In your July/August 2004 issue you castigated a number of journalists for supposedly accepting faulty information from the Iraqi National Congress and publishing it unquestioningly. At the same time you singled out Mark Hosenball and Michael Isikoff of Newsweek, Jonathan Landay of Knight Ridder, and Bob Drogin of the Los Angeles Times for praise for their work in “exposing” the INC. Yet it is these same journalists who published information about the INC that has now been conclusively proven to be false. All of these journalists unquestioningly accepted and published assertions from anonymous sources in U.S. intelligence that the Iraqi defector known as “Curveball” was linked to the INC and that the INC was the main source of U.S. intelligence on Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. The Robb-Silberman WMD report states quite clearly that both of these assertions are untrue. On page 108 it states: “INC-related sources had a minimal impact on pre-war assessments.” On the same page the report finds that “Curveball” “was not influenced by, controlled by, or connected to, the INC.” Will you now hold these journalists to the same standards and ask why they accepted information without skepticism from their anonymous sources who had a clear motive in shifting the blame for intelligence failures from themselves to others?
Ahmad Chalabi
Baghdad, Iraq
Douglas McCollam responds: My piece in cjr was about the influence of the INC’s Information Collection Program on the press in the run-up to the war, not on the intelligence services. Nothing in the Robb-Silberman report contradicts that influence. Indeed, the INC was glad to claim credit for successfully placing the tall tales told by its roster of defectors in the media when it reported to Congress in 2002 on how it was using taxpayer money. As for the connection between the defector known as “Curveball” and the INC, my piece noted that the INC denied any relationship, and that such a link was unproven. I praised Hosenball and Isikoff for uncovering the Information Collection Program, and Drogin and Landay for pointing out the obvious flaws in the INC defectors’ lurid stories of mobile bioweapons labs and secret terrorist training camps. I stand behind that praise.
Bob Drogin responds: Chalabi’s letter notwithstanding, the Los Angeles Times never reported that the Iraqi National Congress was the “main source” of U.S. intelligence on illicit Iraqi weapons. We did report, and the presidential commission on WMD confirms, that the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate relied on reporting from two INC sources who were later proved to be liars. One INC source “provided fabricated reporting” about suspected mobile germ weapon facilities, the commission said, and his misinformation was wrongly used to corroborate reports from a now-discredited defector codenamed “Curveball.” The ex-secretary of state, Colin Powell, cited this bogus INC source in his speech to the UN Security Council in February 2003. The CIA concluded that the second fraudulent INC source “was being ‘directed’ by the INC,” according to the commission. In March 2004, my colleague Greg Miller and I were the first to report that flawed U.S. claims about Iraqi germ weapons stemmed chiefly from “Curveball,” and that the CIA had never interviewed him. We described how UN inspectors had sought Chalabi’s help on Iraqi germ weapons. We wrote that senior CIA officials had determined — and still believe — that “Curveball” was related to an INC member. We wrote that after the war, the CIA “began to suspect [‘Curveball’] might have been coached to provide false information.” The story quoted an INC spokesman denying any role in the “Curveball” case. We subsequently reported Chalabi’s denials. We also reported that the presidential commission was “unable to uncover any evidence that the INC or any other organization was directing “Curveball.”
Jonathan S. Landay responds:Mr. Chalabi is correct that on April 3, 2004, Knight Ridder published a story that quoted anonymous U.S. officials as saying that the Iraqi National Congress supplied the Iraqi defector code-named "Curveball." He is also right that the Silberman-Robb commission found that the defector wasn't connected to the INC.
He fails to mention, however, that a defector who was provided by the INC and later determined to have been a fabricator was used to corroborate Curveball’s false claims about Iraqi mobile biological warfare facilities. Chalabi also neglects to acknowledge that after learning that the Silberman-Robb commission had concluded that the INC had not provided Curveball, Knight Ridder reported that on March 29, 2005 -- two days before the Silberman-Robb report was released.
Further, Chalabi is wrong to assert that in its extensive reporting on pre-war Iraqi intelligence, Knight Ridder portrayed his organization as "the main source of U.S. intelligence on Saddam." In fact, much of our reporting was about the intense clashes between U.S. officials who wanted to use information provided by the INC and others who were deeply suspicious of INC-supplied information.
Chalabi also claims that the Silberman-Robb commission found that INC-related sources had a minimal impact on the Bush administration's pre-war assessments. This is true only with respect to the formal intelligence assessments the commission was charged with examining. His assertion sidesteps two equally critical issues:
A case in point: When President Bush addressed the United Nations General Assembly on September 12, 2002, the White House released a background paper titled "A Decade of Deception and Defiance" on Saddam Hussein’s alleged weapons of mass destruction and links to terrorism. This paper was distributed to foreign governments, members of U.S. and international journalists, and it remains available to the general public on the White House Web site . The first item in the chapter entitled "Saddam Hussein’s Development of Weapons of Mass Destruction" is a claim by an INC-supplied defector, Adnan Ihsan Saeed al Haideri, a chemical engineer, that he had visited twenty secret nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons sites. The White House published this claim even though DIA and CIA interrogators nine months earlier had rejected Mr. Saeed as unreliable after he flunked a lie detector test by the CIA in Thailand. When he was brought back to Iraq by the Iraq Survey Group after the war, Mr. Saeed was unable to identify a single WMD facility. Mr. Saeed’s claim was also the focus of the lead story in The New York Times on Dec. 20, 2001, and was picked up and reproduced by other media outlets.
In a chapter entitled "Saddam Hussein’s Support for International Terrorism," the White House paper claimed that, "Former Iraqi military officers have described a highly secret terrorist training facility in Iraq known as Salman Pak, where both Iraqis and non-Iraqi Arabs receive training on hijacking planes and trains, planting explosives in cities, sabotage, and assassinations." This allegation came from two INC-supplied defectors, Sabah Khalifa Khodada Alami, a former Iraqi army captain, and Brig. Gen. Abu Zeinab al Quairy, the purported commander of the training facility. Both men were rejected as unreliable by U.S. intelligence professionals. Nevertheless, the White House published their claims. Their claims, including suggestions that the September 11 hijackers may have been trained at the alleged facility, also appeared in the American and British media. After the invasion, the only training facility found at Salman Pak was determined by U.S. officials to have been used by Iraqi counter-terrorism units.
We could cite other examples of exaggerated and bogus INC-supplieddefector claims appearing in official U.S. government materials and American and international news media. Chalabi and his organization insist that they did their best to check the backgrounds and claims by defectors before passing them on to American officials. That may well be true. But Chalabi is wrong to suggest that the Silberman-Robb report absolves him or the INC of responsibility for the dissemination of erroneous or fabricated information about Iraqi weapons programs and ties to terrorism that some officials in the Bush administration used in making their case for pre-emptive war. Knight Ridder stands by its reporting on pre-war intelligence, and we will continue to report on the subject.
What bullshit. The wishful comment by ABC News president David Westin about “redoubling our commitment to finding the truth” is outlandish Voices, March/April). He will face further cuts in budget to satisfy the Disney stockholders. If he does not satisfy the demands of those greedy bastards, Michael Eisner or another corporate whore will fire him in a minute. There was a time when I would have found cjr’s printing of such trash beneath their journalistic standards. But no more. cjr is part of the entire journalistic demise, because cjr relies on the Gannetts, Knight Ridder, Tribune, Time/CNN, etc. to support what should be a magazine of criticism. My wife and I had a visitor from Berlin, and as I bemoaned the sorry state of U.S. network news, the visitor had to be shown. We turned on KABC-TV (as in Westin’s network) and showed her the 11:00 news — consisting almost exclusively of violence, sensationalism, weather, and sports. It was a nauseating display of catering to the stupidest elements of our society. Westin and all the other network ceos should be in jail for their corrupting of our nation’s culture, not writing for cjr. And cjr should be ashamed of printing his pitiful rationalization of the crap he brings us.
Gerry Long
Newport Beach, California
David Westin surely has a lot of influence about the content of TV “news” programs. It was, therefore, perplexing to read his thoughtful article and try to reconcile it with Peter Jennings’s special on UFOs — two hours. During this fluff, Jennings did not seem to be aware that all the reports of UFOs come from English-speaking territories. The aliens seem to speak English as their mother tongue; maybe that is why they have a civilization that can build spaceships that don’t land in China. Another question is, why do the extraterrestrials have a predilection for landing on farms and in the desert?
Why aren’t they attracted by big city lights — Albuquerque, for instance, if they insist on going to New Mexico. Why don’t they go to the White House once in a while?
One last question for Westin: Do they get paid for this drivel?
Edmond Murad
Newton, Massachusetts
David Westin responds: Your readers are certainly entitled to criticize, however intemperately, me and ABC News. But, as the late Senator Moynihan said, “Everyone has a right to their own opinion, but no one has a right to his own facts.”
One reader complains about the content of an 11:00 p.m. local newscast. ABC News doesn’t produce local newscasts; we’re responsible for the national, network news programs like Nightline that follow local news. That said, I am proud of the local news operations of our owned stations and our affiliates.
As for our UFO special, Peter Jennings and ABC News have presented award-winning documentary programs on a myriad of topics, from religion to policing. But let’s be honest, haven’t we all wondered about those lights in the sky?
In an editorial in the March/April issue, CJR lays out a prescription for reviving public regard for American journalism: We should do work that actually benefits people and explain ourselves. Those are worthy ingredients in a strategy to rebuild trust with the public. But a third element also is crucial. Journalists need to acknowledge that we don’t have all the answers inside our newsroom bunkers. We need the help of readers and viewers to understand, and bridge, the persistent and growing disconnect between journalists and the people they serve. Journalists must listen as well as lecture. Many newspapers will say that they hear from their readers in many ways, but often these are arms-length engagements. The depth of the crisis in confidence dictates face-to-face, give-and-take, peer-to-peer conversation. One model for conducting such public dialogues has been developed and tested over the past four years as part the National Credibility Roundtables Project of the Associated Press Managing Editors Association. By the end of this year, about 10 percent of the country’s daily newspapers will have used the model to hold press-public dialogues about journalistic issues. Readers are surprised that journalists consider the impact of their work and have guidelines for what they do. Journalists go to the meetings expecting brickbats. They come away with thoughtful comments about journalism’s core values — practical suggestions for showing fairness and story ideas.
Carol Nunnelley
Director
National Credibility Roundtables Project
New York, New York
While it’s always nice to win recognition, I must confess to being a bit disappointed in receiving runner-up honors in Corey Pein’s January/February column for “Biggest Liberal Media Fantasy” on the strength of my investigative articles exposing the object under President Bush’s jacket during the three presidential debates. Like most of the mainstream media, Pein chose to take a cheap attempt at humor, linking the stories to UFO fantasies. In fact, the work I did, which included publishing carefully enhanced photos of the president’s back prepared by a highly respected photo analyst and astronomer from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, Dr. Robert Nelson, makes it clear that there was a significant device under the jacket, and that whatever it was — cuing device or medical device — the explanations put forward by the White House, the Bush campaign, and the president himself (“poorly tailored suit,” “poorly tailored shirt,” “grassy knoll” conspiracy) were quite simply lies. This is a significant story — so sigificant that The New York Times assigned two science reporters to do a piece on it, only to kill the final product five days before the election because senior editors wimped out. Instead of declaring the serious investigative efforts of the alternative media a fantasy, you should be handing that award to the major media that published real liberal fantasies in 2004 about WMDs, Social Security bankruptcy, and an honest vote in Ohio.
Dave Lindorff
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
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