[Media-watch] Tricked by WMD lies (David Rose's explanation) - Observer - 30/05/2004

[Julie-ann Davies]

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1227862,00.html

Iraqi defectors tricked us with WMD lies, but we must not be fooled again

Media coverage of Iraq is now the subject of fierce debate and last week the
New York Times issued an extraordinary apology for some of its journalism.
The Observer's David Rose, whose own stories have provoked controversy,
argues that hidden agendas on all sides can still distort reporting

Sunday May 30, 2004
The Observer

The event which cost Ahmad Chalabi, the leader of the Iraqi National
Congress, the protection of his former allies in the Pentagon can be timed
exactly - 19 February this year, when the Daily Telegraph suggested that if
his group had supplied inaccurate claims about Saddam's weapons of mass
destruction to the American government, Chalabi was proud of it.
'As far as we're concerned we've been entirely successful. Saddam is gone
and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important,' he
was quoted as saying. 'We are heroes in error.' His words, an INC spokesman
said yesterday, were not meant to be taken seriously. But the damage was
done. 'Many of us admire him,' a senior administration official said. 'But
that interview put his admirers on the defensive.'

Three months after the story was published came the US-sponsored search of
Chalabi's Baghdad home and the INC's office, amid claims by sources in the
CIA that he and his intelligence chief, Arras Karim, leaked US secrets to
Tehran.

Full disclosure: in the 18 months before the invasion of March 2003, I dealt
regularly with Chalabi and the INC and published stories based on interviews
with men they said were defectors from Saddam's regime, both in The Observer
and in Vanity Fair. Some of what they said, especially about human rights
abuses, has proved accurate. But other claims, such as details of Saddam's
supposed weapons of mass destruction which I heard in the Jordanian capital
Amman from a man called Mohamed Harith, were false - well-researched lies
told by someone desperate for refuge in the West. At worst, they were the
product of a calculated set-up, devised to foster the propaganda case for
war.

The INC continues to deny this charge: its resources, its spokesman said,
could only establish that defectors were who they said they were, not that
their stories were true - that was the job of the journalists and
intelligence agencies. This wasn't my impression at the time. Moreover, the
fact that I went to several experts who assessed the defectors' stories as
credible does not make me feel much better. It is possible that these
experts' views, unbeknown to them, were ultimately derived from the same,
tainted sources: in effect, they were an echo chamber.

But if - and for the moment I believe it remains an if - Chalabi and the INC
were peddling deliberate disinformation at Iran's behest, they will not have
been the only organisation playing such games. Those of us bamboozled by INC
defectors are 'fessing up' - most notably in the soul-searching editorial in
last week's New York Times . Yet even as we do, other myths, being sold by
sources with questionable agendas, are assuming the status of unchallenged
fact.

First, the claim that it was the INC that supplied all or nearly all the
intelligence on WMD. In Britain, the opposite is true: MI6 policy was to
dismiss any information from INC sources. Most of the claims in Tony Blair's
fateful dossier of September 2002 were reheated conclusions from the final
report of Unscom, the UN inspection team, in January 1999. The most
sensational new assertion, that Iraq could deploy WMD in 45 minutes, came
from Iraq's new Prime Minister-designate, Iyad Allawi.

In America, the INC's role was more significant. Its defectors persuaded the
Pentagon to accept false claims - disputed by some in the CIA - that
captured aluminium tubes were destined to make nuclear centrifuges and that
Saddam had mobile biological weapons labs. But even here, at least 80 per
cent of what Colin Powell used to make the case for war at the UN Security
Council in February last year had been generated by ordinary intelligence
procedures and had nothing to do with the INC. CIA director George Tenet
told President Bush the WMD case was a 'slam dunk'. If CIA sources now seem
keen on the idea that the whole inaccurate business was down to an
INC-Iranian conspiracy, it is not hard to see a motive.

One of the most contentious claims is the story about an 'intelligence cell'
in the Pentagon called the 'Office of Special Plans'. Its job, it was widely
reported, was to debrief INC defectors, 'cherrypick' this and other
intelligence about WMD, and 'stovepipe' it direct to Vice-President Dick
Cheney, bypassing the intelligence community. The OSP was thought to have
been run by ideologically motivated neo-conservatives calling themselves
'the cabal'.

This may not be true. The OSP had nothing to do with producing intelligence
and its real job - for which it can be severely criticised - was planning
Iraq's postwar future. All the stories about it appear to share a single
source, Karen Kwiatkowski, a now-retired lieutenant colonel who worked in
the Pentagon - but not in the OSP - on North Africa. So how would she know
what went on there? The answer she gave me was that she regularly had
'conversations in the hallway' with someone who did, an official called John
Trigilio. Trigilio denied any such conversations took place, saying neither
he nor his colleagues ever met an INC defector. Why would Kwiatkowski make
it up? On the one hand, she has written for Pat Buchanan's extreme
right-wing journal, the American Conservative, and described herself to me
as a 'conservative anarchist'. Meanwhile, her story first surfaced - with
her name concealed - in a dubious outlet: the Executive Intelligence Review,
a virulently anti-semitic magazine run by conspiracy theorist, Lyndon
LaRouche.

Kwiatkowski told me she admired LaRouche's work and admitted giving his
editor, Jeff Steinberg, an interview. However, she also needed an echo
chamber. She got one in Patrick Lang, former Middle East chief of the
Defence Intelligence Agency, who supplied quotes endorsing her story. He
sent an email to several journalists, enclosing the transcript of the
Kwiatkowski-Steinberg interview. 'Jeff Steinberg is a first-rate scholar,'
Lang wrote. 'I am not concerned where he works.'

Lang popped up again, last week with the claim that he had learnt from his
associates that Chalabi and his defectors were an Iranian intelligence scam,
'one of the most sophisticated and successful intelligence operations in
history'.

I assume Lang, who is widely admired in Washington, would not knowingly
disseminate inaccurate information. But it is possible his political beliefs
may make him credulous. The Pentagon, he said, had been seized by
extremists, 'Zionist revisionists', whose goal was to 'de-Arabise' the
Middle East. Ariel Sharon's Likud party had in effect directed America's
invasion of Iraq, and the way to visualise Likud's power was as 'a steel
barbell, with one ball in Israel and another in the Pentagon, among the
neo-conservatives'.

Now, with the war fought and Iraq on the brink of catastrophe, does any of
this matter? It does: for the propaganda battles continue to resonate
politically. Disinformation helped to drag Britain and America into a war.
It is vital it does not become a significant factor in the attempts to
prevent an Iraqi disaster now.

The information fog is thicker than in any previous war, as I know now from
bitter personal experience. To any journalist being offered apparently
sensational disclosures, especially from an anonymous intelligence source, I
offer two words of advice: caveat emptor.