Why the Press Failed on Iraq
And How One Team of Reporters Got It Right
Twenty
years ago, the George W. Bush administration invaded Iraq to topple
Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and eliminate the weapons of mass
destruction (WMD) officials said he had. Getting the American public to
support a war against a country that had not attacked the United States
required the administration to tell a convincing story of why the war
was necessary. For that, it needed the press.
I
was Knight Ridder’s Washington, D.C., bureau chief at the time, and
among other duties handled our national security coverage. This gave me a
front-row seat to Washington’s march to war and the media’s role in it.
As the Bush administration began making its case for invading Iraq, too
many Washington journalists, caught up in the patriotic fervor after
9/11, let the government’s story go unchallenged. At Knight Ridder’s
Washington bureau, we started asking questions and publishing stories
that challenged the Bush administration’s claims that Iraq had an active
WMD program and ties to al Qaeda. One thing that set Knight Ridder’s
coverage apart was our sourcing—forgoing senior officials in Washington
for experts and scientists inside and outside the Beltway and more
junior staffers and military officers much closer to the relevant
intelligence.
Such
an approach would also have helped U.S. policymakers. The failed wars
in Afghanistan and Iraq show what happens when top officials ignore
their subordinates or assemble their own teams of analysts to confirm
their biases—and when journalists become stenographers for them.
Unfortunately, 20 years on, there is little evidence that the Washington
press corps has learned this lesson. If anything, today’s bleak media
environment has only made it harder to get the story right.
IS THIS TRUE?
On the morning of September 11,
2001, as a pillar of smoke rose from the Pentagon across the Potomac,
Knight Ridder’s Washington bureau set out, like our competitors, to
confirm what we all suspected—that al Qaeda was behind the attacks. We
were an experienced group of journalists, with years spent developing
sources in the intelligence community and the military. I had reported
and edited for Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, and U.S. News and World Report.
Knight
Ridder also had two superb national security reporters in Jonathan
Landay and Warren Strobel, who later were reinforced by Joe Galloway,
arguably the greatest war correspondent of the Vietnam era. Other news
organizations also had formidable talent, along with larger staffs,
bigger budgets, better reputations, and broader reach. Yet in the early
days after 9/11, they didn’t seem to be noticing the red flags that the
Knight Ridder team had already started seeing.
The
first flag appeared just days after the attacks, when Strobel came back
to the office and reported that Bush administration officials had been
discussing not only the al Qaeda
leader Osama bin Laden and his Taliban hosts in Afghanistan but also
Iraq. That made little sense. Saddam’s history of supporting terrorism
was less compelling than that of the dictators Muammar al-Qaddafi of
Libya or Hafez al-Assad of Syria, not to mention Iran’s ayatollahs.
Saddam had given Abu Nidal, one of the most notorious Palestinian
terrorists, limited support—but had expelled him in 1983. Abu Nidal
returned to Iraq in 2002, only to die under mysterious circumstances.
Some U.S. intelligence officials thought Saddam ordered his death in an
attempt to deprive the United States of one casus belli.
Although
some senior administration officials began trying to link Saddam to al
Qaeda, their more knowledgeable subordinates in the intelligence
community and the State Department were questioning why bin Laden, a
Salafi extremist, would link arms with Saddam, a secular ruler whose
likely heirs were his two booze-swilling, skirt-chasing sons, Uday and
Qusay.
In
the days and weeks after the attacks, there were early warnings that
something was amiss. They were easy to spot if you were looking for
them, but few people in the upper levels of the Bush administration or
at other major news organizations, riding the patriotic wave sweeping
the country, were looking.
Too many Washington journalists let the government’s story go unchallenged.
We were. On September 22, 11 days after the attacks, Strobel reported that some administration officials and outside experts were skeptical that Iraq had played any role in them. On October 11, he reported
that Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy U.S. secretary of defense, had
nevertheless dispatched a former CIA director, James Woolsey, to Wales
to search for evidence that Saddam was linked to an earlier attack on
the World Trade Center. A senior U.S. official told Strobel that
Wolfowitz and others at the Pentagon were “seized” with the idea that Iraq was behind the attacks.
That
same month, Washington reporters covering the story began receiving
appetizing nuggets from a new source: Ahmed Chalabi, the head of the
Iraqi National Congress, an exile group whose eagerness to take control
of Iraq and its oil wealth was obvious. I had first met Chalabi with a
friend at a Georgetown townhouse years before 9/11, and when we left, I
told my friend: “If he gave me change for a quarter, I’d count it.”
Chalabi’s
camp fed me two pieces of information in October and early November
that were knocked down immediately by the U.S. intelligence officers
with whom I spoke. So I ignored them rather than print impotent “he said/she said” stories.
According
to the Chalabi team, Farouk Hijazi, the Iraqi ambassador to Turkey and a
former head of Iraqi intelligence, had traveled to Afghanistan, met
with bin Laden, and offered him sanctuary in Iraq. That much was true,
two U.S. intelligence officers said, but the story didn’t end there. A
friendly Arab power, the intelligence officers said, had inserted an
agent in bin Laden’s camp, and he had reported that after Hijazi left,
bin Laden had turned to his second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and
said they would not move to Iraq because if they did, al Qaeda’s agenda
would become Saddam’s, not theirs. The real story reinforced our belief
that bin Laden and Saddam were in no way natural allies.
Undeterred, Chalabi’s camp came back to me with a report that Iraq was operating a terrorist
training facility at Salman Pak, some 15 miles south of Baghdad, using
an airplane fuselage to instruct hijackers. When asked about it, U.S.
and foreign intelligence officers told me off the record that they had
been keeping an eye on the facility but that they could find no evidence
that foreign terrorists were training there. More likely, these sources
said, it was a counterhijacking training facility. When I asked who the
Iraqis were afraid might try to hijack one of their airliners, one of
the officers responded, “Oh, probably Osama.”
I
decided not to write anything about the supposed training facility,
even a story that presented the allegation and the knockdown of it. It
made no sense to publish a story that would inject a falsehood into the public debate. Other outlets, including The New York Times, ran the story.
Today’s bleak media environment has only made it harder to get the story right.
Both
the administration and some major news outlets continued to rely on
information from Chalabi, who cunningly pivoted from positing an Iraq–al
Qaeda connection to providing dubious intelligence about Saddam’s
alleged WMD programs. Chalabi often fed the same information to the
Pentagon and to the press, which made some journalists think they had
two sources when they had only one. Landay and Tish Wells, the bureau’s
researcher, later exposed how successful the Iraqi National Congress had been at getting major news outlets to run bogus intelligence.
By
late November and early December 2001, U.S. military and intelligence
officers in Afghanistan—along with those supporting them at U.S. Special
Operations Command in Tampa, Florida—were asking me off the record why
officials back in Washington were diverting resources from their
efforts. On February 13, 2002, Strobel and I wrote
a story that answered their question: “President Bush has decided to
oust Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein from power and ordered the CIA, the
military and other agencies to devise a combination of military,
diplomatic and covert steps to achieve that goal, a senior U.S. official
said Tuesday.”
For
most of 2002 and early 2003, the Bush administration’s main public
relations task was to sell the war, and too many news organizations were
buying it. Still, basic reporting discredited—but failed to
silence—some of the administration’s sales pitches. On September 6,
2002, Landay reported
that the lack of hard evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was
worrying some U.S. officials. “There is no new intelligence that
indicates the Iraqis have made significant advances in their nuclear,
biological or chemical weapons programs,” a U.S. intelligence official
told Landay.
The administration’s claim that Iraq had ordered aluminum tubes to enrich uranium was conveniently leaked to The New York Times,
allowing Bush administration officials to discuss publicly what
otherwise would be classified information. The story, however, fell
victim to simple fact-checking by Landay. He called experts at the
Energy Department’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. They said the tubes could not be used to enrich uranium.
It made no sense to publish a story that would inject a falsehood into the public debate.
Four days later, Strobel reported that some administration officials had misgivings about Bush’s Iraq policy. On October 24, 2002, Landay and Strobel revealed
the feud between administration hard-liners determined to oust Saddam
and intelligence professionals and experts at the CIA, the State
Department, and other agencies who distrusted the information coming
from Chalabi and his associates.
Galloway,
who was awarded a Bronze Star for risking his life trying to save a
wounded American soldier in Vietnam in 1965 and had unrivaled access to
senior military officials, contributed to many of these stories, but we
kept his name off most of them because his friendships were well known.
Nevertheless, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld became so infuriated
by Galloway’s reporting that he summoned him to his Pentagon office for a
one-on-one meeting. When Galloway got there, Rumsfeld had summoned
reinforcements. He accused Galloway of relying on retired generals as
his sources. Galloway replied that many of his sources were still on
active duty. “Hell,” he said. “Some
of them might even be in this room.” When we returned to our office,
Landay, Strobel, and I asked him if that was true. “No,” Galloway
replied. “But it was fun watching ’em sweat.”
Our
reporting might have been getting under officials’ skin, but it did not
slow the administration’s march to war. Some Knight Ridder papers even
ignored what their own Washington bureau was writing and instead printed
New York Times stories (which the paper later admitted were
wrong). One Knight Ridder editor even assigned reporters from his local
paper to see if what we were writing was accurate because the Times and The Washington Post were not reporting the same things.
We
were undeterred by these legitimate local decisions not to run our
coverage and by the Bush administration’s decision to ignore our stories
rather than call attention to them by disputing them, and we continued
reporting. After all, we never sought to influence U.S. policy, much
less derail the invasion planning, but only to air the debate inside the
government as best we could.
When
the invasion began, in March 2003, little went according to plan. Many
in the administration and the media were surprised. Not Landay, Strobel,
Galloway, or me. In 2004, Landay, Wells, and others on our team reported that there had been no proper post-war planning.
OUTSIDE THE BUBBLE
What
distinguished the Knight Ridder Washington bureau from its peers in the
Washington press corps was its remove from power and politics. Knight
Ridder’s Washington team worked for daily newspapers across the United
States. Our readers were not in Washington and New York, but scattered
around the country from Anchorage, Alaska, to Miami, Florida. More
important, Knight Ridder papers served some 30 military communities,
including Fort Benning and Fort Bragg, Fort Lewis and Fort Riley, and
Grand Forks and Shaw Air Force Bases. I once told an all-hands staff
meeting: “We’re not The New York Times. We’re not The Washington Post.
We’re not CBS or ABC or CNN. We report for the people whose sons and
daughters and husbands and wives get sent to war, not for the people who
send them.”
As
a corollary to that, we did not see ourselves as part of the Washington
elite, nor did we crave to climb from the fourth estate to become town
criers for the first. The entire 9/11 team was well connected, but
Landay, Strobel, and Galloway saw no need to curry favor with—much less
rely on—high-ranking officials in the Pentagon, Vice President Dick
Cheney’s office, or anywhere else. They spent their time earning the
trust of people closer to the ground and further from the politics. It
became a standing joke how much time I was spending meeting
still-unnamed sources in the paint aisles of the Lowe’s store and the
Cracker Barrel out in Manassas, Virginia, rather than at embassy parties
in Washington.
Last,
and perhaps most important, we had the unflinching support of our
bosses: Tony Ridder, Knight Ridder’s CEO; the late Jerry Ceppos, the
vice president of news; and Clark Hoyt, the Washington editor and my
immediate supervisor. Not until much later did I learn that advertisers
had called Ridder and asked that he tell them when the latest in our
series of “unpatriotic” articles would appear so they could pull their
ads. He told them they would see it at the same time he did—when it hit
newsstands.
THIS TOWN
After
we reported how successful the Iraqi National Congress had been at
planting news stories, newspapers that got Iraq wrong issued
corrections, retractions, and apologies. The New York Times published its
on May 26, 2004—on page 10. But there is little evidence that much has
changed in the culture of Washington or in the way it is covered. Some
members of the Bush administration still refuse to acknowledge their
mistakes. Indeed, one of the main lessons from Iraq—the importance of
listening to experts rather than hearing only what you want to hear and
disregarding the rest—has been ignored or forgotten.
This
was clear as the Biden administration rushed the last American troops
and contractors out of Afghanistan in August 2021. The White House, much
of Congress, and the news media once again were caught off guard. This
time, it was by the rapid collapse of the American-backed Afghan
government and security forces, which has left tens of thousands of
Afghan allies and their families still stranded.
Once
more, officials had ignored the people who were on the ground and made
decisions that were shaped more by domestic politics than by
professional expertise and firsthand experience. The folly of the U.S.
nation-building mission in Afghanistan had been evident to U.S. military
officers two decades earlier, when they began trying to teach their
Afghan counterparts how to fly, drive, and maintain American military
equipment. As one U.S. Air Force officer told me in 2005, “It’s hard to
teach people how to fly when you find out they can’t read.”
In early June 2021, two months before Biden’s rapid withdrawal, I wrote:
Despite
months of talk and interagency meetings, White House officials have
made no decisions about how to get tens of thousands of Afghans who
supported the international effort to establish a stable democracy in
Kabul out of harm’s way. Some military officials and diplomats say it
already may be too late to prevent a humanitarian and political
disaster. . . Although the administration has doubled its effort to
issue Special Immigrant Visas to the 18,000 Afghans who’ve applied for
them, military officials privately warn that a collapse of Ghani’s
government could endanger three times that number, and perhaps as many
as 150,000 Afghans.
The article I wrote containing that bleak assessment was offered to multiple publications, but no one wanted it.
Today,
laudable efforts are underway to bolster basic investigative reporting
and quiet the increasingly frantic quest for attention, too often in the
form of official leaks and sensational stories touted as “scoops” with
half-lives now measured in seconds. After all, the latest outburst from
former President Donald Trump or Republican Representative Marjorie
Taylor Greene of Georgia, however ludicrous, and the latest Harry and
Meghan gossip are guaranteed to attract an audience.
Some newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times,
continue to do commendable work, increasingly in partnership with
outfits that specialize in investigative reporting, such as ProPublica
and the nonprofit Investigative Reporters and Editors. At the same time,
though, the country’s press corps continues to shrink, most importantly
at the local, regional, and international levels. I was sent to
Washington in 1975 as the junior reporter in the Bergen Record’s
two-person bureau. This month, the Gannett chain laid off Jonathan
Salant, the last New Jersey reporter in the nation’s capital. For those
who wonder where Knight Ridder went: The McClatchy Co. bought Knight
Ridder in 2006, filed for bankruptcy in 2020, and was purchased by the
hedge fund Chatham Asset Management later that year. An archive of
Knight Ridder Iraq stories is available—behind a paywall.
In
addition to eroding public trust in the media, the declining number of
local reporters covering the U.S. government is depriving young
reporters of the best places to learn and veterans of the best places to
teach that basic lesson of Afghanistan and Iraq: If you want to know
the local crime situation, ask the residents and the cops on the beat,
not the police chief or the mayor.