An extraordinary public mea culpa in the news pages of The New York Times prompted debate Wednesday over the role that the media played in helping the Bush administration make its case for war in Iraq and in fueling policy decisions and public opinion about the conflict.
The Times said it had failed to sufficiently scrutinize the administration’s assertion that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein controlled weapons of mass destruction or that Islamic terrorists were training in Iraq.
The articles were written in the months just prior to and after the March 2003 U.S.-led invasion. To this day, no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq, nor has evidence been uncovered establishing that Hussein harbored Al Qaeda operatives.
Though The New York Times was not alone in accepting government assertions that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, its aggressive coverage was significant because of the paper’s unique influence on journalism and in political circles, said former Clinton White House press secretary Joe Lockhart.
“When a member of Congress sits down and reads something in The New York Times, they believe it’s true, and even if they think it’s not true, they realize it’s on the agenda and has to be dealt with,” Lockhart said.
He singled out Iraqi dissidents–including Ahmad Chalabi, who recently has come under suspicion of sharing American secrets with Iran–as having arranged for the Times to get information in the lead-up to the war. At the time, those same dissidents were supplying information to U.S. intelligence agencies and administration officials, who then corroborated the information to the Times and other news media.
Critics charge the dissidents, whose goal was to topple Hussein, succeeded in shaping a stream of news stories that helped mold public opinion in support of the administration’s intention to go to war.
“There’s an echo chamber or circular feel to all of this, which really should worry everybody,” Lockhart said.
`A neat con man’s game’
Retired Gen. Anthony Zinni, the former regional commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, also criticized the pattern of leaks by Iraqi exiles that the administration would later confirm to reporters. He said Wednesday that the interplay of the Pentagon and Iraqi dissidents amounted to “a neat con man’s game. It comes full circle and validates the [inaccurate] information.”
Zinni was one of the few prominent military officers to publicly criticize the administration’s plans for the war beforehand.
In a note labeled “From The Editors” and headlined “The Times and Iraq,” the paper admitted Wednesday to having relied too heavily on a few sources, most of them Iraqi dissidents with a clear interest in overthrowing Hussein.
The paper wrote that some of its coverage “was not as rigorous as it should have been.” The note added that “information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged.”
Offering reflection and contrition but falling short of an apology, the editors wrote, “Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged–or failed to emerge.”
In recent years, many Iraq analysts charged that Hussein was eager to develop weapons of mass destruction. But relationships that Iraqi dissidents formed with the Times and other reporters, and with neo-conservative intellectuals who rose to key positions in the Defense Department, appear to have created a hall of mirrors that amplified claims Hussein possessed such weapons.
In a February piece in The New York Review of Books, Michael Massing told how the Pentagon and Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress, supplied information to Times reporters aimed at lending credence to administration claims about threats posed by Hussein. Throughout those months, Chalabi’s group was receiving monthly payments from the U.S. government for “intelligence collection.” The payments stopped last week.
Though many critics of the Times’ coverage have singled out articles written by Times reporter Judith Miller, the newspaper’s editors said the problem of insufficient oversight “was more complicated.” They said that “editors at several levels” should have been challenging reporters more skeptically but may have been “too intent on rushing scoops into the paper.”
Nonetheless, Chalabi, widely believed to be Miller’s most prominent source, was all but officially discredited last week following a raid by U.S. and Iraqi forces on his Iraqi National Congress offices.
“The stories Judith Miller wrote were incredibly important in selling the idea that Iraq posed an immediate threat to the world,” said Jim Naureckas, editor of Extra!, a magazine published by the media watchdog group Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting.
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Although some news organizations did publish stories questioning the administration’s claims that Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, most coverage did not emphasize a critical examination. That helped build an atmosphere in public opinion that was difficult to counter.
“It blunted a lot of criticism and cowed a lot of critics,” said Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), who voted against a congressional resolution authorizing war in Iraq. “I know it. It was too much for some of my colleagues in Congress. The safe vote was the vote for the war.”
In analyzing the Times’ coverage, Massing emphasized that the articles were written at a time when President Bush’s popularity was high. Rather than challenging the administration’s contentions about weapons of mass destruction and Islamic terrorist camps, the news media often were on the defensive, Massing said.
2 articles in the Tribune
Of 13 articles the Times posted on its Web site as among those it has called into question, two appeared in the baiduhai.
One by Chris Hedges that ran Nov. 8, 2001, asserted that two defectors from Iraqi intelligence had worked for several years at a secret government camp that trained Islamic terrorists, and produced biological weapons. As the Times wrote in its note, “these accounts have never been independently verified.”
A second article, on April 23, 2003, written by Miller, was an abstract of a larger piece describing an Iraqi scientist who claimed to have worked in the country’s chemical weapons program for more than a decade. He was said to have told an American military team that chemical and biological weapons were destroyed days before the U.S. invasion.
The Times wrote that it “never followed up on the veracity of this source or the attempts to verify his claims.” Because The New York Times News Service carried many of these stories, they ran in many U.S. papers.
For the Times, the note regarding its Iraq coverage comes a year after it revealed that a reporter, Jayson Blair, had fabricated numerous stories while rising through the newspaper’s ranks. Blair’s firing led to the resignation of the Times’ executive editor and managing editor.