that article—it says that the best scientists are with [the administration]. Miller rejects this. The article, she says, clearly stated that there was a debate about the tubes. As written, however, the piece gives far more attention and credence to officials who dismissed the dissenters, and the debate, as inconsequential—a "footnote." ....
Meanwhile, the tubes were drawing the notice of Knight Ridder's Washington bureau, which serves Knight Ridder's thirty-one newspapers in the US, including The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Miami Herald, and The Detroit Free Press. Almost alone among national news organizations, Knight Ridder had decided to take a hard look at the administration's justifications for war. As Washington bureau chief John Walcott recalled, in the late summer of 2002 "we began hearing from sources in the military, the intelligence community, and the foreign service of doubts about the arguments the administration was making." Much of the dissent came from career officers disturbed over the allegations being made by political appointees. "These people," he said, "were better informed about the details of the intelligence than the people higher up in the food chain, and they were deeply troubled by what they regarded as the administration's deliberate misrepresentation of intelligence, ranging from overstating the case to outright fabrication." Walcott assigned two experienced reporters, Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel, to talk with those sources. Drawing on them, Landay in early September 2002 filed a report for Knight Ridder that quoted senior US officials with access to intelligence on Iraq as saying that "they have detected no alarming increase in the threat that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein poses to American security and Middle East stability." While it was well known that Iraq was "aggressively trying to rebuild" its weapons programs, Landay noted, "there is no new intelligence that indicates the Iraqis have made significant advances" in doing so.
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On October 8, 2002, Landay and Strobel, joined by bureau chief Walcott, filed a sharp account of the rising discontent among national security officers. "While President Bush marshals congressional and international support for invading Iraq," the article began, "a growing number of military officers, intelligence professionals and diplomats in his own government privately have deep misgivings about the administration's double-time march toward war." These officials, it continued, charge that administration hawks have exaggerated evidence of the threat that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein poses—including distorting his links to the al-Qaida terrorist network....
On December 12, for example, The Washington Post ran a front-page story by Barton Gellman contending that al-Qaeda had obtained a nerve agent from Iraq. Most of the evidence came from administration officials, and it was so shaky as to draw the attention of Michael Getler, the paper's ombudsman. In his weekly column, Getler wrote that the article had so many qualifiers and caveats that the effect on the complaining readers, and on me, is to ask what, after all, is the use of this story that practically begs you not to put much credence in it? Why was it so prominently displayed, and why not wait until there was more certainty about the intelligence?
And why, he might have added, didn't the Post and other papers devote more time to pursuing the claims about the administration's manipulation of intelligence? Part of the explanation, no doubt, rests with the Bush administration's skill at controlling the flow of news. "Their management of information is far greater than that of any administration I've seen," Knight Ridder's John Walcott observed. "They've made it extremely difficult to do this kind of [investigative] work." That management could take both positive forms—rewarding sympathetic reporters with leaks, background interviews, and seats on official flights—and negative ones— freezing out reporters who didn't play along. In a city where access is all, few wanted to risk losing it....
David Albright experienced this firsthand when, during the fall, he often appeared as a commentator on TV. "I felt a lot of pressure" from journalists "to stick to the subject, which was Iraq's bad behavior," Albright says. And that, in turn, reflected pressure from the administration: "I always felt the administration was setting the agenda for what stories should be covered, and the news media bought into that, rather than take a critical look at the administration's underlying reasons for war." Once, on a cable news show, Albright said that he felt the inspections should continue, that the impasse over Iraq was not simply France's fault; during the break, he recalls, the host "got really mad and chastised me."
"The administration created a set of truths, then put up a wall to keep people within it," Albright says. "On the other side of the wall were people saying they didn't agree. The media were not aggressive enough in challenging this."....
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.
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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."
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. |
