http://www.fair.org/extra/0307/wmdhunt.html
Excerpt:
So how had the media come to be so convinced of the weapons'
existence? And could they have seen past the White House spin had
they chosen to?
"Parroting the so-called experts"
In part, journalists absorbed their aura of certainty from a
battery of "independent" weapons experts who repeated the mantra
of Iraq concealment over and over. Journalists used these experts
as outside sources who could independently evaluate the
administration's claims. Yet often these "experts" were simply
repeating what they heard from U.S. officials, forming an endless
loop of self-reinforcing scare mongering.
Take the ubiquitous David Albright, a former U.N. inspector in
Iraq. Over the years, Albright had been cited in hundreds of news
articles and made scores of television appearances as an authority
on Iraqi weapons. A sample prewar quote from Albright (CNN,
10/5/02): "In terms of the chemical and biological weapons, Iraq
has those now. How many, how could they deliver them? I mean,
these are the big questions."
But when the postwar weapons hunt started turning up empty,
Albright made a rather candid admission (L.A. Times, 4/20/03): "If
there are no weapons of mass destruction, I'll be mad as hell. I
certainly accepted the administration claims on chemical and
biological weapons. I figured they were telling the truth. If
there is no [unconventional weapons program], I will feel taken,
because they asserted these things with such assurance."
(Recently, Albright has become a prominent critic of the
government's handling of prewar intelligence on Iraq.)
A similar case was Kenneth Pollack, the influential and heavily
cited war advocate at the Brookings Institution. Before the war,
Pollack had absolutely no doubt Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons.
"Does he have the ability to attack us here in the United States?"
Oprah Winfrey asked him on her talkshow (10/9/02). "He certainly
does," Pollack explained. "He has biological and chemical agents
that he could employ, but he'd have to use terrorist means to do
so, which he's done in the past.... Right now, his capabilities to
do so are fairly limited. The problem is that we know that he is
building new capabilities as fast as he can."
As Pollack is a former CIA analyst who specialized in Persian Gulf
military issues, many reporters no doubt took these as first-hand
assessments. Yet in a post-war interview, when asked to defend his
claims about Iraq's arsenal, Pollack demurred (CITE): "That was
the consensus of opinion among the intelligence community. It was
hearing things like that that brought me to the conclusion that,
you know, 'Boy, if this is the case, we've got to do something
about this guy.' That was not me making that claim; that was me
parroting the claims of so-called experts."
Some "experts" had a political axe to grind. Charles Duelfer,
another former inspector, had been a State Department functionary
for years before joining the UNSCOM inspection team. At the U.N.
Security Council, critics of U.S. policy viewed him with suspicion
as a Trojan horse. Once his U.N. tour of duty was over, he became
a "resident scholar" at the conservative Center for Strategic and
International Studies in Washington, appearing on TV news shows as
an impartial authority. He answered technical questions on
subjects like liquid bulk anthrax and aerial satellite photos,
offering his considered judgment that Iraq unquestionably was
hiding a huge arsenal.
But off-camera, Duelfer admitted he was a committed proponent of
regime change whether Saddam was harboring illegal weapons or not
(Endgame, Scott Ritter): "I think it would be a mistake to focus
on the issue of weapons of mass destruction. To do so ignores the
larger issue of whether or not we want this dictator to have
control over a nation capable of producing 6 billion barrels of
oil per day.... If you focus on the weapons issue, the first thing
you know, Iraq will be given a clean bill of health."
"Inactionable intelligence"
The U.S. and British governments were proactive in managing the
media on the weapons issue. Beginning in the fall of 1997, the
British intelligence agency MI6 ran a disinformation campaign to
promote the idea that Iraq was still hiding banned arms, according
to sources cited by Seymour Hersh (New Yorker, 3/31/03). MI6
secretly arranged for an unidentified UNSCOM official sympathetic
to Anglo-American policy to funnel false or unverifiable
information--so-called "inactionable intelligence"--to the spy
agency, which then planted the stories in newspapers in Britain
and abroad.
"It was intelligence that was crap, and that we couldn't move on,
but the Brits wanted to plant stories," a former U.S. intelligence
official told Hersh. An unnamed former Clinton administration
official said the U.S. approved the operation: "I knew that was
going on," he told Hersh. "We were getting ready for action in
Iraq, and we wanted the Brits to prepare."