Dear Laurie,
Out of respect for you and the
readership of Iraq News, I ask that you update a controversy you
described in an earlier edition. It had to do with a story I wrote about
the investigation of Iraq's prewar nuclear weapons program. David Kay, who
declined to provide any answers for that story, and Brig. Gen. Stephen
Meekin, whom I quoted, wrote in challenge of what I reported. They said, in
effect, that I rendered Meekin's remarks incorrectly and that he was, in
any case, neither involved in the WMD hunt nor qualified to pass
judgments.
The Washington Post does not reply in
print to letters and columns about our stories. Some readers, yourself perhaps
included, concluded from this silence that The Post acknowledged the Kay and
Meekin letters to be correct or our story to be wrong. We did not.
Quite the reverse.
My original piece on Iraq's nuclear
program was:
Search in Iraq Fails
to Find Nuclear Threat
No Evidence Uncovered Of Reconstituted Program
No Evidence Uncovered Of Reconstituted Program
The Kay and Meekin letters were
published here:
The Hunt for Iraq's
Weapons:
Michael Getler, the Post's ombudsman,
then took up the case:
Tough Words for a
Tough Story
Since then, Leonard Downie, the
executive editor, has sent an unpublished letter to David Kay. In it he said he
reviewed my raw notes, the full context of two lengthy conversations with
Meekin, the identities of my confidential sources and the information those
sources supplied. On the basis of that investigation, Downie told Kay the
Post is standing by the story without reservation. I believe he is prepared
to release his letter to other interested parties.
For our internal review, I
provided line by line answers to the Kay and Meekin letters. I will
summarize my replies to the three points you highlighted in your previous
email. If you reread the two letters closely, you will find that none of these
three points are actually in dispute.
1. Meekin's unit was, by all accounts,
integrated into the Iraq Survey Group when the ISG stood up in June. As a
general officer and leader of a major ISG component -- this is according to
Meekin, confirmed by DOD -- Meekin reports direct to Maj. Gen. Keith
Dayton, the ISG's commander. Meekin is also the ranking Australian
officer in the ISG, which means that he retains some elements of national
command over all his countrymen there. Dayton, of course, operates under the
direction of David Kay. The survey group is a joint, combined and interagency
task force, which blurs "reporting" chains to some degree. Kay makes use of
that ambiguity in his artful denial that Meekin reports to him.
In ordinary English,
Kay is in charge of the weapons hunt and Meekin works for him. Saying otherwise
is roughly like saying the leaders of the DCI Counterterrorism Center don't
work for George Tenet (because those leaders report through others, and include
personnel from the FBI) -- except that there are several layers between the
CTC and Tenet and only one between Meekin and Kay.
2. Meekin's unit did indeed
have (as Kay said) a major conventional mission -- collecting and analyzing
Iraqi radars and SAMS and so on. It also had, according to Meekin and all U.S.
officials who spoke of it, two major missions specific to WMD. One was
to find delivery systems for CW/BW/nuclear payloads (bombs,
warheads, etc.). The other was what Meekin called a "due diligence or
counterproliferation mission" to prevent the dispersal of materials that could
be used to produce WMD. It was in the latter context that I interviewed Meekin
for most of an hour on the aluminum tubes. It's true that among the reasons he
cited for calling them innocuous is that the tubes posed no conventional threat
to coalition troops. But that part of the conversation took less than a minute,
because Meekin did not need many words to persuade me that a rocket body without
motor, fins or warhead is fairly benign. The rest of the conversation had to do
with the possible use of the tubes as centrifuges, or evidence that would bear
on that question.
3. Meekin is not the person responsible
for making the nuclear judgment on the tubes, but he did accurately reflect the
judgment of those who are. (Please note that Kay writes carefully around this
point. He says for himself that it is too soon to make a
judgment, but he does not dispute that my story accurately
described the judgment of nuclear team leaders.) From confidential sources
I know authoritatively what the nuclear team has reported, and the story noted
that those sources were afraid to be named. Meekin's value was that he
spoke on the record, which is highly prized by our editors and readers alike. As
for qualifications, Meekin (a) is director-general of scientific and technical
assessment for Australia's Defence Intelligence Organisation, (b) commands a
staff of subject matter experts with similar background, including in dual use
technology, (c) borrowed experts from other ISG units when his mission required
them, specifically including the nuclear team for the tubes, and (d) was
describing -- accurately, as I already knew -- the views of his colleagues most
directly involved in the question. He need not be a nuclear expert himself to be
a credible source in light of these credentials.
I think I am as surprised as anyone at
the absence of evidence for Iraqi biological, chemical and missile programs.
(Neither I nor most of the experts in the field thought a nuclear program had
been revived.) I made some bets before the war that such evidence would be
found. That's what I like about my business. It's empirical, and I don't get
paid for predictions. I have followed the developing facts to the best of my
ability.
It must be tempting, but it's silly, to
suppose that my editors or I are looking for a story that discounts the threat.
My Unscom series of 1998, linked on the home page below, did as much to
highlight Iraq's obstruction of inspectors -- and the Clinton
administration's inability to address it in the U.N. -- as any journalism of its
day. I'd like as much as you would to find out how the story ends, and I'm not
done looking.
Thank you for enabling me to reach your
important audience with this reply.
Barton Gellman
Special Projects, National News
The Washington Post
251 W. 57th St., 12th floor
New York, NY 10019
212-445-4999 (office)
Special Projects, National News
The Washington Post
251 W. 57th St., 12th floor
New York, NY 10019
212-445-4999 (office)
home page:
www.washingtonpost.com/bartongellman
www.washingtonpost.com/bartongellman
