The New York Times has burned its reputation on a pyre of lies about Iraq

The Guardian (UK)

How Chalabi and the White House held the front page

By James Moore

The Guardian When the full history of the Iraq war is
written, the most scandalous chapter may be about how
American journalists, in particular those at the New
York Times, allowed themselves to be so easily
manipulated by both Ahmad Chalabi, an Iraqi exile with
his own virulently pro-war agenda, and the Bush White
House.

Even before the latest suspicions that Chalabi may have
been sending US secrets to Iran, a reporter trying to
convince an editor that the smooth-talking exile was a
credible source had a difficult case to make.

The former head of the Iraqi National Congress (INC)
was a convicted criminal. In exile, he was accused of
embezzling millions from his Petra Bank in Amman,
Jordan. Chalabi left the country in the boot of a car
but was convicted in absentia and faces 22 years in
prison if he returns. He has always maintained that his
prosecution was political.

Shortly after his 1989 escape from Jordan, Chalabi made
contact with CIA operatives who funnelled an estimated
$100m to the INC, culminating in a failed 1996 takeover
of Iraq by Kurdish forces.

Chalabi, who studied at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, cultivated the image of a well-informed
leader seeking justice for his people, but he was a
well-known player and the darling of Richard Perle and
his fellow neocon hawks.

He would not have survived a background check for a job
at Slim’s Used Cars, and was viewed with deep suspicion
by the CIA and the state department; but he was good
enough as a source for the New York Times, the
Washington Post and other news outlets, all of whom
burned their reputations on Chalabi’s pyre of lies.

Judith Miller, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and
authority on the Middle East for the NYT, appears to
have been the most reliant on Chalabi. In an email
exchange with the NYT’s Baghdad bureau chief John
Burns, Miller said Chalabi "had provided most of the
front page exclusives for our paper". She later said
that this was an exaggeration, but in an earlier
interview with me, Miller did not discount the value of
Chalabi’s insight. "Of course, I talked with Chalabi,"
she said. "But he was just one of many sources I used."

Miller refused to say who those other sources were but,
at Chalabi’s behest, she interviewed various defectors
from Saddam Hussein’s regime, who claimed without
substantiation that there was still a clandestine WMD
programme operating inside Iraq. US investigators now
believe that Chalabi sent these same Iraqi expatriates
to at least eight Western spy agencies as part of a
scheme to convince them to overthrow Saddam.

If spies wanted a trophy to show what happens when
their craft is perfectly executed, it would be a story
written by Judith Miller on the front page of the New
York Times on a Sunday morning in September 2002. She
wrote that an intercepted shipment of aluminum tubes,
to be used for centrifuges, was evidence that Saddam
was building a uranium gas separator to develop nuclear
material.

The story had an enormous impact, one amplified when
national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, secretary
of state Colin Powell and vice-president Dick Cheney
all did appearances on the Sunday-morning talk shows,
citing the first-rate journalism of the liberal NYT. No
single story did more to advance the neoconservative
cause.

But Miller’s story was wrong. The aluminum tubes were
covered with an anodised coating, which rendered them
useless for a centrifuge, according to a number of
scientists who spoke publicly after Miller’s story. The
tubes, in fact, were almost certainly intended for use
as rocket bodies. The probable source for Miller’s
story, in addition to US intelligence, was Adnan Ihsan
Saeed, an Iraqi defector Miller was introduced to by
Chalabi. Miller had quoted him in a December 2001
report, when Saeed had told her he had worked on
nuclear operations in Iraq and that there were at least
20 banned-weapons facilities undergoing repairs. Of
course, no such facilities have been found, forcing the
conclusion that Saeed was either lying or horribly
uninformed.

"I had no reason to believe what I reported was
inaccurate," Miller told me. "I believed the
intelligence I had. We tried really hard to get more
information and we vetted information very, very
carefully." A few months after the aluminum tubes
story, a former CIA analyst explained to me how simple
it had been to manipulate the correspondent and her
newspaper.

"The White House had a perfect deal with Miller," he
said. "Chalabi is providing the Bush people with the
information they need to support their political
objectives, and he is supplying the same material to
Judy Miller. Chalabi tips her on something and then she
goes to the White House, which has already heard the
same thing from Chalabi, and she gets it corroborated.
She also got the Pentagon to confirm things for her,
which made sense, since they were working so closely
with Chalabi. Too bad Judy didn’t spend a little more
time talking to those of us who had information that
contradicted almost everything Chalabi said."

Long after the fact, Miller conceded in her interview
with me that she was wrong about the tubes, but not
that she had made a mistake. "We worked our asses off
to get that story," she said. "No one leaked anything
to us. I reported what I knew at the time. I wish I
were God and had all the information I had needed. But
I’m not God ... All I can rely on is what people tell
me." Sadly, America’s sons and daughters were sent off
to war wearing the boots of a widely disseminated lie.

Much too late, America’s paper of record discovered its
conscience, and last Wednesday published an
extraordinary mea culpa in which the editors, while not
singling out Miller, wrote: "We have found ... coverage
that was not as rigorous as it should have been ... In
some cases, the 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."

The NYT’s editors conceded what intelligence sources
had long before told me and numerous other reporters:
that Chalabi had set up a situation with Iraqi exiles
where all the influential institutions were shouting
into the same garbage can, hearing the same echo. The
editors admitted as much: "Administration officials now
acknowledge that they sometimes fell for misinformation
from these exile sources."

Another Miller story - Illicit Arms Kept Till Eve of
War, an Iraqi Scientist Is Said To Assert - was based
on a source Miller never met or even interviewed. She
watched a man in a baseball cap from a distance, who
pointed at the desert floor, and used that as a basis
for filing a piece that confirmed the US had discovered
"precursors to weapons of mass destruction," Miller
explained to me months later. "I know who he is," she
insisted. "There’s no way I would have gone forward
with such a story without knowing who my source was.
Maybe it turns out that he was lying or ill-informed."
Yes, Ms Miller, that is how it turned out.

If Miller’s boss had done some reporting of his own, he
might have discovered evidence of Miller’s political
predisposition. The Middle East Forum, an organisation
that openly advocated that the US overthrow Saddam,
listed Miller as an expert speaker on its website and
held a launch party for her book. She was represented
by Benador Associates, a speakers’ bureau that
specialises in conservative thinkers with Middle East
expertise. I asked Miller if she supported Bush
politically. "My views are well known," she replied. "I
understood that these people ... who hated us so much
... that if they ever got their hands on WMD, they
would use them. Do I have a belief that the WMD exist,
and a fear? Yeah, I have real fear for my country."

Nobody wanted a war against Iraq more than Ahmad
Chalabi, and the biggest paper in the US gave it to him
almost as willingly as the White House did.

· James C Moore is the author of Bush’s War for Re-
election: Iraq, the White House, and the People, and
co-author of Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W
Bush Presidential; a version of this article appears on
Salon.com

jimoore@ctt-texas.net

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1227334,00.html