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-Caveat Lector-
FAIR-L
Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting
Media analysis, critiques and activism
(**Special NYC event this week: details below)
ACTION ALERT:
Spying in Iraq: From Fact to Allegation
September 24, 2002
Nothing makes a newspaper prouder than a juicy foreign-policy scoop.
Except, it seems, when the scoop ends up raising awkward questions about a
U.S. administration's drive for war.
Back in 1999, major papers ran front-page investigative stories revealing
that the CIA had covertly used U.N. weapons inspectors to spy on Iraq for
the U.S.'s own intelligence purposes. "United States officials said today
that American spies had worked undercover on teams of United Nations arms
inspectors," the New York Times reported (1/7/99). According to the
Washington Post (3/2/99), the U.S. "infiltrated agents and espionage
equipment for three years into United Nations arms control teams in Iraq
to eavesdrop on the Iraqi military without the knowledge of the U.N.
agency." Undercover U.S. agents "carried out an ambitious spying
operation designed to penetrate Iraq's intelligence apparatus and track
the movement of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, according to U.S. and U.N.
sources," wrote the Boston Globe (1/6/99).
Each of the three news stories ran on the papers' front pages. At first,
U.S. officials tried to deny them, but as more details emerged, "spokesmen
for the CIA, Pentagon, White House and State Department declined to repeat
any categorical denials" (Washington Post, 3/2/99). By the spring of 1999,
the UNSCOM spying reported by the papers was accepted as fact by other
outlets, and even defended; "Experts say it is naive to believe that the
United States and other governments would not have used the opportunity
presented by the U.N. commission to spy on a country that provoked the
Persian Gulf War in 1991 and that has continued to tangle with U.S. and
British forces," USA Today reported (3/3/99).
But now that the Bush administration has placed the inspectors at the
center of its rationale for going to war, these same papers have become
noticeably queasy about recalling UNSCOM's past spying. The spy scandal
badly damaged the credibility of the inspections process, especially after
reports that data collected through UNSCOM were later used to pick targets
in the December 1998 bombing of Iraq: "National security insiders, blessed
with their unprecedented intelligence bonanza from UNSCOM, convinced
themselves that bombing Saddam Hussein's internal apparatus would drive
the Iraqi leader around the bend," wrote Washington Post analyst William
Arkin (1/17/99).
Suddenly, facts that their own correspondents confirmed three years ago in
interviews with top U.S. officials are being recycled as mere allegations
coming from Saddam Hussein's regime.
The UNSCOM team, explained the New York Times' Barbara Crossette in an
August 3 story, was replaced "after Mr. Hussein accused the old commission
of being an American spy operation and refused to deal with it." She gave
no hint that Saddam's "accusation" was reported as fact by her Times
colleague, Tim Weiner, in a front-page story three years earlier.
"As recently as Sunday, Iraqi officials called the inspectors spies and
accused them of deliberately prolonging their work," the Washington Post's
Baghdad correspondent wrote recently in a story casting doubt on the Iraqi
regime's intentions of cooperating (9/8/02). Readers would have no way of
knowing that the Post's Barton Gellman exhaustively detailed the facts of
the spying in a series of 1999 articles.
"Iraq accused some of the inspectors of being spies, because they remained
on their host countries' payrolls while reviewing Iraq's weapons," the
Boston Globe's Elizabeth Neuffer wrote recently, in an oddly garbled
rendition of the charges (9/14/02). She could have boasted that her
paper's own Colum Lynch (now with the Washington Post) was widely credited
with first breaking the story of UNSCOM's spying in a January 6, 1999
front-page expose. But she chose not to.
It's hard to avoid the impression that certain media outlets would rather
that UNSCOM's covert espionage had never been exposed in the first place.
The day after Barton Gellman of the Washington Post first reported the
spying charges, in a story sourced to Kofi Annan's office, his own paper
ran a thundering editorial denouncing Annan's "gutless ploy"
("Back-Stabbing at the U.N.," 1/7/99) and instructing the U.N. leader that
instead of providing the information to a Washington Post reporter, he and
his aides should have "raised their concerns in private."
ACTION: Please remind these leading newspapers that espionage by U.N.
weapons inspectors, now being treated as an allegation made by Saddam
Hussein, was previously reported by these papers as a fact.
CONTACT:
New York Times
Howell Raines, Executive Editor
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Boston Globe
Helen Donovan, Executive Editor
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Washington Post
Phil Bennett, Assistant managing editor, foreign news
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
As always, please remember that your comments are taken more seriously if
you maintain a polite tone. Please cc [EMAIL PROTECTED] with your
correspondence.
********************
NYC MEDIA TALK:
Robert McChesney and John Nichols-- two outstanding media critics and
authors-- will be speaking at NYU this Friday. McChesney and Nichols are
co-authors of "Our Media, Not Theirs: The Democratic Struggle Against
Corporate Media" (forthcoming from Seven Stories Press). For more
information, about their work, see:
http://www.robertmcchesney.com/ .
Friday, September 27, 7:30 PM
New York University, Kimball Lounge
246 Greene St. (btw Waverly Pl. & Washington Pl.), New York City
Free and open to the public
Co-sponsored by FAIR, the Project on Media Ownership (PROMO) and Seven
Stories Press, the talk is part of PROMO's series on "Critical
Perspectives on the Media Cartel."
********************
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information, go to: http://www.fair.org/extra/subscribe.html . Or call 1-800-847-3993.
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and Canada. To find the CounterSpin station nearest you, visit
http://www.fair.org/counterspin/stations.html .
FAIR's INTERNSHIP PROGRAM: FAIR accepts internship applications for its New York
office on a rolling basis. For more information, see:
http://www.fair.org/internships.html
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will look at each message. We especially appreciate documented examples of media bias
or censorship. And please send copies of your email correspondence with media outlets,
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FAIR
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http://www.fair.org/
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