Fast and Loose With the Facts

How Two Leading Journalists Played the Public to Help Bush Sell His War

By Spencer Ackerman 27/03/08 "Washington Independent" -- -- "The danger," said President George W. Bush on Sept. 25, 2002, "is that Al Qaeda becomes an extension of Saddam's madness and his hatred and his capacity to extend weapons of mass destruction around the world." He proceeded to build on a lie that finally died last week -- but only after nearly 4,000 U.S. troops and perhaps hundreds of thousands of Iraqis did as well. "The war on terror," Bush said, "you can't distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror."

Only if you're a liar. For the CIA knew that Saddam Hussein had no ties of any significance to Al Qaeda. Richard A. Clarke, the long-time counterterrorism director at the National Security Council, knew that Saddam Hussein had no ties of any significance to Al Qaeda. Michael Scheuer, the CIA's original bin Laden analyst, knew that Saddam Hussein had no ties of any significance to Al Qaeda. Eventually, the 9/11 Commission would know that Saddam Hussein had no ties of any significance to Al Qaeda. But by the time the U.S. invaded Iraq, five years ago today, much of the public thought that Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda were tightly allied to strike the United States. And the public believed this because the Bush administration constantly intimated it in order to launch its long-desired war.

Donald H. Rumsfeld called the evidence linking Saddam and Al Qaeda "bulletproof." (He would later say, "To my knowledge, I have not seen any strong, hard evidence that links the two" -- and then walk that statement back.) CIA Director George J. Tenet, carrying the administration's water by misrepresenting what his CIA knew, said there were ties going back a decade. (He meant that they were a decade old.) Vice President Dick Cheney went on "Meet The Press" again and again to say that 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta met with an agent of Iraqi intelligence. (In early 2002, the FBI and the CIA debunked this claim.) But the public also believed it because the press amplified the lie. The major networks and papers uncritically recycled what these administration officials said. The elite media was no exception -- and played a major role in convincing less-expert journalists that the administration was on to something. Two writers in particular, though very different, stand out: Jeffrey Goldberg, then of The New Yorker and now of The Atlantic, and Stephen F. Hayes, of the neoconservative Weekly Standard.

Goldberg, in The New Yorker, wrote two pieces -- one in March 2002 and the other on the eve of the invasion -- backing the Saddam/Al Qaeda claim. Bush praised his work publicly, if inelegantly: "Evidently, there's a new article in the New York magazine or New Yorker magazine--some East Coast magazine--and it details about [Saddam's] barbaric behavior toward his own people." Asked about Goldberg by Tim Russert, Cheney called Goldberg's 2002 piece, which breathlessly recycled the second-hand claims of prisoners of the Kurds that Saddam and bin Laden were allied, "devastating." Hayes, in the Standard, has made a career out of pretending Saddam and Al Qaeda were in league to attack the United States. He published a book -- tellingly wafer-thin and with large type in its hardcover edition -- called "The Connection." One infamous piece even suggested that Saddam might have aided the 9/11 attack. Hayes can be relied on to provide a farrago of speciousness every time new information emerges refuting his deceptive thesis. Unsurprisingly, Cheney has repeatedly praised Hayes's work, telling Fox News, "I think Steve Hayes has done an effective job in his article of laying out a lot of those connections." The Bush administration will leave office with the legacy of a disastrous and unnecessary war, which threatens to undermine the Republican Party for a second straight election. Bush and Cheney will probably leave office distrusted and loathed by a large majority of the electorate, and if they ever travel to Europe they might even face indictment as war criminals.

By contrast, Goldberg and Hayes have seen their careers flourish. Goldberg traded his New Yorker post for a lucrative spot at The Atlantic. Hayes wrote a lengthy hagiography of Cheney for major New York publisher, HarperCollins. Publicity for the book got him a special spot on "Meet The Press," befitting his status as a high-profile television pundit who is never treated as the conspiracy theorist he is.

Every single inquiry into the Saddam/Al Qaeda link has revealed it to be untrue. First, in 2004, the 9/11 Commission's definitive study found "no collaborative operational ties" between the two. (Hayes' response was first to attack the commission, and then to claim that this was a legalistic way of saying that Saddam and Al Qaeda were actually in league.) Then, in 2006, the Senate intelligence committee rejected it. Then, in 2007, the Pentagon inspector general -- albeit in a more circuitous way -- rejected it. Now, in a report released last week, the U.S. military's Joint Forces Command rejects it.

The Joint Forces Command study combed through 600,000 pages of captured documents about Saddam Hussein's support for terrorism throughout the years. It documents, in great detail, precisely that. But the label "terrorism" is a misleading category. The study refutes the idea that there was any "direct connection" between Saddam and Al Qaeda. Saddam's support for terrorism was largely limited to Palestinian, anti-Kurdish and anti-Gulf state terrorist groups. (See the JFC's Executive Summary here, another excerpt here and conclusions.)

About as close as anything could come to linking Saddam to Al Qaeda was a memo from one Saddam's intelligence services "written a decade before Operation Iraqi Freedom." It says: "In a meeting in the Sudan we agreed to renew our relations with the Islamic Jihad Organization in Egypt." That organization would eventually merge with Al Qaeda in the late 1990s, long after the apparent meeting in Sudan. It also says that for a time in the mid-1990s, Saddam and Al Qaeda had "indirect cooperation" by offering "training and motivation" to some of the same terror organizations in that country.

Out of this thin gruel, Hayes attempted to make a meal in the Standard's pages this week. He lifted as many bullet points from the report as he could that, out of context, seemed to bolster his theory. He then went about attacking reporters who accurately wrote that the study found no direct connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda. Hayes tacitly promised his readers that history will ultimately vindicate him, writing that "as much as we have learned from this impressive collection of documents, it is only a fraction of what we will know in 10, 20 or 50 years." And he expressed puzzlement that an administration with an obvious credibility problem had not "done anything to promote the study."

Hayes's boss, New York Times columnist Bill Kristol, criticized the administration's silence in an editorial, lamenting that "most Americans will assume there was no real Saddam-terror connection." The phraseology is telling. Not even Kristol, a supreme propagandist, could bring himself to write of a "real Saddam-Al Qaeda connection," preferring the sleight-of-hand approach to discussing Saddam's ties to undifferentiated "terror" groups.

At the risk of belaboring the point, it should be obvious that if Saddam Hussein was as important to Al Qaeda as Hayes has erroneously and deliberately written for years, then Al Qaeda should be reeling years after the destruction of his regime. Instead, according to a mid-2007 warning from the National Counterterrorism Center, Al Qaeda is "Better Positioned to Strike the West." Never once has Hayes, in all the thousands of words he has written on the "connection," reckoned with this basic strategic problem. In essence, he asks every U.S. soldier and Marine in Iraq to be the last man to die for a debater's point.

Goldberg's approach has been rather different. He has simply kept quiet about what he did. In his March 2002 piece, he credulously recycled the claims of "Kurdish intelligence officials" that a Kurdish terror group called Ansar al-Islam was "shielding Al Qaeda members, and... doing so with the approval of Saddam's agents." (In a parody of a concession to reality, he caveated the claim by saying "they have no proof that Ansar al-Islam was ever involved in international terrorism or that Saddam’s agents were involved in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.") Never once did he indicate to his readers -- The New Yorker has a circulation of more than a million -- that the Kurds, sworn enemies of Saddam Hussein, had an obvious motive to peddle lies to American reporters.

A subsequent piece baselessly asserted that "the relationship between bin Laden and Saddam’s regime was brokered in the early nineteen-nineties by the then de-facto leader of Sudan, the pan-Islamist radical Hassan al-Tourabi." Needless to say, not a single investigation into Iraq or Al Qaeda has ever substantiated what Goldberg wrote.

Goldberg further pimped the assertions of "senior officials" that "an Al Qaeda operative--a native-born Iraqi who goes by the name Abu Abdullah al-Iraqi -- was dispatched by bin Laden to ask the Iraqis for help in poison-gas training." (It's possible that this piece of information came from Abu Sheikh al-Libi, who was tortured into telling the Bush administration about Saddam giving Al Qaeda chemical and biological weapons training, before subsequently recanting.) And he again wrote of "another possible connection early last year," gleaned -- once again -- from "Kurdish intelligence officials."

Goldberg, perhaps chastened, largely stopped writing about the war after the occupation proved to be a disaster. Unlike Hayes, if he still believes that Saddam and Al Qaeda were indeed in league, he has not publicly said so. His beat at The New Yorker changed from the Iraq war to domestic politics. Yet even then, he could not resist the urge to lionize the architects of the Saddam-Al Qaeda connection. In 2005, he authored a puffy profile of former Pentagon official Douglas J. Feith. ("His glasses magnify his eyes, making him appear owlish, and his mouth is set in an expression of bemusement that can slip into impatient condescension when he hears something that he thinks is foolish, which is often.")

All the while, he has neglected to correct the record. The closest Goldberg has come to acknowledging what he did in 2002 and 2003 was in an interview with New York magazine to promote a book he published in 2006. When the reporter, Boris Kachka, gently asked about his earlier reporting, Goldberg snapped, "Is that part of the interview? Okay, fine, if you really want to go into it, the specific allegations I raised have never been definitively addressed by the 9/11 Commission."

Yet Goldberg enjoys a sterling reputation. The Atlantic's wealthy owner, David Bradley, reportedly sent Goldberg's children ponies in order to convince the reporter to leave The New Yorker for the prestigious magazine. "He's incredibly persistent and makes you feel like you're God's gift to journalism," Goldberg said of Bradley. The Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz approvingly referred to Bradley's pursuit of "top talent."

But it seems as though, despite Goldberg's ability to escape accountability for his journalistic malpractice, he can't help smirking to attentive readers. The cover story of the January/February edition of The Atlantic featured Goldberg's meditations on the post-Iraq Middle East. It featured, of all things, a discursion into "a decrepit prison in Iraqi Kurdistan" where "a senior interrogator with the Kurdish intelligence service" tortured an Arab prisoner. Goldberg mentioned not a word of what his last dalliance with Kurdish intelligence yielded. To anyone who read his 2002 and 2003 pieces, it appeared that The Atlantic writer was returning to the scene of the crime.

Nearly 4,000 Americans and perhaps hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and counting, will not have the same opportunity. See also

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article19614.htm

Frontline: Too Timid, Too Little, Too Late By Ray McGovern

27/03/08 "ICH" --- - Frontline’s “Bush’s War” on PBS Monday and Tuesday evening was a nicely put-together rehash of the top players’ trickery that led to the attack on Iraq, together with the power-grabbing, back-stabbing, and limitless incompetence of the occupation.

Except for an inside-the-beltway tidbit here and there—for example, about how the pitiable secretary of state Colin Powell had to suffer so many indignities at the hands of other type-A hard chargers, Frontline added little to the discussion. Notably missing was any allusion to the unconscionable role the Fourth Estate adopted as indiscriminate cheerleader for the home team; nor was there any mention that the invasion was a serious violation of international law. But those omissions, I suppose, should have come as no surprise.

Nor was it a surprise that any viewer hoping for insight into why Cheney and Bush were so eager to attack Iraq was left with very thin gruel. It was more infotainment, bereft of substantive discussion of the whys and wherefores of what in my view is the most disastrous foreign policy move in our nation’s history.

Despite recent acknowledgements from the likes of Alan Greenspan, Gen. John Abizaid, and others that oil and permanent (or, if you prefer, “enduring”) military bases were among the main objectives, Frontline avoided any real discussion of such delicate factors. Someone not already aware of how our media has become a tool of the Bush administration might have been shocked at how Frontline could have missed one of President George W. Bush’s most telling “signing statements.” Underneath the recent Defense Authorization Act, he wrote that he did not feel bound by the law’s explicit prohibition against using the funding:

“(1) To establish any military installation or base for the purpose of providing for the permanent stationing of United States Armed Forces in Iraq,” or

“(2) To exercise United States control of the oil resources of Iraq.”

So the Frontline show was largely pap.

At one point, however, the garrulous former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage did allude to one of the largest elephants in the living room—Israel’s far-right Likudniks—and their close alliance with the so-called neo-conservatives running our policy toward the Middle East. But Armitage did so only tangentially, referring to the welcome (if totally unrealistic) promise by Ahmed Chalabi that, upon being put in power in Baghdad, he would recognize Israel. Not surprisingly, the interviewer did not pick up on that comment; indeed, I’m surprised the remark avoided the cutting room floor.

Courage No Longer a Frontline Hallmark

Frontline has done no timely reportage that might be looked upon as disparaging the George W. Bush administration—I mean, for example, the real aims behind the war, not simply the gross incompetence characterizing its conduct. Like so many others, Frontline has been, let’s just say it, cowardly in real time—no doubt intimidated partly by attacks on its funding that were inspired by the White House.

And now? Well the retrospective criticism of incompetence comes as polling shows two-thirds of the country against the Iraq occupation (and the number is surely higher among PBS viewers). So, Frontline is repositioning itself as a mild ex-post-facto critic of the war, but still unwilling to go very far out on a limb. Explaining the aims behind war crimes can, of course, be risky. It is as though an invisible Joseph Goebbels holds sway.

Too Late

On Monday evening I found myself initially applauding Frontline’s matter- of-fact, who-shot-John chronology of how our country got lied into attacking and occupying Iraq. Then I got to thinking—have I not seen this picture before? Many times?

It took a Hollywood producer to recognize and act promptly on the con games that sober observers could not miss as the war progressed. Where were the celebrated “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD)? Robert Greenwald simply could not abide the president’s switch to “weapons of mass destruction programs,” which presumably might be easier to find than the much-ballyhooed WMD so heavily advertised before the attack on Iraq. You remember—those remarkable WMD about which UN chief inspector Hans Blix quipped that the U.S. had one hundred percent certainty of their existence in Iraq, but zero percent certainty as to where they were.

Robert Greenwald called me in May 2003. He had read a few of the memoranda published by Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) exposing the various charades being acted out by the administration and wanted to know what we thought of the president’s new circumlocution on WMD.

I complimented him on smelling a rat and gave him names of my VIPS colleagues and other experienced folks who could fill him in on the details. Wasting no time, he arrived here in Washington in June, armed simply with copious notes and a cameraman. Greenwald conducted the interviews, flew back to his eager young crew in Hollywood and, poof, the DVD “Uncovered: The War on Iraq” was released at the beginning of November 2003.”

So Frontline is four and a half years behind a Hollywood producer with appropriate interest and skepticism. (Full disclosure: I appear in “Uncovered,” as do many of the interviewees appearing in Frontline’s “Bush’s War.”)

Actually, the interviewing by Frontline occurred just a few months later. I know because I was among those interviewed for that as well, as was my good friend and former colleague at the CIA, Mel Goodman. I was struck that Mel looked four years younger on this week’s Frontline. It only then dawned on me that he was four years younger when interviewed.

Have a look at “Uncovered,” [http://www.truthuncovered.com/index.php ] and see how you think it compares to Frontline’s “Bush’s War.”

Safety in Retrospectives

It also struck me that producing a Frontline-style retrospective going back several years is a much less risky genre to work with. Chalk it up to my perspective as an intelligence analyst, but ducking the incredibly important issues at stake over the next several months is, in my opinion, unconscionable. The troop “surge” in Iraq, for example.

Only toward the very end of the program does Frontline allow a bit of relevant candor on a point that has been self-evident since Cheney and Bush, against strong opposition from Generals Abizaid and Casey (and apparently even Rumsfeld), decided to double down by sending 30,000 more troops into Iraq. A malleable new secretary of defense would deal with the recalcitrant generals and pick a Petreaus ex Machina of equal malleability and political astuteness to implement this stop-gap plan.

Pulitzer Prize winning journalist/author Steve Coll, with typical candor, put the “surge” into perspective:

“The decision at a minimum guaranteed that his [Bush’s] presidency would not end with a defeat in history’s eyes; that by committing to the surge, he was certain to at least achieve a stalemate.”

Given this week’s fresh surge of violence as the U.S. surge is scheduled to wind down, even a stalemate may be in some doubt. But, okay, small kudos to Frontline for including that bit of truth—however obvious—and for adding the grim background music to its final comment: “Soon Bush’s war will be handed to someone else.”

Rather Not, Thank You

Intimidation of the media is what has happened all around, including with Frontline, which not so many years ago was able to do some gutsy reporting. Let me give you another example about which few are aware.

Do you remember when Dan Rather made his Apologia Pro Vita Sua, admitting that the American media, including him, was failing to reveal the truth about things like Iraq? Speaking to the BBC on May 16, 2002, Rather compared the situation to the fear of “necklacing” in South Africa:

"It's an obscene comparison," Rather said, "but there was a time in South Africa when people would put flaming tires around peoples' necks if they dissented. In some ways, the fear is that you will be neck-laced here, you will have a flaming tire of lack of patriotism put around your neck."

Talking to another reporter, Dan told it straight about the careerism that keeps US journalists in line. "It's that fear that keeps [American] journalists from asking the toughest of the tough questions and to continue to bore-in on the tough questions so often."

The comparison to “necklacing” may be “obscene” but, sadly, it is not far off the mark. So what happened to the newly outspoken Dan Rather with the newly found courage, when he ran afoul of Vice President Dick Cheney and the immense pressure he exerts on the corporate media?

We know about the lies and the cheerleading for attacking Iraq. But there is much more most of us do not know and remain unable to learn if Rather and other one-time journalists keep acting like Bert Lahr’s cowardly lion in the Wizard of Oz before he gets “the nerve” and courage.

For Dan Rather, the fear would simply not go away...even after leaving CBS for HDNet and promising that, on his new “Dan Rather Reports” show, viewers would see hard-hitting and courageous reporting that he said he couldn’t do at CBS.

Will it surprise you that Dan Rather cannot shake the necklace? I refer specifically to a program for “Dan Rather Reports,” meticulously prepared by award-winning producer, Kristina Borjesson. The special included interviews with an impressive string of first-hand witnesses to neocon machinations prior to the US attack on Iraq, and provides real insights into motivations—the kind of insights Frontline did not even attempt.

Nipped in the Bud by the “Dark Side”

Last year Borjesson’s taping was finished and the editing had begun. Borjesson’s requests to interview people working for the vice president had been denied. But, following standard journalistic practice (not to mention common courtesy), she sent an email to John Hannah in Cheney’s office in order to give Hannah a chance to react to what others—including several of the same senior folks on Frontline last evening— had said about him for her forthcoming report.

At that point all hell broke loose. Borjesson was abruptly told by Rather’s executive producer that by sending the email, Borjesson could have “brought down the whole (‘Dan Rather Reports’) operation.”

The show was killed and Borjesson sacked. For good measure, she was also accused of “coaching” interview subjects and taking their words out of context. Since neither Rather nor his executive producer would provide proof to substantiate that allegation, Borjesson took the unprecedented step of sending her script and transcripts to all her interview subjects, asking them to confirm or deny that she had coached them or taken their words out of context. Not one of them found her script inaccurate or said they were coached. She has the emails to prove this.

This sorry episode and Frontline’s careful avoidance of basic issues like the strategic aims of the Bush administration in invading and occupying Iraq are proof, if further proof were needed, that the White House, and especially Cheney’s swollen office, exert enormous pressure over what we are allowed to see and hear. The fear they instill in the corporate press, and in what once was serious investigative reporting of programs like Frontline, translates into programs getting neutered or killed outright—and massive public ignorance.

Some consolation is to be found in the good news that, in this particular case, Kristina Borjesson is made of stronger stuff; she has not given up, and was greatly encouraged by how many of the very senior officials and former officials she had already interviewed consented to be re-interviewed (since the tapes belonged to the “Rather Not” folks).

Now who looks forward to being re-interviewed?

Borjesson’s original interviewees took into account her problems with the cowards and the censors—and her atypical, gutsy refusal to self-censor—and went the extra mile. A tribute to them as well, and their interest in getting the truth out.

Borjesson is now completing the program on her own. Look for an announcement in the coming months, if you’re interested in real sustenance rather than the pabulum served up, no doubt under duress, by Frontline.

Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington, DC. He was an Army infantry/intelligence officer in the early sixties, then a CIA analyst for 27 years. He now serves on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

This article originally appeared on Consortiumnews.com.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article19619.htm