Pro Versus Con At The Five-Year Mark

(And I don’t have to answer the question “Of what?,” do I?).

Max Follmer of HuffPo interviews John Walcott, the Washington bureau chief for McClatchy Newspapers (formerly Knight Ridder), one of the group of reporters from that organization who actually practiced serious journalism prior to the beginning of the war (here).

Of all of the good questions from Follmer and better answers from Wolcott and the team, this may be tops as far as I’m concerned…

And what was it about the way that you and the Knight Ridder team were approaching the story from a tradecraft point of view that make it different from what the public was seeing in the Times and the Post and the Wall Street Journal?

I think we approached this by asking the question every time the administration made an allegation "is this true?" "Is this true" is the basic question any journalist must ask any time a government, any government, makes an assertion. Governments do things for their own reasons depending on what the administration is. There could be altruistic reasons. But particularly a government that is politicized as the Bush Administration, one has to ask that question even more intensely. So we were doing that. We were also listening to people who were coming to us and saying "we don't think this is right. We don't believe that the intelligence is as strong as the administration is making it out to be." And indeed you saw that in open source reports. I'm referring to the unclassified version of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction which everyone had available to it, including members of congress.

First you had on September 3, 2002 the famous New York Times "aluminum tubes" piece by Judy Miller and Michael Gordon. That same day you had Vice President Cheney and then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice appear conveniently on the Sunday talk shows to talk about what had been extremely classified information that had appeared that day, in the New York Times. And then on September 10 you had the same allegations made to the world by the President of the United States from the podium of the United Nations. And then the following week the President made the same assertion that these aluminum tubes were for a nuclear weapons program that Iraq had hidden from UN weapons inspectors in an address to the nation. Then you had the unclassified version of the National Intelligence Estimate, which said there is division within the intelligence community on exactly what these tubes are all about.

I raise this point because this was one data point in what we had seen was a trend by this administration of exaggerating the intelligence it had on Iraq. We began tracing It back to right after 9/11 when Warren [Strobel] did the first story quoting analysts as saying it was unlikely that Iraq was involved in the World Trade Center attack. Then he went on to disclose that the former director of the CIA [James] Woolsey had made official visits to Britain on behalf of the Pentagon to check out a cockamamie tale that Ramzi Yousef, who we have in jail for the first World Trade Center attack, was not actually Ramzi Yousef but an Iraqi agent. And then right after the US went into Afghanistan, he and John [Walcott] did a story on how the administration had made a decision to oust Saddam Hussein. And we kept asking the question "why do they keep talking about Iraq when the problem is Al Qaeda in Afghanistan? Why do they keep talking about Iraq?" And we were already in that thinking mode when we started working on the stories in the lead up to the war. We were just doing the journalism that our journalism was pushing at.

And now, for the completely opposite side, we have Deadeye Dick Cheney here saying “it’s good to be back in Iraq” here.

Yeah, Dick – I think I speak for many people when I say that it’s good that you’re there also. And here’s more…

Cheney, who was in Iraq 10 months ago, said the Iraqis have made legislative advances that would be vital to the country's future. He also said there was no question but there had been a dramatic improvement in security.

(Iraq Prime Minister Nouri) Al-Maliki, speaking through an interpreter, also cited security improvements and said he and the vice president had talked about negotiations under way to spell out the legal basis for the presence of U.S. troops on Iraqi territory and to establish the legal rights and obligations of the troops, the so-called “status of forces agreement.”

And by the way, just to note here, the Status of Forces Agreement is something that was originally discussed in 2005, and three years later we still have no idea whether or not it is even remotely close to completion (and that’s also putting aside the fact that, without it, our personnel still have no legal basis for remaining in Iraq).

And here’s something else on the status of forces agreement from Defense Secretary Robert Gates (from about a month ago here)…

"The status-of-forces agreement that is being discussed will not contain a commitment to defend Iraq and neither will any strategic framework agreement," Gates told a U.S. Senate panel.

"We do not want, nor will we seek, permanent bases in Iraq," he later told a U.S. House of Representatives committee.

Gee, I'm sure that’s news to the Friends Committee on National Legislation, which has identified 13 such bases here.

And for more information on how to try and bring this nightmare to an end, here once more is the video with Darcy Burner and other Democrats and related experts with their plan and what we can do to help (here).