I nominate The New Yorker's Jeffrey Goldberg as the Remington of
our time, though without the artistic talent. Remington? Back in 1898,
William Randolph Hearst was trying to fan war fever between the United
States and Spain. He dispatched a reporter and the artist Frederic Remington
to Cuba to send back blood-roiling depictions of Spanish beastliness to
Cuban insurgents. Remington wired to say he could find nothing sensational
to draw and could he come home. Famously, Hearst wired him, "Please remain.
You furnish the pictures, and I'll furnish the war." Remington duly did so.
I wouldn't set The New Yorker's editor, David Remnick, in the
shoes of a Kong-sized monster like Hearst. Remnick is a third-tier talent
who has always got ahead by singing the correct career-enhancing tunes, as
witness his awful reporting from Russia in the 1990s. Art Spiegelman
recently quit The New Yorker, remarking that these dangerous times require
courage and the ability to be provocative, but alas, "Remnick does not feel
up to the challenge."
That's putting it far too politely. Remnick's watch has been
lackluster and cowardly. He is also the current sponsor (Marty Peretz of The
New Republic was an earlier one) of Goldberg, whose first major chunk of
agitprop for The New Yorker was published on March 25 of last year. Titled
"The Great Terror," it was billed as containing disclosures of "Saddam
Hussein's possible ties to al Qaeda."
This was at a moment when the FBI and CIA had just shot down the
war party's claim of a meeting between Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi
intelligence agent in Prague before the 9-11 attacks. Goldberg saved the day
for the Bush crowd. At the core of his rambling, 16,000-word piece was an
interview in the Kurdish-held Iraqi town of Sulaimaniya with Mohammed
Mansour Shahab, who offered the eager Goldberg a wealth of detail about his
activities as a link between Osama bin Laden and the Iraqis, shuttling arms
and other equipment.
The piece was gratefully seized upon by the administration as
proof of The Link. The coup de grâce to Goldberg's credibility fell on Feb.
9 of this year in the London Observer, administered by Jason Burke, its
chief reporter. Burke visited the same prison in Sulaimaniya, talked to
Shahab and established beyond doubt that Goldberg's great source is a clumsy
liar, not even knowing the physical appearance of Kandahar, whither he had
claimed to have journeyed to deal with bin Laden, and confecting his
fantasies in the hope of a shorter prison sentence.
Another experienced European journalist, whom I reached on the
Continent at the end of this week and who visited the prison last year
agrees with Burke's findings. "I talked to prisoners without someone
present. The director of the prison seemed surprised at my request. With a
prison authority present, the interview would be worthless. As soon as we
talked to this particular one, a colleague said after 30 seconds, 'this is
worthless. The guy was just a storyteller.'"
The European journalist, who doesn't want to be identified, said
to me charitably that Goldberg's credulity about Shahab "could have been a
matter of misjudgment, but my even stronger criticism is that if you talked,
as we did, and as I gather Goldberg did, to anybody in the PUK (the Kurdish
group controlling this area of northern Iraq) about this particular Islamic
group, all of them would tell you they are backed by Iran, as common sense
would tell you. Look where they are located. It's 200 meters across one
river to Iran. That's what I find upsetting. Misjudging a source can happen
to all of us, but Goldberg did talk to generals in the PUK. I think it's
outrageous that New Yorker ran that story."
An American with a lot of experience in interviewing in prisons
adds, "It's tricky interviewing prisoners in the first place -- their
vulnerability, etc. -- and responsible journalists make some sort of minimal
credibility assessment before they report someone's statements. but the
prisoner said exactly what Jeffrey Goldberg wanted to hear, so Goldberg
didn't feel that he needed to mention that the prisoner was nuts."
On Feb. 10, amid widespread cynicism about the administration's
rationales for war, Remnick published another Goldberg special, "The
Unknown: The CIA and the Pentagon Take Another Look at Al Qaeda and Iraq."
This 6,000-word screed had no pretensions to being anything other than a
servile rendition of Donald Rumsfeld's theory of intelligence: "Build a
hypothesis, and then see if the data supported the hypothesis, rather than
the reverse." In other words, decide what you want to hear, then torture the
data until the data confess.
This last piece of Goldberg's was a truly disgraceful piece of
flackery (of Rumsfeld, Tenet, et al.), devoid of even the pretensions of
independent journalism. "Reporter at Large"? Remnick should retire the
rubric, at least for Goldberg, and advertise his work as "White House
Handout." I should note that Goldberg once served in Israel's armed forces,
which may or may not be a guide to his political agenda.
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.
