Followup Needed After Newsweek Story
on
Iraqi Weapons
by
Norman Solomon
Dissident Voice
February 26, 2003
You
gotta hand it to America's mass media: When war hangs in the balance, they sure
know how to bury a story.
After devoting thousands of
network hours and oceans of ink to stories about "weapons of mass
destruction" in Iraq, major U.S. news outlets did little but yawn in the
days after the latest Newsweek published an exclusive report on the subject --
a piece headlined "The Defector's Secrets."
It's hard to imagine how any
journalist on the war beat could read the article's lead without doing a double
take: "Hussein Kamel, the highest-ranking Iraqi official ever to defect
from Saddam Hussein's inner circle, told CIA and British intelligence officers
and U.N. 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."
The article was written by
Newsweek national security correspondent John Barry, who has been with the
magazine since 1985. After following the Iraq weapons story for a dozen years,
he draws on in-depth knowledge -- in stark contrast to the stenographic
approach taken by most journalists on the beat, who seem content to relay the
pronouncements coming out of Washington and the United Nations.
"I think the whole
issue of Iraq's weaponry has become steadily more impacted and complicated over
the years," Barry told me in a Feb. 26 interview. People often have
trouble making sense out of the "twists and turns of the arguments."
And, Barry added, what's reported as "fact" provided by the U.S.
government or the U.N. is in many cases mere "supposition."
Now, it's time for us to ask
some loud questions about the U.S. media echo chamber. Such as: Is there anybody
awake in there?
Barry's potentially
explosive story, appearing in the March 3 edition of Newsweek, notes that
"Kamel was Saddam Hussein's son-in-law and had direct knowledge of what he
claimed: for 10 years he had run Iraq's nuclear, chemical, biological and
missile programs."
Making use of written
documentation that Newsweek has verified as authentic, the article reports:
"Kamel's revelations about the destruction of Iraq's WMD stocks were
hushed up by the U.N. inspectors, sources say, for two reasons. Saddam did not
know how much Kamel had revealed, and the inspectors hoped to bluff Saddam into
disclosing still more. And Iraq has never shown the
documentation to support
Kamel's story. Still, the defector's tale raise questions about whether the WMD
stockpiles attributed to Iraq still exist."
The Newsweek story came off
the press on Sunday, Feb. 23. The next day, a would-be authoritative source --
the Central Intelligence Agency -- explained that it just wasn't so. "It
is incorrect, bogus, wrong, untrue," declared CIA spokesman Bill Harlow.
For good measure, on the same day, a Reuters article quoted an unnamed
"British government source" eager to contradict Newsweek's documented
account of what Kamel had said. "We've checked back and he didn't say this,"
the source contended. "He said just the opposite, that the WMD program was
alive and kicking."
Under the unwritten rules of
American media coverage, such denials tend to end the matter when the president
and Congress have already decided that war is necessary.
It's not as if Kamel ranks
as a nobody in media circles. Journalists and U.S. officials are fond of
recounting that Saddam Hussein made sure he was quickly killed after the
defector returned to Iraq following six months of voluntary exile.
"Until now, Kamel has
best been known for exposing Iraq's deceptions about how far its pre-Gulf War
biological weapons programs had advanced," media analyst Seth Ackerman
points out. He adds that Newsweek's story "is particularly noteworthy because
hawks in the Bush administration have frequently referred to the Kamel episode
as evidence that U.N. inspectors are incapable of disarming Iraq on their
own."
Ackerman cites a speech Dick
Cheney made last August, when the vice president said that what occurred with
Kamel "should serve as a reminder to all that we often learned more as the
result of defections than we learned from the inspection regime itself."
Accounts of Kamel's
debriefing as a defector and his subsequent demise have often served to
illustrate the dishonesty and brutality of Iraq's government. But now that
other information has emerged about what he had to say, the fellow seems to be
quite a bit less newsworthy.
Norman Solomon is Executive
Director of the Institute for Public Accuracy (www.accuracy.org) and a
syndicated columnist. His latest book is Target Iraq: What the News Media
Didn’t Tell You (Context Books, 2003) with Reese Erlich. Email: mediabeat@igc.org
* Video of the recent C-SPAN
"Washington Journal" one-hour interview with
Norman Solomon:
http://video.c-span.org:8080/ramgen/jdrive/wj020703_solomon.rm
Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn't
Tell You, by Norman
Solomon and Reese Erlich, has just been published as a paperback original by
Context Books. The introduction is by Howard Zinn and the afterword is by Sean
Penn. For the prologue to the book and other information, go to: http://www.contextbooks.com/newF.html