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 latest
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, appearing in the March 3
edition of Newsweek, 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
(
www.contextbooks.com/newF.html).
