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Date sent: Tue, 24 Sep 2002 15:42:24 -0700
Subject: Spying in Iraq: From Fact to Allegation
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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]
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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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