Squaring the Culture

I’m about 2 weeks behind this topic, because I was focusing on other things (like surviving bronchitis), but I brought myself up to speed this morning. What I discovered is that the US press has subjected the American public to one of the most thoroughly dishonest propaganda efforts of the Iraq War, adding to a disturbing legacy of deliberately misleading the public.

Ten days ago the Pentagon released a report concerning ties between pre-invasion Iraq and various terrorist groups, based on a review of 600,000 documents captured from Saddam Hussein’s government during the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Following is the part of the summary that I would focus on as a reporter. As an editor writing a headline, I’d say something like “Captured Papers Prove Saddam’s Terrorist Ties,” and follow the headline with the opening paragraph from the Executive Summary of the report (emphasis mine):

The Iraqi Perspectives Project (IPP) review of captured Iraqi documents uncovered strong evidence that links the regime of Saddam Hussein to regional and global terrorism. Despite their incompatible long-term goals, many terrorist movements and Saddam found a common enemy in the United States. At times these organizations worked together, trading access for capability. In the period after the 1991 Gulf War, the regime of Saddam Hussein supported a complex and increasingly disparate mix of pan-Arab revolutionary causes and emerging pan-Islamic radical movements. The relationship between Iraq and forces of pan-Arab socialism was well known and was in fact one of the defining qualities of the Ba’ath movement…

State sponsorship of terrorism became such a routine tool of state power that Iraq developed elaborate bureaucratic processes to monitor progress and accountability in the recruiting, training, and resourcing of terrorists.

Going beyond the headlines, the actual report, which is available online in PDF format, describes how, with UN sanctions weakening his ability to affect world events directly, Saddam Hussein developed an official policy of using both regional and international terrorists to achieve his policy goals. Hussein’s Iraq recruited and trained suicide bombers and planted them in foreign nations, obtained and stored weapons in foreign countries, trained foreign terrorists in Iraqi training camps, supplied passports and documents to international terrorists, supplied funding to numerous terrorist organizations for their operations against the West and Israel, targeted Western journalists for assassination, and made efforts to penetrate, conjoin, and/or cooperate with a variety of international terrorist organizations, including al Qaeda. While Saddam Hussein’s policy goals often focused on Iraqis overseas and on destabilizing neighbor countries (Saudi Arabia and Kuwait), many times the overlap between Saddam’s goals and those of terrorist groups with broader aspirations produced common bonds and cooperative ventures.

Now, here’s what the newspapers reported:

• McClatchy Newspapers: “Exhaustive review finds no link between Saddam and al Qaida” (March 10)
• ABC News: “Report Shows No Link Between Saddam and al Qaeda” (March 13)
• New York Times: “Oh, By the Way, There Was No Al Qaeda Link” (March 13)
• CNN: “Hussein’s Iraq and al Qaeda not linked, Pentagon says” (March 13)
• Yahoo News: “No link between Saddam and Al-Qaeda: Pentagon study” (March 13)

The McClatchy report was based on leaked information from inside the Pentagon, apparently focusing on a phrase from the second paragraph of the Executive Summary. Here’s the paragraph:

But the relationships between Iraq and the groups advocating pan-Islamic doctrines are much more complex. This study found no “smoking gun” (i.e. direct connection) between Saddam’s Iraq and al Qaeda. Saddam’s interest in, and support for, non-state actors was spread across a variety of revolutionary, liberation, nationalist, and Islamic terrorist organizations. Some in the regime recognized the potential high internal and external costs of maintaining relationships with radical Islamic groups, yet they concluded that in some cases, the benefits of association outweighed the risks.

The McClatchy article, released before the reporter had read the report, represented what it knew this way:

The new study of the Iraqi regime’s archives found no documents indicating a “direct operational link” between Hussein’s Iraq and al Qaida before the invasion, according to a U.S. official familiar with the report.

He and others spoke to McClatchy on condition of anonymity because the study isn’t due to be shared with Congress and released before Wednesday.

The key point here is that once again, some element within the Executive Branch of the government leaked information with specific intent to discredit Bush administration foreign policy. This may be the lasting legacy of the Bush administration, in retrospect; individuals from the opposition party actively attempting to undermine the policies of the elected representatives of the people, constituting something only just short of a coup d’etat in American government. We’ve seen several instances of this throughout the Bush years, including the Plame Game, the false NIE reports, and the leaks of CIA operation details to the press. I’ve written about several such instances (here, here, and generally here, for starters.)

The leaked information has that irritating characteristic of leftist propaganda: true on the surface, but misleading or irrelevant in more ways than can easily fit into a sound bite. The words they used were true in a Clintonian sense (there was no direct operational connection found) but utterly false in intent. Aside from the fact that the war in Iraq has never specifically been about al Qaeda, and aside from the fact that al Qaeda is only one of dozens of relevant adversaries in the global War on Terror, the report documented extensive, indirect cooperation between Hussein and al Qaeda in several areas.

From page 34 of the report:

Captured documents reveal that the regime was willing to co-opt or support organizations it knew to be part of al Qaeda — as long as that organization’s near-term goals supported Saddam’s long-term vision.

From page 42 of the report:

Saddam supported groups that either associated directly with al Qaeda (such as the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, led at one time by bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al Zawahiri) or that generally shared al Qaeda’s stated goals and objectives.

And from the Pentagon’s abstract of the report:

Because Saddam’s security organizations and Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network operated with similar aims (at least in the short term), considerable overlap was inevitable when monitoring, contacting, financing, and training the same outside groups. This created both the appearance of and, in some way, a “de facto” link between the organizations. At times, these organizations would work together in pursuit of shared goals but still maintain their autonomy and independence because of innate caution and mutual distrust.

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air offered a more thorough and well-informed analysis of the al Qaeda links that appear in the report, and reporter Eli Lake of the New York Sun provides an example of how an objective reporter would report the Pentagon study, under the accurate headline “Report Details Saddam’s Terrorist Ties.” His article includes this assessment from page 3:

The report also undercuts the claim made by many on the left and many at the CIA that Saddam, as a national socialist, was incapable of supporting or collaborating with the Islamist al Qaeda. The report concludes that instead Iraq’s relationship with Osama bin Laden’s organization was similar to the relationship between the rival Colombian cocaine cartels in the 1990s. Both were rivals in some sense for market share, but also allies when it came to expanding the size of the overall market.

Of course, McClatchy offered no retraction or clarification after the actual report was released, and the headlines of the rest of the newspaper world cannot be excused for a millisecond. They wanted the report to say the opposite of what it actually said, so they read selectively, and reported only those factoids that fit their favored narrative, no matter how badly out of context. They lied.

This is becoming routine. That’s a shame; it’s an outrage, and concerns every citizen of a free society. Writers from the American revolutionary period note the importance of a free press to protect liberty, but several noted a more foundational need — a virtuous population, devoted to acting righteously. If we can’t count on a free press to tell the truth, then a free press cannot defend our liberties, but can only act as an agent of tyranny. Lies and liberty cannot coexist.

“We have no government armed with the power capable of contending with human passions, unbridled by morality and true religion. Our constitution is made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” John Adams, to the Officers of the First Brigade, Third Division, Massachusetts Militia, October 11, 1798.

Certain news organizations should be driven out of business because of sheer, gross incompetence, or worse, ill will resulting in misleading propaganda.

Stephen Hayes, the reporter who has spent the most effort over the years reviewing and reporting on the contents of documents captured from Hussein’s Iraq, offers the most complete analysis of the report available, and a generous interpretation of how the newspaper world got the story wrong. Thanks also go to The Unalienable Right, the blog from the editors of The Federalist Journal, for providing links to the most relevant facts.