If The New York Times’ grudging retraction of
its coverage of those
elusive Iraqi "weapons of mass destruction" proves
nothing else, it’s
the absurdity of the Republican right’s cherished
myth about "liberal
bias" in the establishment press. Think about
it. Until last week, 14
months had passed since the triumphal toppling
of Saddam Hussein’s
statue in Baghdad with no sign of his terrifying
arsenal, but few hints
of regret from a newspaper whose credulous reporting
helped utopian
ideologues in the Bush administration take the
nation to war under false
pretenses. While the Times’ act of contrition
had clearly been in the
works for some time, what appeared to force it
into print was a U.S.
Army-FBI raid on Ahmad Chalabi, the long-time
Iraqi exile, anti-Saddam
activist and convicted embezzler.
Once touted as the top choice of Pentagon neo-conservatives
to take
over Iraq, Chalabi now finds himself suspected
of being an Iranian spy.
Indeed, there are tantalizing hints of what it’s
tempting to call a
"Persian horse" strategy, a counter-intelligence
coup by Iran to dupe
the U.S. into attacking rival Iraq.
That’s probably too imaginative by half. But Times
editors don’t deny
that they were taken for a ride. Virtually all
of its discredited WMD
coverage, the newspaper conceded on May 26, "depended
at least in part
on information from a circle of Iraqi informants,
defectors and exiles
bent on ‘regime change’ in Iraq, people whose
credibility has come under
increasing public debate in recent weeks. (The
most prominent of the
anti-Saddam campaigners, Ahmad Chalabi, has been
named as an occasional
source in Times articles since at least 1991,
and has introduced reporters
to other exiles. He became a favorite of hard-liners
within the Bush
administration and a paid broker of information
from Iraqi exiles, until his
payments were cut off last week.) ... [T] he
accounts of these exiles were
often eagerly confirmed by United States officials
convinced of the need
to intervene in Iraq. Administration officials
now acknowledge that they
sometimes fell for misinformation from these
exile sources. So did many
news organizations—in particular, this one."
The Times’ retraction cites a half dozen specific
stories, but names no
reporters or editors, whose work gave the "unmistakable"
impression, the
newspaper’s ombudsman Dan Okrent pointed out
in a strongly worded
article of his own, "that Saddam Hussein possessed,
or was acquiring, a
frightening arsenal of WMD [s].... Except, of
course, [that impression]
appears to have been mistaken." (Okrent is a
former colleague whose
work I have long admired.)
Okrent does name names, specifically Judith Miller,
the flamboyant
reporter who broke one WMD "exclusive" after
another, became a TV
celebrity and appeared regularly on PBS and CNN.
Her work includes a
now notorious frontpage article published Sept.
8, 2002, stating
unequivocally that Saddam had launched "a worldwide
hunt for materials
to make an atomic bomb" and quoting Bush administration
officials as
fearful that "the first sign of a ‘smoking gun’
... may be a mushroom cloud."
Enthusiastically endorsed on the Sunday TV news
programs by Dick Cheney,
Colin Powell and Condi Rice, the article put
the Times’ imprimatur on the
drive to war, adding incalculable pressure on
Congress to give President
Bush the war resolution he demanded just before
the 2002 elections.
Rice even adopted the "mushroom cloud" trope
as her very own.
Chances are she’d fed it to Miller in the first
place.
Challenged about the flaws in her work, Miller
actually told Michael
Massing, writing for the New York Review of Books,
that as a reporter,
"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."
No Soviet-era Pravda flunky could have put it
better. "Judy is a smart,
relentless, incredibly well-sourced and fearless
reporter," Times editor
Bill Keller told New York Magazine. "It’s a little
galling to watch her
pursued by some of these armchair media ethicists
who have never
ventured into a war zone or earned the right
to carry Judy’s laptop."
It’s not clear if Keller meant Okrent, who noted
that some Times stories
"pushed Pentagon assertions so aggressively you
could almost sense
epaulets sprouting on the shoulders of editors."
Keller can play the
Hemingway card all he likes, but Okrent’s basic
point is indisputable:
For a newspaper to allow anonymous sources to
escape the consequences
of peddling disinformation is "worse than no
defense. It’s a license
granted to liars." I’d be more sympathetic had
I not spent years trying
to disabuse New York Times editors of the great
"Whitewater" hoax.
If propagandizing for war with Iraq was vastly
more hurtful than helping
keep a president under partisan investigation
for six years, the Times’
journalistic sinsgullibility, willful blindness
and stunning arrogance - strike
me as familiar. In those days, the newspaper
had no ombudsman; critics
got the back of its hand.
• Free-lance columnist Gene Lyons is a Little
Rock author and recipient of the National Magazine Award .
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