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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (54118)	7/13/2004 12:22:51 PM
From: Rascal	Respond to of 793625

LB, Frank, love your thoughts on this. Well worth the click thru. excerpt: Some news organizations, it should be noted, did look askance at the Information Collection Program’s defectors. And a few reporters deserve special recognition for their work in exposing problems with the program, including Drogin, Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball at Newsweek, and Jonathan Landay of Knight-Ridder. It was Hosenball, along with his reporting partner Isikoff, who first documented the existence of the ICP memo to Congress in December 2003. Landay’s articles first brought to light the program’s list of media stories and exposed many of the defectors’ tales as suspect. Though the INC now tries to minimize the influence the Information Collection Program had on the press, Landay says he believes it was critical in shaping coverage of the prelude to the Iraq war. Just how much remains in contention. The INC claims it supplied just three defectors to the media through the ICP. But by my count it’s at least six: the three who talked about Salman Pak; al-Haideri; Mohammed Harith; and a sixth defector who talked with The Kansas City Star about seeing an American pilot, Scott Speicher, who was reported missing in action in the first Gulf War, in a jail in Baghdad. As noted, some think the tally might go quite a bit higher. The question that lingers is, Why did the press so ravenously gobble up the tales supplied by the Information Collection Program? Was it simple hunger for scoops? Both supporters and critics of the INC note that after the UN inspection teams left Iraq in 1998, U.S. intelligence about what was happening inside the country was next to nil. That vacuum, many reporters noted, left the perfect opportunity for the information program to flourish. While veteran reporters knew the CIA and State Department were skeptical of INC-produced information, they knew they had nothing better. Reporters were also influenced by knowledge that the CIA has long had an institutional bias against defectors, dating back to the cold war. James Jesus Angleton, a creator of the CIA’s counterintelligence operation, had been famously derisive about defectors, and that institutional bias remained with the agency, much to its detriment during stretches of the cold war. When I was discussing the Information Collection Program with The Oregonian’s Stephen Engelberg, who covered the CIA for The New York Times in the 1980s, I brought up Angleton and his famous quote that defectors and counterespionage in general were a “forest of mirrors” where anyone could get lost. Engelberg agreed, but noted that Angleton actually called espionage a “wilderness” of mirrors. That phrase was coined not by Angleton but T.S. Eliot (whom Angleton worshiped) in his poem “Gerontion.” It contains a passage perhaps all reporters should consider: History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions, Guides us by vanities. Think now She gives when our attention is distracted And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions That the giving famishes the craving. cjr.org Rascal @Gypsy.com