Now They Tell Us

[ http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16922 ]

Now They Tell Us
By Michael Massing

1.

In recent months, US news organizations have rushed to expose the Bush
administration's pre-war failings on Iraq. "Iraq's Arsenal Was Only on Paper,"
declared a recent headline in The Washington Post. "Pressure Rises for Probe
of Prewar-Intelligence," said The Wall Street Journal. "So, What Went Wrong?"
asked Time. In The New Yorker, Seymour Hersh described how the Pentagon set up
its own intelligence unit, the Office of Special Plans, to sift for data to
support the administration's claims about Iraq. And on "Truth, War and
Consequences," a Frontline documentary that aired last October, a procession
of intelligence analysts testified to the administration's use of what one of
them called "faith-based intelligence."

Watching and reading all this, one is tempted to ask, where were you all
before the war? Why didn't we learn more about these deceptions and
concealments in the months when the administration was pressing its case for
regime change—when, in short, it might have made a difference? Some maintain
that the many analysts who've spoken out since the end of the war were mute
before it. But that's not true. Beginning in the summer of 2002, the
"intelligence community" was rent by bitter disputes over how Bush officials
were using the data on Iraq. Many journalists knew about this, yet few chose
to write about it.

Before the war, for instance, there was a loud debate among intelligence
analysts over the information provided to the Pentagon by Iraqi opposition
leader Ahmed Chalabi and defectors linked to him. Yet little of this seeped
into the press. Not until September 29, 2003, for instance, did The New York
Times get around to informing readers about the controversy over Chalabi and
the defectors associated with him. In a front-page article headlined "Agency
Belittles Information Given by Iraqi Defectors," Douglas Jehl reported that a
study by the Defense Intelligence Agency had found that most of the
information provided by defectors connected to Ahmed Chalabi "was of little or
no value." Several defectors introduced to US intelligence by the Iraqi
National Congress, Jehl wrote, "invented or exaggerated their credentials as
people with direct knowledge of the Iraqi government and its suspected
unconventional weapons program."

Why, I wondered, had it taken the Times so long to report this? Around the
time that Jehl's article appeared, I ran into a senior editor at the Times and
asked him about it. Well, he said, some reporters at the paper had relied
heavily on Chalabi as a source and so were not going to write too critically
about him.

The editor did not name names, but he did not have to. The Times's Judith
Miller has been the subject of harsh criticism. Slate, The Nation, Editor &
Publisher, the American Journalism Review, and the Columbia Journalism Review
have all run articles accusing her of being too eager to accept official
claims before the war and too eager to report the discovery of banned weapons
after it.[1] Especially controversial has been Miller's alleged reliance on
Chalabi and the defectors who were in touch with him. Last May, Howard Kurtz
of The Washington Post wrote of an e-mail exchange between Miller and John
Burns, then the Times bureau chief in Baghdad, in which Burns rebuked Miller
for writing an article about Chalabi without informing him. Miller replied
that she had been covering Chalabi for about ten years and had "done most of
the stories about him for our paper." Chalabi, she added, "has provided most
of the front page exclusives on WMD to our paper."

When asked about this, Miller said that the significance of her ties to
Chalabi had been exaggerated. While she had met some defectors through him,
she said, only one had resulted in a front-page story on WMD prior to the war.
Her assertion that Chalabi had provided most of the Times's front-page
exclusives on WMD was, she said, part of "an angry e-mail exchange with a
colleague." In the heat of such exchanges, Miller said, "You say things that
aren't true. If you look at the record, you'll see they aren't true."

This seems a peculiar admission. Yet on the broader issue of her ties to
Chalabi, the record bears Miller out. Before the war, Miller wrote or co-wrote
several front-page articles about Iraq's WMD based on information from
defectors; only one of them came via Chalabi. An examination of those stories,
though, shows that they were open to serious question. The real problem was
relying uncritically on defectors of any stripe, whether supplied by Chalabi
or not.

This points to a larger problem. 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. As journalists rush to chronicle
the administration's failings on Iraq, they should pay some attention to their
own.

2.

On August 26, 2002, Vice President Dick Cheney gave a speech that was widely
interpreted as signaling the administration's intention to wage war on Iraq.
There "is no doubt," Cheney declared, that Saddam Hussein "has weapons of mass
destruction" and is preparing to use them against the United States. Saddam,
he said, not only had biological and chemical weapons but had "resumed his
efforts to acquire nuclear weapons." If allowed to continue on this course, he
added, Saddam could subject his adversaries to "nuclear blackmail."
Accordingly, the United States had no choice but to take preemptive action
against him.

The reference to nuclear weapons was especially telling. While Iraq was widely
believed to have biological and chemical weapons, there was much more
uncertainty regarding its nuclear program. In 1998, when UN inspectors left
the country, it was generally agreed that Iraq's nuclear program had been
dismantled. The question was, what had happened in the four years since? In
his speech, Cheney flatly stated that Iraq had resumed its quest for a bomb,
but neither he nor any other Bush official offered any supporting evidence.

At the time of Cheney's speech, Times reporters Judith Miller and Michael
Gordon were investigating the state of Iraq's arsenal. Both had reported on
Iraq for many years and brought certain perspectives to the assignment.
Gordon, the paper's chief military correspondent, had after the Gulf War
teamed up with retired general Bernard Trainor to write The Generals' War: The
Inside Story of the Conflict in the Gulf (1995). A detailed account of the
military's conduct of the war, it strongly criticized the US decision to leave
Saddam in power. From his many years of reporting on intelligence matters,
Gordon knew how shocked US analysts had been after the Gulf War to find how
far along Iraq had been in its effort to develop a nuclear weapon.

Miller, the coauthor of Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf (1990) and
Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War (2001), was intimately
acquainted with Saddam Hussein's genius for deception. In February 1998, she
(together with William Broad) had written a 4,900-word report about Iraq's
secret program to produce bioweapons and its success in concealing them from
the outside world. According to the story, many former weapons inspectors and
other experts with whom Miller and Broad talked believed that Baghdad "is
still hiding missiles and germ weapons, and the means to make both."

Later that year, Miller met one of the first defectors who gave her
information—Khidhir Hamza, a scientist who, until the late 1980s, had been a
senior official in Iraq's nuclear program. After fleeing Baghdad in 1994,
Hamza had made his way to Washington, where in 1997 he went to work for the
Institute for Science and International Security, a small think tank, which
arranged for Miller and fellow Times reporter James Risen to interview him.
The result was a front-page story relating Hamza's account of the "inner
workings" of Saddam's push for a bomb prior to the Gulf War, and recounting
Hamza's belief that Saddam retained the infrastructure to duplicate that effort.

While seeing Hamza, Miller told me, she also was in touch with Ahmed Chalabi,
and in 2001 he arranged for her to visit Thailand to interview another
defector, a civil engineer named Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri. The resulting
front-page story related al-Haideri's claim to have personally renovated
"secret facilities for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons." These
facilities were said to exist "in underground wells, private villas and under
Saddam Hussein Hospital in Baghdad." Charles Duelfer, a former inspector, was
quoted as saying that al-Haideri's account was consistent with other reports
showing that Iraq had "not given up its desire" for WMD.

In 2002, Miller went to Turkey to interview yet another defector, Ahmed
al-Shemri. A member of the Iraqi Officers Movement, another opposition group,
al-Shemri (a pseudonym) claimed to have worked in Iraq's chemical weapons
program, and he told Miller that Saddam had continued to produce VX and other
chemical agents even while international inspectors were in Iraq. Iraq, he
added, continued to store such agents at secret sites throughout the country.

By late summer of 2002, then, Miller had developed a circle of sources who
claimed to have firsthand knowledge of Saddam's continued push for prohibited
weapons. And as she and Gordon made the rounds of administration officials,
they picked up a dramatic bit of information about Iraq's nuclear program.
During the previous fourteen months, they were told, Iraq had tried to import
thousands of high-strength aluminum tubes. The tubes had been intercepted, and
specialists sent to examine them had concluded from their diameter, thickness,
and other technical properties that they had only one possible use—as casings
for rotors in centrifuges to enrich uranium, a key step in producing an atomic
bomb.

This was dramatic news. If true, it would represent a rare piece of concrete
evidence for Saddam's nuclear aspirations. And, on Sunday, September 8, 2002,
the Times (then under the editorship of Howell Raines) led with the story,
written by Miller and Gordon. "US Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb
Parts," the headline said. The lead was emphatic:

    More than a decade after Saddam Hussein agreed to give up weapons of mass
    destruction, 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.

Gordon and Miller went on to cite the officials' claims about the aluminum
tubes and their intended use in centrifuges to enrich uranium.

The article contained several caveats, noting, for instance, that Iraq "is not
on the verge of fielding a nuclear weapon." Overall, though, the language was
stark:

    Mr. Hussein's dogged insistence on pursuing his nuclear ambitions, along
    with what defectors described in interviews as Iraq's push to improve and
    expand Baghdad's chemical and biological arsenals, have brought Iraq and
    the United States to the brink of war.

Administration "hard-liners," Gordon and Miller added, worried that "the first
sign of a 'smoking gun'... may be a mushroom cloud." The piece concluded with
a section on Iraq's chemical and biological weapons, relying heavily on the
information supplied by Ahmed al-Shemri. "All of Iraq is one large storage
facility," he was quoted as saying.

Gordon and Miller argue that the information about the aluminum tubes was not
a leak. "The administration wasn't really ready to make its case publicly at
the time," Gordon told me. "Somebody mentioned to me this tubes thing. It took
a lot to check it out." Perhaps so, but administration officials were clearly
delighted with the story. On that morning's talk shows, Dick Cheney, Colin
Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, and Condoleezza Rice all referred to the information
in the Times story. "It's now public," Cheney said on Meet the Press, that
Saddam Hussein "has been seeking to acquire" the "kind of tubes" needed to
build a centrifuge to produce highly enriched uranium, "which is what you have
to have in order to build a bomb." On CNN's Late Edition, Rice said the tubes
"are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs."
She added: "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud"—a phrase
lifted directly from the Times.

In the days that followed, the story of the tubes received wide publicity.
And, on September 12, 2002, President Bush himself, in a speech to the UN
General Assembly, said that "Iraq has made several attempts to buy
high-strength aluminum tubes used to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon"—
evidence, he added, of its "continued appetite" for such a weapon. In the
following months, the tubes would become a key prop in the administration's
case for war, and the Times played a critical part in legitimizing it.

3.

>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.

Reading the September 8 article, Albright felt it was important for the Times
to take note of these dissenting views. In the past, he had worked frequently
with Judith Miller; in fact, it was Albright who had arranged for her to
interview Khidhir Hamza. Although he was unavailable when Miller tried to
contact him for the September 8 story, he had several long conversations with
her after it was published. He then described the doubts many centrifuge
experts had about the administration's claims. And, on September 13, 2002, a
follow-up story appeared. It was not, however, what Albright had expected. 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.

    But hearing there's a debate in the government was knowable by a
    journalist. 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."

Frustrated, Albright began preparing his own report about the tubes. Seeking
an outlet, he approached Joby Warrick of The Washington Post. In contrast to
Miller and Gordon, Warrick had little experience covering national security
matters; the environment was his beat. After the September 11 attacks,
however, he was assigned to do investigative reporting related to the war on
terrorism, and in the summer of 2002 he began looking into Iraq's weapons
programs. Calling around to officials and former inspectors, he quickly
discovered that "nobody knew very much." That, he told me, seemed particularly
true of defectors. Francis Brooke, the Washington representative of the Iraqi
National Congress, was constantly trying to give him information, but it never
seemed to check out. "I became very frustrated at not being able to come up
with anything solid showing that there were active weapons programs," Warrick
said.

Albright's report about the aluminum tubes, however, seemed to offer an inside
look at the debate within intelligence circles over Iraq's nuclear program.[2]
Drawing on it, Warrick wrote an article describing how the administration's
claims about the tubes were being challenged by "independent experts" who
questioned whether they "were intended for a secret nuclear weapons program"
or, as some believed, for use in conventional rockets. Warrick also noted
reports that the Bush administration "is trying to quiet dissent among its own
analysts over how to interpret the evidence." It was one of the first public
mentions of the administration's possible misuse of the data on Iraq.
Appearing on page A18, however, the story caused little stir.

4.

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.

In early October, Landay's curiosity was further aroused when the CIA released
a declassified version of its new National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq. For
the most part, the document blandly summarized the agency's longstanding
findings regarding Iraq's ties to terrorists and its efforts to develop WMD.
In a brief section on the aluminum tubes, however, it noted that, while the
intelligence community as a whole believed the tubes were intended for use in
centrifuges, some experts disagreed, believing they were intended for
conventional weapons. This was a rare public acknowledgment of dissent within
the intelligence agencies, and Landay, intrigued, began making more calls. He
eventually reached a veteran of the US uranium enrichment program. "He'd been
given data on the tubes, and he said that this wasn't conclusive evidence,"
Landay recalled. In early October, Landay wrote about how the CIA report had
"exposed a sharp dispute among US intelligence experts" over Iraq's arsenal.
One expert was quoted as saying he did not believe the tubes were intended for
use in nuclear weapons because "their diameters were too small and the
aluminum they were made from was too hard."

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.... They charge that the administration
    squelches dissenting views and that intelligence analysts are under
    intense pressure to produce reports supporting the White House's argument
    that Saddam poses such an immediate threat to the United States that
    pre-emptive military action is necessary.

As these reports show, there were many sources available to journalists
interested in scrutinizing the administration's statements about Iraq.
Unfortunately, however, Knight Ridder has no newspaper in Washington, D.C., or
New York, and its stories did not get the national attention they deserved.
But in mid-October, other news organizations began to pick up on some of the
same discontent Knight Ridder had documented. The Washington Post, the
Associated Press, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times,
and the Guardian of London all ran articles raising questions about the
administration's case for war. On October 10, The New York Times ran a
front-page account by Michael Gordon of the divisions within the
administration "over what intelligence shows about Iraq's intentions and its
willingness to ally itself with al-Qaeda." And on October 24, the Times, again
on its front page, reported that top Pentagon officials had set up a special
intelligence unit to search for data to support the case for war. Written by
Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt, the article cited the concerns of some
intelligence analysts that civilian policymakers were politicizing the
intelligence to fit their hawkish position. The view "among even some senior
intelligence analysts" at the CIA, they wrote, "is that Mr. Hussein is
contained and is unlikely to unleash weapons of mass destruction unless he is
attacked."

The unit referred to here was the Office of Special Plans, the same group
Seymour Hersh would write about after the war. As such reports show, its
existence was widely known before the war. With many analysts prepared to
discuss the competing claims over the intelligence on Iraq, the press was in a
good position to educate the public on the administration's justifications for
war. Yet for the most part, it never did so. A survey of the coverage in
November, December, and January reveals relatively few articles about the
debate inside the intelligence community. Those articles that did run tended
to appear on the inside pages. Most investigative energy was directed at
stories that supported, rather than challenged, the administration's case.

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.

Such sanctions were reinforced by the national political climate. With a
popular president promoting war, Democrats in Congress were reluctant to
criticize him. This deprived reporters of opposition voices to quote, and of
hearings to cover. Many readers, meanwhile, were intolerant of articles
critical of the President. Whenever The Washington Post ran such pieces,
reporter Dana Priest recalls, "We got tons of hate mail and threats, calling
our patriotism into question." Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and The Weekly
Standard, among others, all stood ready to pounce on journalists who strayed,
branding them liberals or traitors—labels that could permanently damage a
career. Gradually, journalists began to muzzle themselves.

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."

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.


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