Why the Press Failed on Iraq

John Walcott

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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 also would 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 already had 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 nevertheless, Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy U.S. secretary of defense, had 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.