HOME
DV NEWS
SERVICE ARCHIVE SUBMISSIONS/CONTACT ABOUT DV
Out
on a Limb – Part Two
Senior
Source at The Independent on Iraq, WMD and Editorials
by
David Edwards and Media Lens
Dissident Voice
October
23, 2003
In
Part
1 of this alert, we presented part of an email exchange with a leader
writer and senior journalist at The Independent [UK].
On
7 October, Media Lens co-editor David Cromwell responded to the journalist. In
our reply, we detailed the vanishingly small coverage given in the Independent
to authoritative and critical voices. Cromwell wrote:
“I've
been following the Independent's performance on Iraq closely for several years.
One aspect that has struck me is how little attention has been granted to
authoritative voices who have views that challenge the US and UK governments'
version of events. Consider former UN assistant secretary-general Denis
Halliday, who set up the ‘oil-for-food’ programme in Iraq, and who resigned in
September 1998 describing the sanctions as ‘genocidal’. Halliday has been
mentioned just seven times in your paper in over five years, according to a
search on the Independent website. Three of those mentions were in news
stories; the other four were in two articles by John Pilger, one by
anti-sanctions campaigner Milan Rai and one by columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown.
This is a vanishingly small rate for such an important voice in one of the
country's leading liberal newspapers.
On
WMD, you describe yourself as one of the paper's arch-skeptics as to whether
they existed at all after the 1991 Gulf War. And yet a Lexis Nexis search of
your by-lined columns over five years shows that you made no mention of former
UNSCOM weapons inspector Scott Ritter. As you know, Ritter claims that his team
had disarmed Iraq of 90-95% of its WMD by December 1998. In the paper as a
whole, since 1 January 1999, he has been mentioned only 24 times out of 7474
articles in that period that refer to Iraq. Your editorial last Friday [3
October] stated: ‘It has been apparent for some time that there are no weapons
of mass destruction in Iraq’, but the Independent essentially ignored much
authoritative testimony to that effect for years while constantly channelling
the Bush-Blair version of events in its news pages.”
Cromwell
continued:
“With
regard to UN sanctions, Independent editorials and news reports have,
unfortunately, obscured the major responsibility of the US and UK for
maintaining the horrific sanctions regime, and instead have written in terms of
‘a propaganda war’ that Saddam was in danger of winning. Consider, for example,
this Independent editorial from February 2001:
’We
repeat, mantra-like, that we have no quarrel with the Iraqi people - only with
their leader. But we are losing the propaganda war; not only many Arabs, but
many in the West believe that we are responsible for the undoubted suffering of
ordinary Iraqis.’ ('Let Us Declare Victory Over Saddam, End Sanctions And Start
Afresh In The Region', The Independent, 27 February, 2001)
Or
take a typical news report from the same year:
’America
and Britain maintain a hardline policy on Iraq sanctions. There is deep
frustration in London and Washington over the Iraqi leader's success in depicting
UN sanctions as the main cause of Iraqi suffering.’ (Anne Penketh, 'British and
US aircraft bomb Iraqis', The Independent, 17 February, 2001)
Compare
and contrast these with Denis Halliday's account:
’Washington,
and to a lesser extent London, have deliberately played games through the
Sanctions Committee with this programme for years - it's a deliberate ploy...
That's why I've been using the word 'genocide', because this is a deliberate
policy to destroy the people of Iraq. I'm afraid I have no other view at this
late stage.’ (Interview with David Edwards, May 2000, www.medialens.org)
There
have been several excellent reports on the sanctions issue in the Independent.
Robert Fisk wrote in September 2002, that ‘a massive crime against humanity has
been committed in Iraq - half a million Iraqi children were killed by us for
nothing’. But this level of honesty has been a rarity. Previously, Patrick
Cockburn had gone as far as to say that ‘UN sanctions have killed far more
ordinary Iraqis than Saddam Hussein’ and that ‘[t]he result of this prolonged
economic siege of the Iraqi people has been devastating.’ ('If Saddam doesn't
get you the UN sanctions will', Patrick Cockburn, The Independent, 20 January,
2001).
But
now Fisk was going further and making an explicit link between ‘us’ (actually
the governments in Washington and London) and the deaths of half a million
Iraqi children - something that had almost never been made clear in your paper
for years. Why not?
After
this year's invasion, the Independent published a major 5400-word analysis on
the humanitarian crisis in Iraq : 'The Iraq Conflict: Special Analysis - Iraq
Has Fallen. Saddam Is Deposed. But, After 27 Days Of War, Little Else Is
Resolved', the Independent, April 16, 2003. There was not a +single+ mention of
the well-substantiated claim that the US-UK had been primarily responsible for
the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children, and more than a million Iraqi civilians
in total, in 12 years of sanctions. To omit our government's responsibility for
such a massive crime against humanity in reviewing the situation in Iraq is
remarkable.”
Cromwell
also wrote:
”Prior
to the war, a key UK government claim was that the Iraqi regime had always
foiled attempts to achieve peaceful disarmament so that military intervention
was a tragic necessity. What was so astonishing here was that in all the
thousands of news reports and commentaries on Iraq in the Independent, there
were almost literally no attempts to verify the truth of this claim. How
successful had the earlier inspections regimes actually been? What level of
success was achieved? To what extent did the Iraqis cooperate? Why did
inspections break down after so many years? Was peaceful disarmament feasible?
These questions were almost never asked. Ritter, for example, reports:
’If
this were argued in a court of law, the weight of evidence would go the other
way. Iraq has in fact demonstrated over and over a willingness to cooperate
with weapons inspectors.’ (Ritter and Rivers Pitt, War On Iraq, Profile Books,
2002, p.25)
Former
UNSCOM inspector and member of the College of Commissioners of UNMOVIC, Frank
Ronald Cleminson, reports:
’It
is often said, sometimes with dubious authority, that Baghdad never cooperated
in the UN quest to account for its nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons.
In fact, that is not entirely correct. Immediately following the termination of
hostilities in 1991, Iraq did cooperate in a significant fashion... Data from
the archives in New York bear out the contention that UN inspectors proved to
be extremely successful in effectively accounting for the disposition and
ultimate destruction of nuclear materials and associated facilities as well as
of proscribed missiles and of chemical weapons.’ ('What Happened to Saddam's
Weapons of Mass Destruction?', Arms Control Today, September 2003)
After
UNSCOM inspectors were withdrawn in December 1998 amid misleading claims that
Iraq was refusing to cooperate, Ritter was quoted as saying:
’What
[head of UNSCOM] Richard Butler did last week with the inspections was a
set-up. This was designed to generate a conflict that would justify a bombing.’
(Quoted, New York Post, 17 December, 1998)
A
UN diplomat, described as ‘generally sympathetic to Washington’, said: ‘Based
on the same facts he [Butler] could have said, “There were something like 300
inspections [in recent weeks] and we encountered difficulties in five.”’
(Washington Post, 17 December 1998)
These
realities have rarely, if ever, been discussed by the Independent. Why not?
Is
it any wonder that the British public has remained largely ignorant of a
consistent pattern of deceptions and untruths emanating from London and
Washington for many years? It is easy and largely meaningless to point to the
few exceptions of genuinely critical reporting and analysis. As Norman Solomon, Executive Director of the
US-based Institute for Public Accuracy, puts it: ‘scattered islands of
independent-minded reporting are lost in oceans of the stenographic reliance on
official sources’. (Solomon, Target Iraq: What The News Media Didn't Tell You,
New York: Context Books, 2003, p.26)
If
The Independent, and other mainstream media outlets in this country, had
examined state propaganda with the intense and systematic scrutiny it deserved,
rather than provide little more than an echo chamber for government deceptions,
then perhaps Blair would not have been in a position to support Bush in the
illegal, immoral and disastrous invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq.
I
look forward to hearing from you.
Best
wishes,
David
Cromwell”
Turning Up The Propaganda
Volume To 11
On
the same day, 7 October, we received a reply from our journalistic source which
began:
"It
was remarked quite often here [at the Independent] during the 'war', how strange
it was that several - perhaps a majority - of our main columnists favoured the
war, while the editorial line was so fiercely the other way. That was no more
than chance."
It
is noteworthy that though the paper's editorial line was "so
fiercely" anti-war, there had, in fact, been only feeble scrutiny of the
government's war rhetoric, as Media Lens has documented in earlier alerts.
Our
source continued:
"While
I was the main leader writer on Iraq before, during and after the war, there
were others who wrote when I was away or otherwise occupied. They were both
less anti-war and less anti-Blair than I was."
The
source then added some remarks about that person's role at the paper:
"Regrettably,
perhaps, I have not spent the past five years dealing with Iraq, or WMD! I took
over this job [diplomatic editor] two years ago, after almost five years in
Washington. From there, I was covering mainly domestic US politics. The 'war'
of the time was Kosovo, and I covered the US end of that, as well as such
things as Monica Lewinsky, the tied election of 2000, etc. Iraq, weapons
inspections etc was treated as a UN story, from New York. Returning to London,
I had the whole diplomatic portfolio, which included, as I roughly remember,
the aftermath of 9/11, Zimbabwe, Gibraltar, Afghanistan and its aftermath. Iraq
was still covered mostly from the UN or from the region (Fisk)."
The
journalist continued: "I only came into the Iraq debate when war clouds
loomed (spring/summer last year). I did not, and do not, have a regular column,
so have to compete for comment space with the regulars. There was no problem
about my expressing a contrary view; there was, and is, huge difficulty getting
column space at all. The chief outlet for my Iraq war skepticism was,
therefore, mainly the leader column. But no one would have risked having this
paper, or probably any other, say in its leader column that there were no WMD.
The whole government-generated consensus was the other way. At that time, also,
there was always the chance that they could be discovered the next day and then
you would look very stupid."
Once
again, note that the Independent source is rejecting an indefensible position
that no reasonable commentator actually took, namely: to state categorically
that Iraq had +no+ WMD at all. As we highlighted in Media Lens's reply above,
the paper's editorials and its news reports failed to reflect authoritative
testimony that UN weapons inspections teams had disarmed Iraq of 90-95% of its
capability for chemical and biological warfare.
Note,
moreover, the disingenuous phrase, "government-generated consensus".
This implies a process whereby the sheer volume and intensity of government
propaganda generates its own authenticity. This is possible only if journalists
and editors are happy to allow state-sanctioned deceptions to become
established truths. The media then becomes little more than a giant amplifier -
turned up to 11! - for propagating war rhetoric.
Through the Looking Glass
The
Independent's source then shed additional light on the tactics of the
government propaganda machine. This also reveals the extent to which
journalists and editors were unable, or unwilling, to treat government claims
with due skepticism:
"The
reporting front was more complicated. We had three 'reporting centres', if you
like, as did most papers. The MoD, Downing St (the lobby) and the FCO [Foreign
and Commonwealth Office]. As was clear at the time and is even clearer from the
Hutton transcripts, the foreign office was largely sidelined through the whole
Iraq saga. The two dossiers were presented first to the lobby. Technical stuff
went thro the MoD. The FCO people "span" select bits to us, highlighting
such wonders as mustard gas and reeling off the figures for awful substances
Saddam had. But the information was coming first out of the lobby and so it was
they who reported it. I was very 'uncooperative' at FCO briefings, objecting
regularly that almost none of the information they were giving us was current,
and that mustard gas (which they made a big fuss about) was hardly what most
people imagined when they thought of WMD."
Our
source continued:
"Now,
maybe the answer was simply to ignore the FCO and pursue the WMD skeptics. The
problem for a daily paper was that the lobby was always given the
"story" - and it is difficult to argue that an equal and opposite
story (or any story at all) should be written to rubbish it - especially as the
contrary info - Ritter et al - was by then not new. The only new element that I
tried very hard to get into the paper (in a long report which, to my
displeasure, was greatly cut) was the leaked testimony of Saddam's son in law,
Kamal, who had said under CIA debriefing that all stocks were destroyed in
1995.
"This
was initially leaked to Newsweek in the US, which printed it - to no
reverberations whatever. There was then a second attempt to get it out in this
country. But again, no one really wanted to know. I had to use a peg about the
find of some suspect chemical substance in Iraq to bring in the Kamal info,
most of which was then cut for reasons of space. That is a judgment the news
page editor makes."
Media
Lens finds the above technocratic 'explanation' for media acquiescence -
indeed, media complicity - in the attack on Iraq truly remarkable. Note the
curious assertion that, because "contrary info" by Ritter and others
was "not new", it could not be used to challenge, far less discredit,
the gross deceptions, omissions and lies that were being regularly promulgated
by government departments. Ignoring the scientific fact that any remaining
biological weapons would by now be "useless sludge", as Ritter and
others had explained, is supposedly justifiable because it is "not
new". This is Alice in Wonderland logic. Imagine physical theories about
the structure of the universe having to be rebuilt constantly from scratch
because observational evidence of the Big Bang was "not new".
The
Independent journalist also noted that "it is difficult to argue"
along a line that diverges from government opinion. But why it should be
so difficult for the supposed watchdogs of democracy to scrutinise US-UK
propaganda, especially when it has been so patently absurd and false, is
quietly passed over. So too are the difficult daily judgments that "the
news page editor makes". These are judgments that systematically benefit
established power.
The
journalist then continued with a remarkable observation on public opinion:
"I
think our Sunday paper may have done a better job on the weapons skepticism
than the daily. But the skeptical reports gained very little 'traction' with
public opinion. I suppose that Downing Street should be well satisfied at this
propaganda success!"
Two
million people marching in British streets on 15 February, 2003, then,
represents "very little 'traction' with public opinion". Downing
Street might indeed "be well satisfied at this propaganda success",
achieved with the benefit of a largely willing media.
A
recurring element in the fiction of a vigorous fourth estate is the notion that
only brief moments occur in the hurly-burly of current affairs when government
rhetoric can be challenged - and then the moment vanishes. As our Independent
source put it:
"It
was clever of the government to use the lobby rather than the FCO as its outlet
for WMD and war stuff. If the lobby correspondent writes up, for instance, the
45 minute warning with the PM's imprimatur, it is quite difficult for an editor
to prefer a story that questions it. A small paragraph of skepticism is almost
the most you can get in. I regret being on hols when the first - Sept - dossier
came out, because that would have been an opportunity to put an opposite view,
but on a daily paper, the moment passes. And on the existence or not of WMD, I
was thought very peculiar even to pose a question about it."
Again
we see the degree to which media professionals have become embedded within
state-corporate power, isolating themselves from humane, progressive and
knowledgeable sources who ask unsettling questions and challenge received
wisdom. To reflect 'alternative' sources - such as former senior UN diplomats,
weapons inspectors, aid agencies, and indigenous voices - would simply be
"very peculiar".
The
journalist continued:
"I
agree absolutely, that Ritter et al were quite scurrilously disparaged (I remember
that Ritter's sanity was called into question at one point). And no one really
took seriously Iraq's denials that it had WMD or the extent to which it was
cooperating with the UN and weapons inspectors. Again, I made similar points at
editorial meetings, but you have to remember how strong the consensus was on
Iraq's weapons capability. Ekeus and Blix were rather more cautious and
ambiguous in their judgements at the time than they have been since (and than
you suggest), and as for [former UNSCOM chief Richard] Butler."
Regular
Media Lens readers will recall previous media alerts -- or can read them in our
archive at www.medialens.org/alerts.html
-- that show the falsity of the above assertion on "how strong the
consensus was on Iraq's weapons capability."
The
Independent journalist concluded:
"With
hindsight, I think it was a highly successful government propaganda job (on
both sides of the Atlantic). Unfortunately for them, the information at the
centre of it - the existence of WMD, which most of the government apparently
believed in some form - has been
discredited on the ground. I doubt that any of them anticipated that happening:
1. At all, or 2. So soon."
In
reviewing the lengthy reply from this senior Independent journalist, Media Lens
was astonished that there was no mention of UN sanctions, covered at length in
our email of 7 October. In other words, there was no response at all to the
well-documented charge that Washington and London bear a heavy responsibility
for the deaths of around one million Iraqis under 12 years of UN sanctions, and
that this was largely buried by the media. That this tragic reality could be
passed over in silence is a remarkable example of thought control in the
service of power.
It
is also tragic that the Independent, and other mainstream sources, had access
to authoritative sources that could have utterly discredited government
propaganda before the invasion of Iraq. Future historians will, one
hopes, judge the role of the media appropriately.
SUGGESTED
ACTION
The goal of Media Lens is to promote
rationality, compassion and respect for others. In writing letters to
journalists, we strongly urge readers to maintain a polite, non-aggressive and
non-abusive tone.
Write to Simon Kelner, Independent
editor: s.kelner@independent.co.uk
Please copy all emails to Media Lens: editor@medialens.org
Visit the Media Lens website: http://www.medialens.org
David
Edwards is the editor of
Media Lens,
and the author of Burning All
Illusions: A Guide to Personal and Political Freedom (South
End Press, 1996). Email: editor@medialens.org.
Visit the Media Lens website: http://www.MediaLens.org
Other Recent Articles by David Edwards
and Media Lens
* Lulling
Us Into Submission: Advertising, Core Truths, And The Great Electronic
Tranquilizer
* The Importance
of Being Nuanced: A Tragicomedy Of Media Manners
* What
Should I Do? Selfishness, Happiness And Benefiting Others
* The BBC,
Self-Glorification And Disaster
* Adventures
in Media Surreality – Part 2: Global Climate Catastrophe – Mustn’t Grumble
* Adventures
in Media Surreality – Part 1: Blair’s Serious and Current Lies
* Biting the
Hand That Feeds – Part 2
* Stenographers
to Power: "Saddam Loyalists" Or "Anti-Occupation Forces"?
Ask The BBC
HOME