[Media-watch] Amy Goodman on the NY Times and Iraq

[Mark and Andrea]

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=21&ItemID=5608

Fatal Error: The Lies of Our Times

by Amy Goodman and David Goodman
Democracy Now
May 27, 2004




              MAINSTREAM MEDIA


  In our new book, The Exception To the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians,
War Profiteers and the Media That Love Them, we titled one chapter "The Lies
of Our Times" to examine how The New York Times coverage on Iraq and its
alleged stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction helped lead the country to
war. Yesterday, The New York Times, for the first time, raised questions
about its own coverage in an 1,100-word editor's note. Here is an excerpt
from our section of the book on the New York Times and Iraq.



  "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in
August." -- Andrew H. Card, White House Chief of Staff speaking about the
Iraq war P.R. campaign, September 6, 2002



  In the midst of the buildup to war, a major scandal was unfolding at The
New York Times-the paper that sets the news agenda for other media. The
Times admitted that for several years a 27-year-old reporter named Jayson
Blair had been conning his editors and falsifying stories. He had pretended
to be places he hadn't been, fabricated quotes, and just plain lied in order
to tell a sensational tale. For this, Blair was fired. But The Times went
further: It ran a 7,000-word, five-page expose on the young reporter, laying
bare his personal and professional escapades.



  The Times said it had reached a low point in its 152-year history. I
agreed. But not because of the Jayson Blair affair. It was The Times
coverage of the Bush-Blair affair.



  When George W. Bush and Tony Blair made their fraudulent case to attack
Iraq, The Times, along with most corporate media outlets in the United
States, became cheerleaders for the war. And while Jayson Blair was being
crucified for his journalistic sins, veteran Times national security
correspondent and best-selling author Judith Miller was filling The Times'
front pages with unchallenged government propaganda. Unlike Blair's
deceptions, Miller's lies provided the pretext for war. Her lies cost lives.



  If only The New York Times had done the same kind of investigation of
Miller's reports as it had with Jayson Blair.



  The White House propaganda blitz was launched on September 7, 2002, at a
Camp David press conference. British Prime Minister Tony Blair stood side by
side with his co-conspirator, President George W. Bush. Together, they
declared that evidence from a report published by the UN International
Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) showed that Iraq was "six months away" from
building nuclear weapons.



  "I don't know what more evidence we need," crowed Bush.



  Actually, any evidence would help-there was no such IAEA report. But at
the time, few mainstream American journalists questioned the leaders'
outright lies. Instead, the following day, "evidence" popped up in the
Sunday New York Times under the twin byline of Michael Gordon and Judith
Miller. "More than a decade after Saddam Hussein agreed to give up weapons
of mass destruction," they stated with authority, "Iraq has stepped up its
quest for nuclear weapons and has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials
to make an atomic bomb, Bush administration officials said today."



  In a revealing example of how the story amplified administration spin, the
authors included the phrase soon to be repeated by President Bush and all
his top officials: "The first sign of a 'smoking gun,' [administration
officials] argue, may be a mushroom cloud."



  Harper's publisher John R. MacArthur, author of Second Front: Censorship
and Propaganda in the Gulf War, knew what to make of this front-page
bombshell. "In a disgraceful piece of stenography," he wrote, Gordon and
Miller "inflated an administration leak into something resembling imminent
Armageddon."



  The Bush administration knew just what to do with the story they had fed
to Gordon and Miller. The day The Times story ran, Vice President Dick
Cheney made the rounds on the Sunday talk shows to advance the
administration's bogus claims. On NBC's Meet the Press, Cheney declared that
Iraq had purchased aluminum tubes to make enriched uranium. It didn't matter
that the IAEA refuted the charge both before and after it was made. But
Cheney didn't want viewers just to take his word for it. "There's a story in
The New York Times this morning," he said smugly. "And I want to attribute
The Times."



  This was the classic disinformation two-step: the White House leaks a lie
to The Times, the newspaper publishes it as a startling expose, and then the
White House conveniently masquerades behind the credibility of The Times.



  "What mattered," wrote MacArthur, "was the unencumbered rollout of a
commercial for war."4



  Judith Miller was just getting warmed up. Reporting for America's most
influential newspaper, Miller continued to trumpet administration leaks and
other bogus sources as the basis for eye-popping stories that backed the
administration's false premises for war. "If reporters who live by their
sources were obliged to die by their sources," Jack Shafer wrote later in
Slate, "Miller would be stinking up her family tomb right now."



  After the war, Shafer pointed out, "None of the sensational allegations
about chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons given to Miller have panned
out, despite the furious crisscrossing of Iraq by U.S. weapons hunters."



  Did The New York Times publish corrections? Clarifications? Did heads
roll? Not a chance: Judith Miller's "scoops" continued to be proudly run on
the front pages.



  Here are just some of the corrections The Times should have run after the
year-long campaign of front-page false claims by one of its premier
reporters, Judith Miller.



  FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS



  Scoop: "U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts," by Judith
Miller and Michael R. Gordon, September 8, 2002. The authors quote Ahmed
al-Shemri (a pseudonym), who contends that he worked in Iraq's chemical
weapons program before defecting in 2000. " 'All of Iraq is one large
storage facility,' said Mr. Shemri, who claimed to have worked for many
years at the Muthanna State Enterprise, once Iraq's chemical weapons plant."
The authors quote Shemri as stating that Iraq is stockpiling "12,500 gallons
of anthrax, 2,500 gallons of gas gangrene, 1,250 gallons of aflatoxin, and
2,000 gallons of botulinum throughout the country."



  Oops: As UN weapons inspectors had earlier stated-and U.S. weapons
inspectors confirmed in September 2003-none of these claims were true. The
unnamed source is one of many Iraqi defectors who made sensational false
claims that were championed by Miller and The Times.



  Scoop: "White House Lists Iraq Steps to Build Banned Weapons," by Judith
Miller and Michael Gordon, September 13, 2002. The article quotes the White
House contention that Iraq was trying to purchase aluminum pipes to assist
its nuclear weapons program.



  Oops: Rather than run a major story on how the United States had falsely
cited the UN to back its claim that Iraq was expanding its nuclear weapons
program, Miller and Gordon repeated and embellished the lie.



  Contrast this with the lead paragraph of a story that ran in the British
daily The Guardian on September 9: "The International Atomic Energy Agency
has no evidence that Iraq is developing nuclear weapons at a former site
previously destroyed by UN inspectors, despite claims made over the weekend
by Tony Blair, western diplomatic sources told The Guardian yesterday." The
story goes on to say that the IAEA "issued a statement insisting it had 'no
new information' on Iraq's nuclear program since December 1998 when its
inspectors left Iraq."



  Miller's trumped-up story contributed to the climate of the time and The
Times. A month later, numerous congressional representatives cited the
nuclear threat as a reason for voting to authorize war.



  Scoop: "U.S. Faulted Over Its Efforts to Unite Iraqi Dissidents," by
Judith Miller, October 2, 2002. Quoting Ahmed Chalabi and Defense Department
adviser Richard Perle, this story stated: "The INC [Iraqi National Congress]
has been without question the single most important source of intelligence
about Saddam Hussein."



  Miller airs the INC's chief complaint: "Iraqi dissidents and
administration officials complain that [the State Department and CIA] have
also tried to cast doubt on information provided by defectors Mr. Chalabi's
organization has brought out of Iraq."



  Oops: Miller championed the cause of Chalabi, the Iraqi exile leader who
had been lobbying Washington for over a decade to support the overthrow of
Saddam Hussein's regime. As The Washington Post revealed, Miller wrote to
Times veteran foreign correspondent John Burns, who was working in Baghdad
at the time, that Chalabi "has provided most of the front page exclusives on
WMD [weapons of mass destruction] to our paper."



  Times readers might be interested to learn the details of how Ahmed
Chalabi was bought and paid for by the CIA. Chalabi heads the INC, an
organization of Iraqi exiles created by the CIA in 1992 with the help of the
Rendon Group, a powerful public relations firm that has worked extensively
for the two Bush administrations. Between 1992 and 1996, the CIA covertly
funneled $12 million to Chalabi's INC. In 1998, the Clinton administration
gave Chalabi control of another $98 million of U.S. taxpayer money.
Chalabi's credibility has always been questionable: He was convicted in
absentia in Jordan of stealing some $500 million from a bank he established,
leaving shareholders high and dry. He has been accused by Iraqi exiles of
pocketing at least $4 million of CIA funds.



  In the lead-up to war, the CIA dismissed Chalabi as unreliable. But he was
the darling of Pentagon hawks, putting an Iraqi face on their warmongering.
So the Pentagon established a new entity, the Office of Special Plans, to
champion the views of discredited INC defectors who helped make its case for
war.



  As Howard Kurtz later asked in The Washington Post: "Could Chalabi have
been using The Times to build a drumbeat that Iraq was hiding weapons of
mass destruction?"



  Scoop: "C.I.A. Hunts Iraq Tie to Soviet Smallpox," by Judith Miller,
December 3, 2002. The story claims that "Iraq obtained a particularly
virulent strain of smallpox from a Russian scientist." The story adds later:
"The information came to the American government from an informant whose
identity has not been disclosed."



  Smallpox was cited by President Bush as one of the "weapons of mass
destruction" possessed by Iraq that justified a dangerous national
inoculation program-and an invasion.



  Oops: After a three-month search of Iraq, " 'Team Pox' turned up only
signs to the contrary: disabled equipment that had been rendered harmless by
UN inspectors, Iraqi scientists deemed credible who gave no indication they
had worked with smallpox, and a laboratory thought to be back in use that
was covered in cobwebs," reported the Associated Press in September 2003.



  Scoop: "Illicit Arms Kept Till Eve of War, an Iraqi Scientist Is Said to
Assert," by Judith Miller, April 21, 2003. In this front-page article,
Miller quotes an American military officer who passes on the assertions of
"a man who said he was an Iraqi scientist" in U.S. custody. The "scientist"
claims that Iraq destroyed its WMD stockpile days before the war began, that
the regime had transferred banned weapons to Syria, and that Saddam Hussein
was working closely with Al Qaeda.



  Who is the messenger for this bombshell? Miller tells us only that she
"was permitted to see him from a distance at the sites where he said that
material from the arms program was buried. Clad in nondescript clothes and a
baseball cap, he pointed to several spots in the sand where he said chemical
precursors and other weapons material were buried."



  And then there were the terms of this disclosure: "This reporter was not
permitted to interview the scientist or visit his home. Nor was she
permitted to write about the discovery of the scientist for three days, and
the copy was then submitted for a check by military officials. Those
officials asked that details of what chemicals were uncovered be deleted."
No proof. No names. No chemicals. Only a baseball cap-and the credibility of
Miller and The Times-to vouch for a "scientist" who conveniently backs up
key claims of the Bush administration. Miller, who was embedded with MET
Alpha, a military unit searching for WMDs, pumped up her sensational
assertions the next day on PBS's NewsHour with Jim Lehrer: Q: Has the unit
you've been traveling with found any proof of weapons of mass destruction in
Iraq?



  JUDITH MILLER: Well, I think they found something more than a smoking gun.
What they've found...is a silver bullet in the form of a person, an Iraqi
individual, a scientist, as we've called him, who really worked on the
programs, who knows them firsthand.



  Q: Does this confirm in a way the insistence coming from the U.S.
government that after the war, various Iraqi tongues would loosen, and there
might be people who would be willing to help?



  JUDITH MILLER: Yes, it clearly does.... That's what the Bush
administration has finally done. They have changed the political
environment, and they've enabled people like the scientists that MET Alpha
has found to come forth.



  Oops: The silver bullet got more tarnished as it was examined. Three
months later, Miller acknowledged that the scientist was merely "a senior
Iraqi military intelligence official." His explosive claims vaporized.



  A final note from the Department of Corrections: The Times deeply regrets
any wars or loss of life that these errors may have contributed to.



  UP IN SMOKE



  Tom Wolfe once wrote about a war-happy Times correspondent in Vietnam
(same idea, different war): The administration was "playing [the reporter]
of The New York Times like an ocarina, as if they were blowing smoke up his
pipe and the finger work was just right and the song was coming forth better
than they could have played it themselves." But who was playing whom? The
Washington Post reported that while Miller was embedded with MET Alpha, her
role in the unit's operations became so central that it became known as the
"Judith Miller team." In one instance, she disagreed with a decision to
relocate the unit to another area and threatened to file a critical report
in The Times about the action. When she took her protest to a two-star
general, the decision was reversed. One Army officer told the Post, "Judith
was always issuing threats of either going to The New York Times or to the
secretary of defense. There was nothing veiled about that threat."



  Later, she played a starring role in a ceremony in which MET Alpha's
leader was promoted. Other officers were surprised to watch as Miller pinned
a new rank on the uniform of Chief Warrant Officer Richard Gonzales. He
thanked her for her "contributions" to the unit. In April 2003, MET Alpha
traveled to the compound of Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmed Chalabi "at
Judy's direction," where they interrogated and took custody of an Iraqi man
who was on the Pentagon's wanted list-despite the fact that MET Alpha's only
role was to search for WMDs. As one officer told the Post, "It's impossible
to exaggerate the impact she had on the mission of this unit, and not for
the better."



  After a year of bogus scoops from Miller, the paper gave itself a bit of
cover. Not corrections-just cover. On September 28, 2003, Times reporter
Douglas Jehl surprisingly kicked the legs out from under Miller's sources.
In his story headlined AGENCY BELITTLES INFORMATION GIVEN BY IRAQ DEFECTORS,
Jehl revealed: An internal assessment by the Defense Intelligence Agency has
concluded that most of the information provided by Iraqi defectors who were
made available by the Iraqi National Congress was of little or no value,
according to federal officials briefed on the arrangement. In addition,
several Iraqi defectors introduced to American intelligence agents by the
exile organization and its leader, Ahmed Chalabi, invented or exaggerated
their credentials as people with direct knowledge of the Iraqi government
and its suspected unconventional weapons program, the officials said.



  The Iraqi National Congress had made some of these defectors available
to...The New York Times, which reported their allegations about prisoners
and the country's weapons program. Poof. Up in smoke went thousands of words
of what can only be called rank propaganda.



  This Times confession was too little, too late. After an unnecessary war,
during a brutal occupation, and several thousand lives later, The Times
obliquely acknowledged that it had been recycling disinformation. Miller's
reports played an invaluable role in the administration's propaganda war.
They gave public legitimacy to outright lies, providing what appeared to be
independent confirmation of wild speculation and false accusations. "What
Miller has done over time seriously violates several Times' policies under
their code of conduct for news and editorial departments," wrote William E.
Jackson in Editor & Publisher. "Jayson Blair was only a fluke deviation....
Miller strikes right at the core of the regular functioning news machine."



  More than that, Miller's false reporting was key to justifying a war. And
The Times' unabashed servitude to the administration's war agenda did not
end with Iraq.



  On September 16, 2003, The Times ran a story headlined SENIOR U.S.
OFFICIAL TO LEVEL WEAPONS CHARGES AGAINST SYRIA. The stunningly uncritical
article was virtually an excerpt of the testimony about to be given that day
by outspoken hawk John R. Bolton, undersecretary of state for arms control.
The article included this curious caveat: The testimony "was provided to The
New York Times by individuals who feel that the accusations against Syria
have received insufficient attention." The article certainly solved that
problem.



  The author? Judith Miller-preparing for the next battlefront.



   -- Jeremy Scahill Producer/Correspondent Democracy Now! Phone:
+1-212-431-9090 Fax:+1-212-431-8858 www.democracynow.org Sign up for the
Democracy Now! Daily News Digest: http://www.democracynow.org/maillist.pl

----

Mark and Andrea


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