VOICES
The Lies We Bought
THE
UNCHALLENGED "EVIDENCE" FOR WAR
BY
JOHN R. MacARTHUR
Shortly
before American military forces invaded Iraq, a troubled Ellen
Goodman raised a singularly important question about the Bush
administration’s propaganda campaign for war — “How
we got from there to here.”
There, according to Goodman, was innocent 9/11 victimhood
at the hands of religious fanatics; here, was bullying
superpower bent on destroying a secular dictator. I assumed that
someone as astute as Goodman would reveal at least part of the
answer — that the American media provided free transportation
to get the White House from there to here. But nowhere in her
nationally syndicated column did she state the obvious —
that the success of “Bush’s PR War” (the headline
on the piece) was largely dependent on a compliant press that
uncritically repeated almost every fraudulent administration claim
about the threat posed to America by Saddam Hussein.
Late as she was, Goodman was better than most in even recognizing
that there was a disinformation campaign aimed at the people
and Congress. Just a few columnists seriously challenged the White
House advertising assault. Looking back over the debris of half-truths
and lies, I can’t help but ask my own question of Goodman:
Where was she — indeed, where was the American press —
on September 7, 2002, a day when we were sorely in need of reporters?
It was then that the White House propaganda drive began in earnest,
with the appearance before television cameras of George Bush and
Tony Blair at Camp David. Between them, the two politicians cited
a “new” report from the UN’s International Atomic
Energy Agency that allegedly stated that Iraq was “six months
away” from building a nuclear weapon. “I don’t
know what more evidence we need,” declared the president.
For public relations purposes, it hardly mattered that no such
IAEA report existed, because almost no one in the media bothered
to check out the story. (In the twenty-first paragraph of her
story on the press conference, The Washington Post’s
Karen DeYoung did quote an IAEA spokesman saying, in DeYoung’s
words, “that the agency has issued no new report,” but
she didn’t confront the White House with this terribly interesting
fact.) What mattered was the unencumbered rollout of a commercial
for war — the one that the White House chief of staff and
former General Motors executive Andrew Card had famously withheld
earlier in the summer: “From a marketing point of view, you
don’t introduce new products in August.”
Millions of people saw Bush tieless, casually inarticulate, but
determined-looking and self-confident, making a completely uncorroborated
(and, at that point, uncontradicted) case for preemptive war.
While we contemplate the irony of Bush quoting a UN weapons inspection
agency that he would later dismiss, we might ask ourselves why
no more evidence was needed than the president’s say-so —
and why no reporters asked for any.
But the next day, more “evidence” suddenly appeared,
on the front page of the Sunday New York Times. In a disgraceful
piece of stenography, Michael Gordon and Judith Miller inflated
an administration leak into something resembling imminent Armageddon:
“More than a decade after Saddam Hussein agreed to give up
weapons of mass destruction, Iraq has stepped up its quest for
nuclear weapons and has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials
to make an atomic bomb, Bush administration officials said today.”
The key to this A-bomb program was the attempted purchase of “specially
designed aluminum tubes, which American officials believe were
intended as components of centrifuges to enrich uranium.”
Mysteriously, none of those tubes had reached Iraq, but “American
officials” wouldn’t say why, “citing the sensitivity
of the intelligence.”
Gordon and Miller were mostly careful to attribute their information
to anonymous “administration officials,” but at one
point they couldn’t restrain themselves and crossed the line
into commentary. After nodding to administration “critics”
who favored containment of Hussein, they wrote this astonishing
paragraph:
“Still, Mr. Hussein’s dogged insistence on pursuing
his nuclear ambitions, along with what defectors described in
interviews as Iraq’s push to improve and expand Baghdad’s
chemical and biological arsenals, have brought Iraq and the United
States to the brink of war.”
That Sunday, Card’s new-product introduction moved into high
gear when Vice President Dick Cheney appeared on NBC’s Meet
the Press to brandish Saddam’s supposed nuclear threat. Prompted
by a helpful Tim Russert, Cheney cited the aluminum tubes story
in that morning’s New York Times — a story leaked by
Cheney’s White House colleagues. Russert: “Aluminum
tubes.” Cheney: “Specifically aluminum tubes.”
This gave the “six months away” canard a certain ring
of independent confirmation: “There’s a story in The
New York Times this morning,” said Cheney. “And
I want to attribute the Times.”
Does it matter that, in the months that followed, aluminum tubes
as weapons of mass destruction were discredited time and again?
Does it matter that the former U.S. weapons inspector David Albright
(not the usual suspect Scott Ritter) told 60 Minutes, in an interview
broadcast on December 8 (a program in which I participated) that
“people who understood gas centrifuges almost uniformly felt
that these tubes were not specific to gas centrifuge” for
production of enriched uranium — that the administration
was “selectively picking information to bolster a case that
the Iraqi nuclear threat was more imminent than it is, and in
essence, scare people”? Will the Times ever publish
a clarification (à la Wen Ho Lee) based on IAEA chief Mohammed
el-Baradei’s January 9 and March 7 reports insisting that
there was “no evidence” that the 81 mm tubes were intended
for anything other than conventional rocket production?
As for the “defectors” with special knowledge of Saddam’s
elusive chemical weapons stockpile, did Miller and Gordon —
did anyone in the mainstream U.S. press — take proper note
of Newsweek’s exclusive on March 3? In it, John Barry
reported that Iraq’s most important defector, Hussein Kamel,
who had run Saddam’s nuclear and biological weapons program,
told the CIA and UN weapons inspectors in the summer of 1995 “that
after the gulf war, Iraq destroyed all its chemical and biological
weapons stocks and the missiles to deliver them.”
And what of Saddam’s overall nuclear procurement program?
When el-Baradei told the UN Security Council on March 7 that supporting
documents of alleged attempts to buy uranium from Niger were forged,
no clarification of the Gordon-Miller report appeared in the Grey
Lady. Perhaps Times people still believed their own scare
story from all those months before: “Hard-liners are alarmed
that American intelligence underestimated the pace and scale of
Iraq’s nuclear program before Baghdad’s defeat in the
gulf war,” the September 8 piece reported. “The first
sign of a ‘smoking gun,’ they argue, may be a mushroom
cloud.”
The few corrections and refutations of the White House line were
too little and too late for American democracy. Enterprising reporting
was needed from the moment of the Bush-Blair p.r. gambit to October
10, the day Congress abdicated its war-making power to the president.
During that crucial period, I was able to find only one newspaper
story that straightforwardly countered the White House nuclear
threat propaganda; it appeared, of all places, in the right-wing,
Sun Myung Moon-owned Washington Times. On September 27,
a very competent piece by Joseph Curl (unfortunately buried on
page 16) pointed out not only that there was no “new report”
by the IAEA saying Saddam was six months away from the A-bomb,
but also that the agency had never issued a report predicting
any time frame. Indeed, when IAEA inspectors pulled out of Iraq
in December 1998, spokesman Mark Gwozdecky told Curl, “We
had concluded that we had neutralized their nuclear-weapons program.
We had confiscated their fissile material. We had destroyed all
their key buildings and equipment.”
The American media failed the country badly these past eight months.
As journalists, what can we do about it? Perhaps we need to adopt
the rapid-response techniques used in public relations, something
akin to James Carville’s and George Stephanopoulos’s
famous “War Room” ethos: never leave an accusation unanswered
before the end of a news cycle.
Unfortunately, the politicians and their p.r. people know all
too well the propaganda dictum related nearly twenty years ago
by Peter Teeley, press secretary to then Vice President George
H.W. Bush. Teeley was responding to complaints that the elder
Bush, during a televised debate, had grossly distorted the words
of his and Ronald Reagan’s opponents, the Democratic candidates
Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro. As Teeley explained it to
The New York Times in October 1984, “You can say anything
you want during a debate, and 80 million people hear it.”
If “anything” turns out to be false and journalists
correct it, “So what. Maybe 200 people read it, or 2,000
or 20,000.”
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John MacArthur
is publisher of Harper’s Magazine and author of
Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War.
