Topic awaiting preservation: Iraq has no WMD?

Wow! This really surprised me...Article here. Why is this not getting news coverage? And why haven't I heard of this?

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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 March 3 issue of 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 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."

-- Alternet (Newsweek)

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Very interesting...too bad the guy is now dead.


WebShaman

WebShaman, journalists are no longer the defenders of freedom that they once were. They are wholly owned by their business-conscious publishers. Their sole responsibility is to regurgitate the agenda put forth by their owners.

However, even an unbiased and dedicated journalist would not reprint this piece if they could not themselves verify it's veracity.

The short of it is, if a journalist wants to keep their jobs, they'll print what their conservative newspaper owners want them to print.

<edit>If you cannot tell, I at one point worked for a newspaper</edit>



[This message has been edited by St. Seneca (edited 02-28-2003).]

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conservative newspaper owners

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You mean there really are such owners? Aren't the overwhelming majority of newspaper owners in the US precisely on the opposite side of the political spectrum?

Here some more info from 1999 on what happened to Hussein Kamel.

Conspiracy theories really get tiresome but it's good to question sources all the same. I really wonder about how reliable defectors are because you would think they have a lot of ulterior motives. They could be trying to strike back at the regime for killing their families, they could want another faction to take over, they could be totally honest too. I think we havet to take their words and consider them with all of these possibilities factored into the mix.

For instance, Khidhir Hamza, is an awesome source for the pro-war camp but how much credibility should we afford him? It's a difficult call.

Take a look at his Cirriculum Vitae and isn't it interesting that:

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Choice of site and design of preliminary planning for Al-Atheer nuclear weapons development project as Director General of Weaponization under General Hussein Kamel.

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This article craps on him and this one doesn't.

. . : slicePuzzle

Bugimus, while most journalists are liberal, the paper owners are trying to run a profitable business. That usually makes them very conservative.

So most of the owners are conservative and they don't mind their newspapers being liberally biased? Is that how you're saying it works? I'm curious because that seems odd to me. What paper did you work for?

No, Bugimus, what I'm saying is that even though the journalists are as liberal as they ever were, papers themselves have become more conservative due to the control of their conservative owners.

When the boss comes in and says that he wants a story killed because it makes some rich friend of his look bad, the story dies. (unless it is an extreme case where every other paper in the area will cover the story, thereby making that paper look bad for not covering it.) In the end, getting a paycheck is more important to a journalist than integrity.

Owners decide what type of stories are covered or more importantly which aren't. They decide where in the paper the story goes; either emphasizing or de-emphasizing it. And even after the reporter has written and turned an article in, the editor can go in to cut or add anything that they wish.

So, I would say that most papers no longer maintain a liberal slant.

How would you rank the major newspapers in America when it comes to left versus right leaning?

NY Times
LA Times
Wall Street Journal
Washington Post
etc.

Because out of just those four I see it as 3 to 1 left wing.