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Investigative Reporters Defined Out of Existence
November 13, 2005 07:45 AM
Last night on Larry King Live, [Judy] Miller once again blamed "faulty intelligence" for her "handful" of flawed stories, neglecting to explain that real investigative reporters aren't passive conduits for intelligence but skeptical analysts of it. [Emphasis added]
This is patent nonsense. If this were in fact the case, we'd lose every investigative reporter who took Joe Wilson's word about what he "found" (but, alas, didn't find) in Africa. Skeptical analysts? Journalists such as The Nation's David Corn, in spite of a mountain of evidence to the contrary, still covers the Wilson/Plame affair as if its protagonist has not been roundly discredited, and as if his wife was still some kind of top-secret foreign operative, rather than a CIA bureaucrat who did in fact recommend her husband for the Niger assignment. (Corn now wants to know whether VP Cheney "outed" her. Oy vey!) Given Corn's penchant for nitpickery in all other matters (witness this bit of pedantry), he's awfully generous with a source who has taken him for a fool.
Like it or not, the disclosure of raw intelligence is often both the sum and substance of investigative reporting in Washington. I don't recall there being much "skeptical analysis" after "United States intelligence officials" (hmmmm) revealed that Ahmad Chalabi had betrayed important intelligence to Iran. In spite of this apparent misdeed, Chalabi went to Washington last week to meet privately with top Bush administration officials, who evidently let the whole Iran thing slide. (Hey, what's one intelligence leak to a theocratic state with nuclear ambitions between friends?) If you're a betting man, would you wager that those initial Chalabi reports were accurate? I'll take that bet.
Yet there's a glaring logical absurdity to Shafer's argument, as well. Here's Kenneth Pollack, a former CIA man who was the Clinton administration's Iraq expert on the National Security Council:
US analysts were not alone in these views [that Iraq had WMD capabilities]. In the late spring of 2002 I participated in a Washington meeting about Iraqi WMD. Those present included nearly 20 former inspectors from the UN Special Commission (Unscom), established in 1991 to oversee the elimination of WMD in Iraq. One of the senior people put a question to the group: did anyone in the room doubt that Iraq was currently operating a secret centrifuge plant? No one did.Other nations' intelligence services were similarly aligned with US views. Somewhat remarkably, given how adamantly Germany would oppose the war, the German Federal Intelligence Service held the bleakest view of all, arguing that Iraq might be able to build a nuclear weapon within three years. Israel, Russia, Britain, China, and even France held positions similar to that of the US; Jacques Chirac told Time magazine last February: "There is a problem - the probable possession of weapons of mass destruction by an uncontrollable country, Iraq." No one doubted that Iraq had WMD. [Emphasis added]
So let's see. One investigative reporter at the New York Times is supposed to know more about Saddam's WMD capabilities than Pollack and Unscom, to say nothing of Jacques Chirac? Those suspicions were built on decades of accumulated context, including actual use of poison gas and rampant, repeated deceitfulness on WMD matters. On what basis, then, would Miller dispute the veracity of the reports? Better yet, suppose Miller had instead cast doubt on reports that Saddam's Iraq was pocked with mass graves and jails filled with children? CNN kept a reporter in Baghdad for years without even a whisper of atrocity. Last time I checked, Jane Arraf was still working.
My guess is that Miller believed she had cultivated sources who could -- and, to her mind, did -- get her inside the story that everyone in the world knew to be true: that Saddam had continued on with his WMD programs in spite of international sanctions. Anyhow, I suspect her real crime is being hated. She works at a job where jealousies are rich and egos are big, and where Miller has always, in one way or another, been despised by her colleagues. She made a perfect scapegoat for those who wish to believe that, but for this lone reporter, Saddam could still be on his throne, and we could still be wringing our hands in dismay over what to do about it. Now she's out of a job, and perhaps Shafer and her other pursuers are on their way to Reportopia. But the only people who are being truly dishonest in this matter are those who now suggest that evidence of Saddam's malfeasance -- with or without Judy Miller -- was not overwhelming.
