- NEW YORK -- The New
York Times yesterday admitted that its coverage in the run-up to the Iraq
war was "not as rigorous as it should have been" and failed to
adequately question the credibility of Iraqi defectors or challenge their
tales of terror camps and the presence of weapons of mass destruction.
-
- In a 1,200-word article signed From the Editors, one
of America's most prestigious newspapers wrote: "Looking back, we
wish we had been more aggres sive in re-examining the claims as new evidence
emerged - or failed to emerge."
-
- The paper is particularly critical of its dependence
on Iraqi informants, defectors and exiles "bent on regime change in
Iraq - people whose credibility has come under increasing public debate
in recent weeks". Chief among them, the editors concede, was Ahmad
Chalabi, the former Pentagon favourite, whose offices in Iraq were raided
last week after he fell out of favour.
-
- "Administration officials now acknowledge that they
sometimes fell for misinformation from these exile sources. So did many
news organisations - in particular, this one," the editors write.
-
- The article marks the end of a troubled 12 months for
the paper, which lost its editor and his deputy last June after a scandal
over the deceptions of a young reporter, Jayson Blair.
-
- Yesterday's note said that no individual was to blame
for the mistakes, insisting that the "problem was more complicated",
involving unchalleng ing editors and a lack of scepticism from those "too
intent on rushing scoops into the paper".
-
- However, of the five articles it singles out for their
misleading content, three bear the byline of Judith Miller, the paper's
bioterrorism expert. On September 8 2002, in a joint byline story with
Michael Gordon, Miller wrote a front page article headlined US Says Hussein
Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts. The story claimed Iraq had tried to
import thousands of high-strength aluminium tubes to produce en riched
uranium and, eventually, an atomic weapon.
-
- Administration officials were quoted as saying: "The
first sign of a 'smoking gun' ... may be a mushroom cloud."
-
- "In the following months," wrote Michael Massing,
in an article for New York Review criticising Miller and the Times coverage,
"the tubes would become a key prop in the administration's case for
war, and the Times played a critical part in legitimising it."
-
- "It should have been pre sented more cautiously,"
the Times conceded yesterday. "Administration officials were allowed
to hold forth at length on why this evidence of Iraq's nuclear intentions
demanded that Saddam Hussein be dislodged from power."
-
- When misgivings within the intelligence agencies emerged
about the tubes, the stories were run on page 13. Miller did not return
requests to comment on her reporting.
-
- The American media establishment, now lambasted by conservatives
for its coverage of the failures of the occupation, was long under fire
from liberals for the manner in which it reported the run-up to the war
and its apparently uncritical acceptance of the presence of weapons of
mass destruction.
-
- "This is one of the great journalistic mass delusions
of the era," said Michael Wolff, a media commentator and columnist
for Vanity Fair.
-
- In an examination of unsigned editorials for the Columbia
Journalism Review, Chris Mooney looked at the US media's response to Colin
Pow ell's presentation on WMD before the UN security council last year.
-
- "The US papers all pronounced Powell right, though
they couldn't possibly know for sure that he was. In short, they trusted
him. And in so doing, they failed to bring even an elementary scepticism
to the Bush case for war."
-
- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2004 http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1225616,00.html
|