The night of the antiwar protest, NBC Nightly News at least managed to mention the rally on the air. Anchor Brian Williams, though, was careful to give one sentence to the antiwar protesters and one sentence to a small group of pro-war demonstrators who also gathered in Washington, D.C., that day. Antiwar forces absolutely dwarfed their pro-war counterparts but NBC news executives thought both groups deserved the same amount of coverage, with the subtext being dueling war demonstrators facing off against each other. That was a common MSM theme. CNN reported it "was a weekend of protests and counter-protests in Washington."
The MSM's ingrained timidity regarding war protesters, even in 2005, was telling because on the eve of the Sheehan-led rally, a CNN/USA Today poll revealed 67 percent of Americans disapproved of Bush's handling of the war in Iraq and 59 percent said sending troops to invade Iraq was a mistake. Both numbers represented public opinion high-water marks since the war began. Yet the press, still spooked about charges it was not being sufficiently pro-administration during a time of war, treated antiwar demonstrators with an overabundance of caution.
On Monday, September 26, when Sheehan along with 370 war protesters were arrested outside the White House, NBC's Nightly News ignored the arrests. Both the CBS and ABC nightly newscasts gave the arrests one sentence, downplaying the numbers involved. CBS reported Sheehan was arrested along with "dozens" of others. (As in, thirty dozen?) The next morning CNN, ignoring the fact that nearly four hundred people chose to be arrested in order to protest the war, reported "Sheehan and several others were arrested." [Emphasis added.]
The MSM's signature 2002-2003 timidity during the run-up to war, though, was most clearly visible in their reporting on weapons of mass destruction and the overblown prewar estimates about Iraq's firepower. The topic was absolutely essential. If the White House could prove, or at least convince most Americans, that Saddam posed an imminent danger, then the war of choice with Iraq would be easier to sell. Easier for Bush to announce, one month before the invasion, "My job is to protect the American people from further harm. I believe that Saddam Hussein is a threat to the American people." Any lingering, why-a-war-now doubts would hinder that sales pitch. In the fall of 2002 the White House needed to paint a picture of Saddam's Iraq as a country flooded with illegal chemical and biological warfare agents. The MSM was more than willing to help with the task.
A telling and comprehensive media study of the WMD coverage conducted by Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland (CISSM) and the University of Maryland and released in March 2004 concluded too many press stories simply repeated the "official line" on WMD regarding the Iraq war, and that most journalist accepted the Bush administration's linking of the War on Terror with WMDs, while at the same time failing to note that there was no precedent of terror organizations demonstrating the capacity to use WMDs. Simply put, "The American media did not play the role of checking and balancing the exercise of power that the standard theory of democracy requires," according to CISSM, which monitored WMD coverage between October 2002 and May 2003 from seven U.S. news outlets: Christian Science Monitor, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Washington Post, Newsweek, US News & World Report, as well as NPR's "Morning Edition" and "All Things Considered."
In retrospect, NBC's Brian Williams argued the MSM had no choice but to simply repeat what administration officials were saying about Saddam's alleged WMD arsenal. "We had no independent testing authority," Williams told CNN. "We had to go with [what] the government experts and witnesses [were saying], including our own secretary of state before the United Nations." Williams's predecessor Tom Brokaw agreed, insisting, "A lot of what happened during the lead-up to [war] was unknowable." In truth, there was a long list of distinguished military and political experts who were ready and willing -- before the war began -- to illuminate NBC's viewers about the gaping holes in Bush's justification for war and what the colossal hurdles would be post-invasion. NBC anchors, though, were not overly interested in hearing from them and yet years later insisted there was no way to have known the war had been poorly thought out.
As the MSM watched Fox News post big rating numbers with its openly conservative broadcasts while at the same time journalists were being dogged by accusations of being too liberal, out of touch, and unpatriotic in a time of national crisis, pressure mounted to prove they could play nice with a Republican administration and forcefully back a war. That seemed to be particularly true at the New York Times, which knee-jerk conservatives had singled out as being too pro-peace in its reporting. Executive editor Howell Raines wanted to show his right-wing critics wrong. "According to half a dozen sources within the Times, Raines wanted to prove once and for all that he wasn't editing the paper in a way that betrayed his liberal beliefs," wrote Seth Mnookin in his 2004 Times expose, "Hard News." Mnookin quoted Doug Frantz, the former investigative editor of the Times, who recalled how "Howell Raines was eager to have articles that supported the war-mongering out of Washington. He discouraged pieces that were at odds with the administration's position on Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction and alleged links of al-Qaida." The New York Observer later reported, "One senior Washington bureau staffer said that as the Bush administration edged closer to invasion, the editorial climate inside The Times shifted from questioning the rationale for military action to putting the paper on a proper war footing. 'Everyone could see the war coming. The Times wanted to be out front on the biggest story,' the staffer said. 'It became the plan of attack.'"
For the administration, one cornerstone of its plan of attack was built around Iraqi defectors who told reporters wild tales about Saddam's WMDs. Shepherded to the press by Ahmad Chalabi, the unreliable, glad-handing Iraqi defector who, much to the White House's delight, conned reporters with tales of Saddam's fearsome arsenal, the defectors were greeted as truth tellers. And perhaps nowhere were their tales told more excitedly than on the front pages of the New York Times, and most often told by the sympathetic Judith Miller who stood out as the paper's go-to person for anonymous heavy security scoops and who had risen to the top of the Times's newsroom star system. Miller may have won the admiration of the Times leadership, but years prior to the war in Iraq at least one reporter with the paper voiced his distaste for Miller's unique style of pro-government reporting. According to the Washington Post, Craig Pyes, a former contract writer for the Times who teamed up with Miller for a series on al-Qaida, complained about her in a December 2000 memo to Times editors and asked that his byline not appear on one piece:
"I'm not willing to work further on this project with Judy Miller. I do not trust her work, her judgment, or her conduct. She is an advocate, and her actions threaten the integrity of the enterprise, and of everyone who works with her. ... She has turned in a draft of a story of a collective enterprise that is little more than dictation from government sources over several days, filled with unproven assertions and factual inaccuracies."
One of the Times's first high-profile, post-9/11 defector stories came on December 20, 2001, when neoconservatives inside the White House were first pressing their case for an invasion of Iraq. The article was headlined, "An Iraqi Defector Tells of Work on at Least 20 Hidden Weapon Sites." Written by Miller, the story wove the startling tale of Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, a forty-three-year-old Iraqi who had fled his homeland in Kurdistan and who, according to Miller, "said he personally worked on renovations of secret facilities for biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons in underground wells, private villas, and under the Saddam Hussein Hospital in Baghdad as recently as a year ago." If verified, she noted, "his allegations would provide ammunition to officials within the Bush administration who have been arguing that Mr. Hussein should be driven from power partly because of his unwillingness to stop making weapons of mass destruction, despite his pledges to do so."
As James Bamford later detailed in Rolling Stone, al-Haideri was lying about his claims about Saddam. CIA officials, who had strapped al-Haideri up to polygraph tests for hours at a time, knew he was lying long before Miller ever wrote her ominous-sounding article. (The CIA did not peddle the fake al-Haideri story to Miller, Chalabi did.) Regardless of its authenticity, al-Haideri's fanciful tale, trumpeted by the Times, proved to be invaluable to the White House. Wrote Bamford:
"For months, hawks inside and outside the administration had been pressing for a preemptive attack on Iraq. Now, thanks to Miller's story, they could point to 'proof' of Saddam's 'nuclear threat.' The story was soon being trumpeted by the White House and repeated by newspapers and television networks around the world. It was the first in a long line of hyped and fraudulent stories that would eventually propel the U.S. into a war with Iraq -- the first war based almost entirely on a covert propaganda campaign targeting the media."
The administration's war architects had set up a simple, yet foolproof way to disseminate pro-war propaganda through the Times; foolproof as long as Times reporters and editors played along. Here's how one former CIA analyst described the scheme to James Moore, writing in Salon:
"The White House had a perfect deal with Miller. Chalabi is providing the Bush people with the [Saddam] information they need to support their political objectives with Iraq, and he is supplying the same material to Judy Miller. Chalabi tips her on something and then she goes to the White House, which has already heard the same thing from Chalabi, and she gets it corroborated by some insider she always describes as a 'senior administration official.'"
Round and round it went. Of course there were scores of senior intelligence officials within the administration, and specifically within the CIA, who refuted Chalabi's intelligence, but they never received the same type of airing in Miller's articles. In retrospect, Miller's Iraq reporting was in desperate need of balance, not to mention professional skepticism. Two Page One stories in particular stand out not only for being extraordinarily helpful to the White House's war efforts -- in fact, the articles appear to have been spoon-fed by government officials -- but also for being untrue.
The first arrived September 8, 2002, and was co-written with Michael Gordon. The duo were investigating the state of Iraq's arsenal and discovered that Saddam had made a bold initiative in hopes of reconstituting his nuclear weapons program. Two weeks earlier Vice President Dick Cheney announced in an August 26 speech, that "Many of us are convinced that Saddam Hussein will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon ... and subject the United States and any other nation to nuclear blackmail." Few independent arms experts signed off on Cheney's Armageddon warning. But that's where the Times September 8 expose came in. Keep in mind that the Times article surfaced after Bush's chief of staff and former General Motors executive Andy Card had famously explained that the administration held off from trying to publicly make the case for war during the summer months of 2002 because, "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August."
So think of the Times September 8 article as the launch commercial in the war marketing effort. And what more could the White House have asked for than the so-called liberal New York Times trumpeting on its front page a Holy Shit-type exclusive that forcefully reported, "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." Specifically, the article relayed administration claims that Saddam had been trying to import thousands of high-strength aluminum tubes used for rotors in centrifuges to enrich uranium, a key step in producing an atomic bomb. None of the tubes ever reached Iraq. The article came complete with colorful quotes from administration officials who feared a "mushroom cloud" if Saddam's mad arms march was not stopped.
At times it was difficult for readers to discern where White House spin ended and the Times reporting began. Adopting the administration rhetoric with astonishing ease, Miller and Gordon wrote, "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." [Emphasis added.] Of course, arms inspectors later determined that allegations about Saddam's "nuclear ambitions" were erroneous.
The tubes article, which was later discredited, appeared on a Sunday. That morning administration officials, the same ones who likely leaked the story in the first place, hyped the Times exclusive on the morning talk shows. On CNN's "Late Edition," National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice insisted the tubes "are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs." She added: "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud," using the exact same language as one of the off-the-record administration sources featured in the Times exclusive. The synergy between the White House and the Times was stunning, even to other members of the MSM. "You leak a story to the New York Times and the New York Times prints it, and then you go on the Sunday shows quoting the New York Times and corroborating your own information," noted CBS reporter Bob Simon. "You've got to hand it to them. That takes, as we say here in New York, chutzpah."
As Michael Massing wrote in the New York Review of Books, "The September 8 story on the aluminum tubes was especially significant. Not only did it put the Times' imprimatur on one of the administration's chief claims, but it also established a position at the paper that apparently discouraged further investigation into this and related topics." In other words, Miller, a star reporter, had publicly and forcefully staked out her, and the paper's, position regarding Saddam's WMD. Unfortunately for both, it was the wrong position.
The Times tubes article immediately raised doubts among scientists and other independent experts who did not believe the tubes in question would have been used for making nuclear weapons. At least one, David Albright, director of the Institute for Science and International Security, contacted Miller after the article ran and spoke with her at length, relaying the skepticism he and others had. A follow-up to the tubes story was imminent and the Times had two choices. It could step back and emphasize the doubts being raised regarding the story being told by the White House, thereby deflating some of the original article's hyperbole, or the paper could stick close to the president and forge ahead with the Saddam-might-have-nukes narrative. Miller opted for the latter. Said Albright after reading the Times follow-up tubes article, "I thought for sure she' d quote me or some people in the government who didn't agree. It just wasn't there."
Fast forward to Iraq, April 2003, and Miller was embedded with U.S. forces, hunting for WMDs, sporting a military uniform, and boasting top-secret security clearance no other reporter -- let alone Times editor -- could match. (Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld reportedly signed off on Miller's unique arrangement.) It seemed clear Miller, rewarded for her bellicose prewar WMD reporting, had landed a unique role in the search for WMDs, although one that would be hard to describe as a journalist. Instead, she seemed to be more of a quasi government agent who happened to file dispatches on deadline. As the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz reported, "More than a half-dozen military officers said that Miller acted as a middleman between the Army unit with which she was embedded and Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmed Chalabi, on one occasion accompanying Army officers to Chalabi's headquarters, where they took custody of Saddam Hussein's son-in-law. She also sat in on the initial debriefing of the son-in-law, these sources say. Since interrogating Iraqis was not the mission of the unit, these officials said, it became a "Judith Miller team," in the words of one officer close to the situation. Kurtz also quoted an anonymous senior staff officer complaining, "It's impossible to exaggerate the impact she had on the mission of this unit, and not for the better."
Next page: The press har-de-hars over Bush's gag about not being able to find the WMD