Until Judith Miller's piece showed up on the front page of the
New York Times on April 22, I'd thought the distillation of disingenuous
U.S. press coverage of the invasion of Iraq came with the images of the
April 9 hauling down of Saddam's statue and of Iraqis cheering U.S. troops
in the square in Baghdad in front of the Palestine Hotel.
These were billed as the photos and news footage that showed It
Was All Worthwhile, up there in the pantheon with Joe Rosenthal's photograph
of the raising of the U.S. flag on Iwo Jima and the images of the Berlin
Wall going down.
Now, I'm certain there were plenty of Iraqis in Baghdad on April
9 delighted at the possibility that the Age of Saddam had drawn to a close.
And probably there were some Iraqis prepared to wave at Saddam's conquerors
riding in on their tanks. The problem is that the news photographs aren't
there to prove it.
I've yet to see the image reproduced in any mainstream American
newspaper that I've come across, but I have seen photographs on the Web of
the entire square when that statue was being pulled down by a U.S. tank, and
it's scarcely a spectacle of mass Iraqi involvement.
In one small portion of the square, the area itself sealed off
by three U.S. tanks, there's a knot of maybe 150 people. Close-up
photographs suggest that the active non-U.S. participants are associates of
Ahmad Chalabi, leader of the exile group that rode in on the back of those
U.S. tanks, the Iraqi National Congress. (It's up on the Counterpunch Web
site I coedit with Jeffrey St. Clair. Go to
www.counterpunch.org/statue.html, and see for yourself.)
Some reporters and photographers present at the scene
acknowledged that the crowds scarcely resembled the cheering throngs being
ecstatically invoked on Fox, CNN and other American entertainment channels.
Asked by an MSNBC interviewer how he felt at being present at such an
historic moment, one Time magazine employee volunteered that he thought the
crowd was small, the same way he thought the streets were pretty empty
further south when the U.S. troops rolled through.
So here we had a faked "news event," concocted by Pentagon news
managers in front of the Palestine Hotel where the international press was
housed. The "event" was obviously a huge political plus for the Bush
administration and gave Americans the false tidings that their troops were
being greeted as liberators. Predictably, the U.S. media were somewhat coy
in offering the news, not long thereafter, that U.S. troops had shot at
least 10 in a crowd in Mosul that shook their fists instead of offering
flowers. Promote a lie, and it's sometimes not long before that lie comes
home to roost.
What else, aside from a welcoming crowd, have the networks and
AM radio warhawks, not to mention the Bush administration, been hungering
for? The head, or least the DNA, of Saddam Hussein? Most assuredly. What
else? Weapons of mass destruction, of course. It was Bush's rationale for
his illegal invasion.
The days passed, and each excited bellow of discovery of WMD
caches on the road north from Kuwait yielded to disappointment. Then came
Judith Miller's story in the New York Times. The smoking gun at last!
Not exactly, as we shall see. But first a word about the
reporter, Judith Miller. If ever someone has an institutional interest in
finding an WMD in Iraq, it's surely Miller, who down the years has
established a corner in creaking Tales of Terrorism, many of them served to
her by Israeli and U.S. intelligence.
At least the Times' headline writer kept things honest. "Illicit
Arms Kept Till Eve of War, an Iraqi Scientist Is Said to Assert." Said by
whom? It turns out that Miller, in bed with the 101st Airborne, had been
told by "American weapons experts" that they have been talking to "a
scientist who claims to have worked in Iraq's chemical weapons program," and
he says that the Iraqis destroyed chemical weapons days before the war and
"Iraq had secretly sent unconventional weapons and technology to Syria,
starting in the mid-1990s, and that more recently Iraq was cooperating with
Al Qaeda."
Miller does concede that the U.S. weapons experts had declined
to identify the scientist in question, would not allow her to question the
scientist or do anything more than look at him (as he stood next to a
supposed chemical weapons dump) from a great distance.
What convenient disclosures this Iraqi offers, tailor-made to
buttress Rumsfeld's fist-shaking at Syria and Bush and Powell's claims that
Saddam and Osama bin Laden worked hand in glove, a claim that depended
originally on an article by Jeffrey Goldberg in the New Yorker last year.
At least Goldberg talked to the man claiming Osama/Hussein ties,
although he made no effort to check the man's "evidence," subsequently
discredited by less gullible journalists. With Miller we sink to the level
of straight press handout. I guess the Times put her name on the story
because neither the Iraqi scientist or his U.S. handlers could be
identified.
Alexander Cockburn is coeditor with Jeffrey St. Clair of the
muckraking newsletter CounterPunch. To find out more about Alexander
Cockburn and read features by other columnists and cartoonists, visit the
Creators Syndicate Web page at
www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2003 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
