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New York, May 26, 2004
The Times and
Iraq OVER the last year this
newspaper has shone the bright light of hindsight
on decisions that led the United States into Iraq.
We have examined the failings of American and
allied intelligence, especially on the issue of
Iraq's weapons and possible Iraqi connections to
international terrorists. We have studied the
allegations of official gullibility and hype. It is
past time we turned the same light on
ourselves. In doing so -- reviewing hundreds of articles
written during the prelude to war and into the
early stages of the occupation -- we found an
enormous amount of journalism that we are proud of.
In most cases, what we reported was an accurate
reflection of the state of our knowledge at the
time, much of it painstakingly extracted from
intelligence agencies that were themselves
dependent on sketchy information. And where those
articles included incomplete information or pointed
in a wrong direction, they were later overtaken by
more and stronger information. That is how news
coverage normally unfolds. But we have found a
number of instances of coverage that was not as
rigorous as it should have been. In some cases,
information that was controversial then, and
seems questionable now, was insufficiently
qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged.
Looking back, we wish we had been more
aggressive in re-examining the claims as new
evidence emerged -- or failed to emerge.  The
problematic articles varied in authorship and
subject matter, but many shared a common feature.
They 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.)
Complicating matters for journalists, the
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. Some critics of our coverage during that time
have focused blame on individual reporters. Our
examination, however, indicates that the problem
was more complicated.  Editors
at several levels who should have been challenging
reporters and pressing for more skepticism were
perhaps too intent on rushing scoops into the
paper. Accounts of Iraqi defectors were not always
weighed against their strong desire to have
Saddam Hussein ousted. Articles based on
dire claims about Iraq tended to get prominent
display, while follow-up articles that called the
original ones into question were sometimes buried.
In some cases, there was no follow-up at all. - On Oct. 26 and Nov. 8, 2001, for example,
Page 1 articles cited Iraqi defectors who
described a secret Iraqi camp where Islamic
terrorists were trained and biological weapons
produced. These accounts have never been
independently verified.
- On Dec. 20, 2001, another front-page article
began, "An Iraqi defector who described himself
as a civil engineer said he personally worked on
renovations of secret facilities for biological,
chemical and nuclear weapons in underground
wells, private villas and under the Saddam
Hussein Hospital in Baghdad as recently as a
year ago." Knight Ridder Newspapers reported
last week that American officials took that
defector -- his name is Adnan Ihsan Saeed
al-Haideri -- to Iraq earlier this year to
point out the sites where he claimed to have
worked, and that the officials failed to find
evidence of their use for weapons programs. It
is still possible that chemical or biological
weapons will be unearthed in Iraq, but in this
case it looks as if we, along with the
administration, were taken in. And until now we
have not reported that to our readers.
- On Sept. 8, 2002, the lead article of the
paper was headlined "U.S. Says Hussein
Intensified Quest for A-Bomb Parts." That
report concerned the aluminum tubes that the
administration advertised insistently as
components for the manufacture of nuclear
weapons fuel. The claim came not from defectors
but from the best American intelligence sources
available at the time. Still, it should have
been presented more cautiously. There were hints
that the usefulness of the tubes in making
nuclear fuel was not a sure thing, but the hints
were buried deep, 1,700 words into a 3,600-word
article. Administration officials were allowed
to hold forth at length on why this evidence of
Iraq's nuclear intentions demanded that Saddam
Hussein be dislodged from power: "The first sign
of a `smoking gun,' they argue, may be a
mushroom cloud."
- Five days later, The Times reporters
learned that the tubes were in fact a subject of
debate among intelligence agencies. The
misgivings appeared deep in an article on Page
A13, under a headline that gave no inkling that
we were revising our earlier view ("White
House Lists Iraq Steps to Build Banned
Weapons"). The Times gave voice to skeptics
of the tubes on Jan. 9, when the key piece of
evidence was challenged by the International
Atomic Energy Agency. That challenge was
reported on Page A10; it might well have
belonged on Page A1.
- On April 21, 2003, as American
weapons-hunters followed American troops into
Iraq, another front-page article declared,
"Illicit Arms Kept Till Eve of War, an Iraqi
Scientist Is Said to Assert." It began this
way: "A scientist who claims to have worked in
Iraq's chemical weapons program for more than a
decade has told an American military team that
Iraq destroyed chemical weapons and biological
warfare equipment only days before the war
began, members of the team said."
The informant also claimed
that Iraq had sent unconventional weapons to
Syria and had been cooperating with Al Qaeda --
two claims that were then, and remain, highly
controversial. But the tone of the article
suggested that this Iraqi "scientist" -- who in
a later article described himself as an official
of military intelligence -- had provided the
justification the Americans had been seeking for
the invasion.
The Times never followed up on the
veracity of this source or the attempts to verify
his claims. A sample of the coverage, including the articles
mentioned here, is online at nytimes.com/critique.
Readers will also find there a detailed discussion
written for The New York Review of Books
last month by Michael Gordon, military
affairs correspondent of The [New York]
Times, about the aluminum tubes report.
Responding to the review's critique of Iraq
coverage, his statement could serve as a primer on
the complexities of such intelligence
reporting. We consider the story of Iraq's weapons, and of
the pattern of misinformation, to be unfinished
business. And we fully intend to continue
aggressive reporting aimed at setting the record
straight. 
Chalabi
keeps network, could thwart U.S. goals despite
fall from grace-
Robert Fisk reports: Video
pictures of US helicopter crew shooting wounded
men have been censored by British and European
TV (see below)
Atrocity-galleries from a
"bloodless war": Thousands
of images of the Iraqi victims of Bush and
Blair
How to Shoot a Wounded
Iraqi "That
was awesome, let's do it
again!"
[video, WMV,
zip file, 1
MB]-
1998: The
neo-cons wrote to President Clinton: Project for
the New Century |
Wolfowitz lies again:
Iraqi
pipeline attacks go unreported
-
"What
has the Pentagon's third man done wrong?
Everything"
-
|
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