Posted on 03/03/2003 2:12:39 PM PST by Megalomaniac
Newsweek's Iraq Report Falls on Deaf Ears
By Norman Solomon, AlterNet February 27, 2003
You gotta hand it to America's mass media: When war hangs in the balance, they sure know how to bury a story.
After devoting thousands of network hours and oceans of ink to stories about "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq, major U.S. news outlets did little but yawn in the days after the March 3 issue of Newsweek published an exclusive report on the subject – a piece headlined "The Defector's Secrets."
It's hard to imagine how any journalist on the war beat could read the article's lead without doing a double take: "Hussein Kamel, the highest-ranking Iraqi official ever to defect from Saddam Hussein's inner circle, told CIA and British intelligence officers and U.N. inspectors in the summer of 1995 that after the Gulf War, Iraq destroyed all its chemical and biological weapons stocks and the missiles to deliver them."
The article was written by Newsweek national security correspondent John Barry, who has been with the magazine since 1985. After following the Iraq weapons story for a dozen years, he draws on in-depth knowledge – in stark contrast to the stenographic approach taken by most journalists on the beat, who seem content to relay the pronouncements coming out of Washington and the United Nations.
"I think the whole issue of Iraq's weaponry has become steadily more impacted and complicated over the years," Barry told me in a Feb. 26 interview. People often have trouble making sense out of the "twists and turns of the arguments." And, Barry added, what's reported as "fact" provided by the U.S. government or the U.N. is in many cases mere "supposition."
Now, it's time for us to ask some loud questions about the U.S. media echo chamber. Such as: Is there anybody awake in there?
Barry's potentially explosive story notes that "Kamel was Saddam Hussein's son-in-law and had direct knowledge of what he claimed: for 10 years he had run Iraq's nuclear, chemical, biological and missile programs."
Making use of written documentation that Newsweek has verified as authentic, the article reports: "Kamel's revelations about the destruction of Iraq's WMD stocks were hushed up by the U.N. inspectors, sources say, for two reasons. Saddam did not know how much Kamel had revealed, and the inspectors hoped to bluff Saddam into disclosing still more. And Iraq has never shown the documentation to support Kamel's story. Still, the defector's tale raises questions about whether the WMD stockpiles attributed to Iraq still exist."
The Newsweek story came off the press on Sunday, Feb. 23. The next day, a would-be authoritative source – the Central Intelligence Agency – explained that it just wasn't so. "It is incorrect, bogus, wrong, untrue," declared CIA spokesman Bill Harlow. For good measure, on the same day, a Reuters article quoted an unnamed "British government source" eager to contradict Newsweek's documented account of what Kamel had said. "We've checked back and he didn't say this," the source contended. "He said just the opposite, that the WMD program was alive and kicking."
Under the unwritten rules of American media coverage, such denials tend to end the matter when the president and Congress have already decided that war is necessary.
It's not as if Kamel ranks as a nobody in media circles. Journalists and U.S. officials are fond of recounting that Saddam Hussein made sure he was quickly killed after the defector returned to Iraq following six months of voluntary exile.
"Until now, Kamel has best been known for exposing Iraq's deceptions about how far its pre-Gulf War biological weapons programs had advanced," media analyst Seth Ackerman points out. He adds that Newsweek's story "is particularly noteworthy because hawks in the Bush administration have frequently referred to the Kamel episode as evidence that U.N. inspectors are incapable of disarming Iraq on their own."
Ackerman cites a speech Dick Cheney made last August, when the vice president said that what occurred with Kamel "should serve as a reminder to all that we often learned more as the result of defections than we learned from the inspection regime itself."
Accounts of Kamel's debriefing as a defector and his subsequent demise have often served to illustrate the dishonesty and brutality of Iraq's government. But now that other information has emerged about what he had to say, the fellow seems to be quite a bit less newsworthy.
Norman Solomon is co-author of the new book "Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn't Tell You," published by Context Books.
Great, Saddam should have no problem providing documentation as to how they were destroyed. Nor should he be blocking inspectors. The fact that the opposite has happened, along with a clandestine nuclear program only uncovered after a defecter's report, shows that this defector was in all liklihood a red herring, and people are ignoring the Newsweak article because the claims of one defector simply don't fit with the facts.
Newsweak lies about what the defector said, and therefore the U.S. and British governments are not credible?
I guess it was a mistake for Iraq to conceal that from the U.N. inspectors in 1998, when they drew up their list of existing chemical and biological weapons.
He claims there was thousands of blueprints and notes that were scattered and hidden. Now the inspectors left in 1998, so according to Newsweek, that program should have been going full blast for at least 4 years.
Intersting enough there is a German citizen prominently mentioned and Hamai's conclusion is that Saddam will never change. Small consolation, but he can spend eternity knowing that he was right.
If Saddam had exculpatory scientific, documentary and eye-witness evidence he destroyed his chem/bio weapons, doncha think he would have told us by now?
Why risk annihilation by not disclosing destruction?
This story does not hold water.
Gee, the corporate pro-war media is simply suppressing the news. And why hasn't Saddam trumpeted this, if true and finally what has Iraq done since 1995, say like purchase mobile labs from Germany.
[Hussein Kamel's defection] added a definite sense of urgency.... Suddenly, Hussein Kamel defects, and it's out there, laid before the world: Iraq is cheating, Iraq is lying, Iraq has not complied, and not complied in a big way. What are you going to do about it?
Iraq had a big problem on its hands, because it needed a new explanation for [Kamel's revelations]. And the explanation they hit upon was, "We are shocked, shocked, to discover that under our very noses, Kamel all this time has been hiding all kinds of weapons and documentation. We've discovered it on his chicken farm, and here it is. You may have it all."
And they deliver to UNSCOM one million pages of newly-declared documents, which show a lot of biological weapons programs, which show a lot more chemical weapons programs, which show material shortfalls, which show missile stuff, which show nuclear stuff. But -- and it took a long time to do this -- as UNSCOM went through these million pages of documents, and hundreds of crates, they found that there were interesting gaps.
For example, all the biological stuff was described as research. There was nothing on weaponization, that is to say, nothing on taking what you know to be a toxic bug -- anthrax say -- and putting it into a warhead that can be used as a military weapon. That's a big part of the problem. ... So in each case, Iraq kept back something important. Usually the most important thing.
Hussein Kamel's defection tells UNSCOM that not only have they been missing something, but they've been missing a huge, huge amount of what they were supposed to be finding. Way more than they had ever suspected. Their worst nightmare scenario was eclipsed by the documents on this chicken farm, and it meant the beginning of a major new phase of biological, missile, chemical, and nuclear investigations.
The quantity was staggering. It took the U.N. weapons inspectors months and months and months just to go through and translate every -- and create a database for what was in those papers. It revealed that Saddam Hussein had also hidden far more than anyone ever realized he had, to begin with. This really was the critical turning point of the entire eight years in trying to deal with Saddam Hussein. It put the U.N. weapons program back on track.
Kamel said Iraq had not abandoned its WMD ambitions. The stocks had been destroyed to hide the programs from the U.N. inspectors, but Iraq had retained the design and engineering details of these weapons. Kamel talked of hidden blueprints, computer disks, microfiches and even missile-warhead molds. “People who work in MIC [Iraq’s Military Industrial Commission, which oversaw the country’s WMD programs] were asked to take documents to their houses,” he said. Why preserve this technical material? Said Kamel: “It is the first step to return to production” after U.N. inspections wind down.
Kamel was a scapegoat...
Anybody who tries to portray the "American media" as on board the war train is not credible.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.