After receiving a wrist slap of a sentence, Stewart was glib outside the courthouse, claiming to have won a “great victory against an overarching government.” She believed that an appeal might return her to the bar, and declared that she would do the same “all over again.” As for the twenty-eight-month sentence? She could do that time “standing on her head.” The Times report of her sentencing closed with an image of Stewart greeting well-wishers “as if she were Gandhi—touching them in the crowd.”
Stewart’s arrogance backfired, however, as perhaps did the Times’ glorification of her. In July 2010, a federal judge said the comments she made outside the courthouse showed “a lack of remorse” and extended her sentence to 120 months.
nine
War
The trust that the New York Times put in Judith Miller as its main reporter on the vexing issue of Saddam Hussein’s development and possession of weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq was not at all surprising. Boasting an impressive resumé, Miller had the credentials and, more important, the connections to beat back competition from the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal in the fierce struggle to break big news leading up to the war.
A longtime foreign correspondent for the Times, Miller had won the national security beat by doing time in the Middle East. She had written a book about Saddam Hussein and another on biological weapons. No other journalist had comparable authority on the subject of the possibility of Iraq possessing WMDs. Miller had also written about the threat of Islamic terrorism in depth; in January 2001 she produced several articles about al-Qaeda as part of a series that won her the 2002 Pulitzer Prize. Flashing her legendary chutzpah, she had traveled to Taliban-dominated Afghanistan and demanded to visit a jihadi camp, before being turned away and eventually expelled from the country.
Miller was known as a deeply networked member of the New York-Washington media elite, whose sources were often personal friends, and in some cases romantic interests. Her work on al-Qaeda and on unconventional weapons of mass destruction had earned her contacts deep inside the Bush administration’s national security wing, particularly among the “neoconservatives” who had come to the forefront of post-9/11 strategy and led the way in crafting the case, and the strategy, for war in Iraq. According to reports originating in the Times newsroom, Howell Raines reportedly told her to go off and win “another Pulitzer.”
Just before the war began and just after, Miller produced a series of ominous scoops relying heavily on anonymous sources. In one piece, she described a defector who alleged that Saddam had recently renovated storage facilities for nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. In another, she told of Saddam’s bid to gain a lethal strain of smallpox, as well as antidotes to VX gas and sarin that could facilitate ongoing experimentation with those substances.
Miller’s most important story was headlined “U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts.” Written along with Michael Gordon, a military correspondent, it described the interception of thousands of high-strength aluminum tubes, which U.S. experts had determined could have only one purpose: as casings for rotors to be used in enriching weapons-grade uranium toward the production of an atomic bomb. The bid to procure such tubes, Miller and Gordon said, showed that a decade after Saddam claimed to have given up the quest for nuclear weapons, he had resumed it, “embarking on a worldwide hunt” for nuclear materials. And administration “hard-liners” were justly worried that “the first sign of a ‘smoking gun’ . . . may be a mushroom cloud.”
The piece was immediately used by administration officials to lobby for military action. Vice President Dick Cheney recycled Miller and Gordon’s assertions about the aluminum tubes on Meet the Press, while Condoleezza Rice warned on CNN, “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” The symmetry between Miller’s rhetoric and the administration’s was striking.
Although the baying of the dogs of war temporarily drowned out the complaints of Times reporters angry that the Gray Lady appeared to have volunteered for combat, the critique of the paper’s star reporter continued to build in the early days of military action. Some reporters and editors thought Miller had uncritically bought the policy line of her sources in the upper reaches of the administration, and that her reporting was turning the Times into a conduit for the administration’s “propaganda.” Why had the paper not paid heed to knowledgeable colleagues who had reservations about Miller’s reporting, especially those in the Washington bureau, as well as experts who had begun to doubt the existence of WMDs? According to an account in the Los Angeles Times, editors who delayed the publication of one Miller report claiming that there were a thousand WMD sites in Iraq were lectured by the managing editor, Gerald Boyd, who reminded them that Miller had a Pulitzer Prize, “and your job is to get her stories into the paper.” According to an account in New York magazine, Howell Raines told a close friend that he wanted to prove he could do straight coverage of the Iraqi WMD story, and a former Times editor said that after Bill Kristol characterized the paper as part of an “axis of appeasement,” Raines wanted to “demonstrate that he was fair-minded about the Bush administration.”
During the late spring of 2003, various news organizations such as Time and the Washington Post began to write critically of the government’s claims about WMDs. The Wall Street Journal wrote about the pressure mounting in Washington for an investigation into how prewar intelligence had run so far off the rails. In the New Yorker, Seymour Hersh, relying on mostly anonymous government sources, described how a special unit set up in the Pentagon had disposed of intelligence that didn’t live up to their ideological expectations.
At first, the Times ignored these second-guessings. But a lengthy New York Review of Books piece in February 2004 by Michael Massing criticized the performance of the Times in the run-up to the war as “especially deficient.” Massing continued, “While occasionally running articles that questioned administration claims, it more often deferred to them. Compared to other major papers, the Times placed more credence in defectors, expressed less confidence in inspectors, and paid less attention to dissenters.” The overreliance on the defector Ahmad Chalabi was particularly problematic. Before the war, Massing reported, there had been a loud debate about Chalabi within intelligence circles. But it took the Times months to examine the matter. Massing was told by a “senior editor” at the Times that this was because “some reporters at the paper had relied heavily on Chalabi as a source and so were not going to write too critically about him.”
Massing’s piece opened the floodgates to frustration with the Times and fed into a growing leftist campaign to accuse the media of “selling a war to the American public based on lies,” as Arianna Huffington would later write. Some went so far as to accuse the Times of having disinterred the yellow journalism of the Hearst press during the run-up to the Spanish-American War. And most fingers pointed directly at Judy Miller. In New York magazine, Kurt Andersen explained that “because her vivid, terrifying pieces appeared in the liberal Times, she arguably bears more responsibility than any other American outside government for nudging public opinion in favor of war.”
Bill Keller said that, in hindsight, he wished he had dealt with the controversy over WMD reporting as soon as he took over in June 2003. But he feared that retracing the paper’s steps in an internal investigation would become “a crippling distraction” if he moved too fast. Instead, he ordered Miller off the national security beat—although, as he later said, she kept “drifting” back, continuing to bigfoot editors to publish her reports on this subject. And he assigned some top reporters to do a postmortem, to find where Miller’s reporting had gone off-track. The Times published its findings on May 27, 2004, in a formal editor’s note on page A10. “We have studied the allegations of official gullibility and hype. It is past time we turned the same light on ourselves,” the note said. And in closing: “It is still possible that chemical or biological weapons will be unearthed in Iraq, but in this
case it looks as if we, along with the administration, were taken in.”
An editorial in July baldly accused the Bush administration of “misleading the American people about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction and links with Al Qaeda.” But it added, with uncharacteristic humility, that if the country wanted Bush to be candid about his mistakes, “we should be equally open about our own.” The Times had not listened carefully enough to people with dissident points of view, the editorial continued. “Our certainty flowed from the fact that such an overwhelming majority of government officials, past and present, top intelligence officials and other experts were sure that the weapons were there.... We had a groupthink of our own.”
These mea culpas were careful to insist that the faulty WMD reporting was “institutional,” sidestepping Miller’s personal responsibility. This line was shredded mercilessly by Maureen Dowd in a now-notorious October 2005 column headlined “Woman of Mass Destruction,” written in the shadow of Miller’s involvement in Plamegate, which had prompted some at the Times to accuse Miller of protecting her White House sources. Dowd said that Miller’s stories about WMD “fit too perfectly with the White House’s case for war. She was close to Ahmad Chalabi, the con man who was conning the neocons to knock out Saddam so he could get his hands on Iraq.” In closing, Dowd reported that if Judith Miller returned to the newsroom as planned to cover “threats to our country . . . the institution most in danger would be the newspaper in your hands.”
The Times’ apologies for Miller’s credulous WMD reporting initiated a change in the paper’s reporting on the Iraq War: from now on, it embraced a simple-minded antagonism. After 2004, its coverage displayed a hostile readiness to read negativity into military events and developments where the actual facts did not warrant it. Much of the paper’s war reporting since Keller’s dark night of the soul seems animated by the need for penance, to regain “our moral compass” as Paul Krugman wrote. Indeed, the paper has seen the specter of rising fascism on the home front along with imperial overreach abroad—fruit from the same rotten tree. One 2005 editorial asserted that “one of the greatest harms from the Iraq conflict has been the administration’s willingness to define democracy down on the pretext of wartime emergency.”
A reflexive opposition to the broader War on Terror grew so steadily in the years after 9/11 that in the early summer of 2009 the Times actually condemned a “secret” CIA plot to kill Osama bin Laden, because it had not been reported to Congress. Never mind that most of the public would have been shocked if such a program had not existed and would have demanded that one be instituted. The Times had decided long since that it wasn’t marching anymore.
Besides caustically criticizing the administration’s many policy miscalculations, diplomatic stumbles and military failures, the Times threw a negative light on stories that did not merit such a baby-with-the-bathwater approach. This added up to a body of skewed reportage and commentary on developments in the war zone—all calculated to undercut the war’s legitimacy, to make the United States seem incompetent and morally corrupt, to insist that Iraq was a quagmire similar to Vietnam, and to cast “the surge” of 2007 as a failure long after it was an acknowledged success. The Times has given short shrift to the heroism of our forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, and defamed their character by painting them mostly as killers of civilians and abusers of prisoners.
A preview of what would become the paper’s impulse to exaggerate almost any military misstep or setback and preemptively declare a “quagmire” was provided in Afghanistan soon after 9/11 by the paper’s legendary R. W. “Johnny” Apple. In a news analysis under the headline “A Military Quagmire Remembered: Afghanistan as Vietnam,” Apple lead with: “Like an unwelcome specter from an unhappy past, the ominous word ‘quagmire’ has begun to haunt conversations among government officials and students of foreign policy, both here and abroad.” After a negative assessment of the effects of American bombing on the Taliban, Apple complained about the inability of U.S. Army Special Forces to capture the pivotal town of Mazar-i-Sharif. Yet just after his complaint, Northern Alliance troops with their U.S. advisors overran Mazar-i-Sharif, beginning a swift, almost apocalyptic rout of the Taliban. Apple, finger to the wind, changed his tune—almost comically so. “What a difference a week makes,” his lede said, as he blamed “armchair Clauswitzes” and other “pessimistic prophets” of doom, failing to note that he himself had been one of them.
In the Iraq War’s earliest days, as U.S. forces rolled toward Baghdad, the Times continued to be vigilant for failure. In the estimation of TimesWatch’s Clay Waters, it seemed like the paper’s headlines were being “edited by the Saddam Hussein propaganda machine.” Week one featured headlines such as “The Goal Is Baghdad, but at What Cost?” and “Bush Administration Frustrated by War Doubts.” An editorial that week headlined “Diminished Expectations in Iraq” cited a small-arms attack on fifteen U.S. Apache helicopters and said, “It was the latest evidence that some of the initial hopes—even assumptions—that Iraqi resistance would quickly crumble seemed not to be panning out.” Of course, that initial resistance in Baghdad did quickly crumble, although it would later be reconstructed as the “insurgency.”
The readiness to present the news in Iraq negatively and to look for symbols of disaster showed in how the Times covered the looting of the Baghdad Museum. Ian Fisher filed a story quoting an Iraqi archeologist: “A country’s identity, its value and civilization resides in its history. If a country’s culture is looted, as ours has been, our history ends. Please tell this to President Bush. Please remind him that he promised to liberate the Iraqi people, but that this is not a liberation, this is a humiliation.” According to Frank Rich, the alleged ransacking of the museum constituted “the naked revelation of our worst instincts at the very dawn of our grandiose project to bring democratic values to the Middle East.”
In truth, the museum was not ransacked; and much of its most priceless collections had simply been secreted away. Pejorative information about America allowing the looting came from former Baath officials, who had a self-interest in representing the U.S. military as the culprit in the cultural “crime of the century.” In the Washington Post, Howard Kurtz wrote, “We’re used to journalists being misled in the famous fog of war, but this is ridiculous.” According to Kurtz’s sources, the actual number of stolen items was thirty-three. But the Times was addicted to the narrative of a looted heritage. When the museum reopened in late February 2009, Steven Lee Myers reported that “thousands of works from its collection of antiquities and art—some of civilization’s earliest objects—remain lost.” Myers failed to mention the controversy over how much was looted in the first place.
On occasion, the Times’ defeatist impulse could be risible. The day before Saddam was captured in December 2003, the paper ran an editorial headlined “The Story Gets Worse.” It began, “Isn’t this about where we did not want to be at this point? The news from the American-led occupation is looking like a catalog of easily predictable, and widely predicted, pitfalls.”
It’s often said that generals are always fighting the last war. But in Iraq it was journalists, especially from the Times, who seemed to be re-enacting the past, forcing the conflict into the mold of Vietnam. In a news analysis headlined “Flashback to the 60’s: A Sinking Sensation of Parallels Between Iraq and Vietnam,” Todd Purdham wrote that “a range of military experts, historians and politicians” agreed that parallels between Vietnam and Iraq were entirely valid. “Nearly two years after the American invasion of Iraq, such comparisons are no longer dismissed in mainstream political discourse as facile and flawed, but are instead bubbling to the top.”
It was the columnists, principally Bob Herbert and Frank Rich, who most often hit the Vietnam replay button. In a 2004 column headlined “Powell, Then and Now,” Herbert wrote, “in yet another echo of Vietnam, American commanders are begging for more troops. It was ever thus. Commanders thrust into these un-winnable wars against foreign insu
rgencies always believe that just a few thousand more troops will turn the tide. Americans were told again and again that there was light at the end of the tunnel in Vietnam. The troops sent into that nightmare would dryly remark that the light was coming from an onrushing train.” Also in 2004, Frank Rich dilated on “The War’s Lost Weekend,” writing:Just when you’ve persuaded yourself yet again that this isn’t Vietnam, you are hit by another acid flashback. Last weekend that flashback was to 1969. It was in June 1969 that Life magazine ran its cover story “The Faces of the American Dead in Vietnam: One Week’s Toll,” the acknowledged prototype for Ted Koppel’s photographic roll-call of the American dead in Iraq on “Nightline.” It was in November 1969 that a little-known reporter, Seymour Hersh, broke the story of the 1968 massacre at My Lai, the horrific scoop that has now found its match 35 years later in Mr. Hersh’s New Yorker revelation of a 53-page Army report detailing “numerous instances of ‘sadistic, blatant and wanton criminal abuses’ at Abu Ghraib.”
Vietnam was the prism through which the Times saw the Iraqi elections in January 2005, noting that the elections that had taken place in South Vietnam in 1967—which it implied were similar—had been an empty sham. John Burns’ analysis on the eve of the vote cited an Iraqi exile: “I would like to believe that we could still somehow reclaim the Iraq we lost in the 1950’s, but holding elections in these conditions will be a calamity. They will set a course on which we can easily drift into civil war.”
Gray Lady Down Page 24
