03/22/13 – Peter Hart – The Scott Horton Show

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For Pacifica Radio, March 22, 2013.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right, y'all.
Welcome to the show.
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I'm Scott Horton.
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Tonight's guest is the great Peter Hart from Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.
Welcome to the show, Peter.
How are you doing?
I'm doing great.
Thanks for having me.
Well, you're welcome.
I'm very happy to have you here.
I appreciate you joining us, especially on a Friday afternoon.
So it's the 10th anniversary of the American invasion of Iraq.
And I guess they're keeping you pretty busy, huh?
Yeah.
You know, you want to believe that there's a – at some point, the media starts to learn and starts to learn from the lessons of the Iraq debacle.
But really, the anniversary is a good reminder that many of the lessons have not been learned, that many of the pundits who were so certain about Iraq turned out to be wrong and still have their prominent perches on the Sunday shows and on the op-ed pages and really have done very little to, I think, atone for or apologize for their shameless promotion of the Bush administration's lies about Iraq.
Yeah.
Greg Mitchell, I think, in discussing The New York Times' original sort of admission, he called it a mini-culpa, where they kind of say, well, you know, things were gotten wrong somehow or whatever.
They still won't take any real responsibility.
And that goes for almost every one of the worst cheerleaders for the Iraq war, right?
Even when they say, well, OK, I sort of kind of got it wrong.
They've always gotten out.
And it's always really still somebody else's fault that they got it wrong.
Yeah.
You know, you've mentioned The New York Times.
Michael Gordon was on the PBS NewsHour's 10-Year Look Back segment.
Michael Gordon co-authored and was the lead author, in fact, on the infamous New York Times story about Iraq's aluminum tubes.
So he's not paid a political or a career price for this at all.
One of the things you saw so often in the coverage, this is something that you touched on, was the idea that we were told X and we were told Y.
That was how Brian Williams on NBC did their look back at the Iraq war.
And to me, the most important thing was not what the government was telling Brian Williams or telling NBC News or telling any other reporter.
It's what they were telling the public.
The government will tell you all kinds of things.
All government lies.
I think the best way to approach this, if you're a journalist.
So it does sort of push the responsibility off to someone else when you say, hey, they weren't being straight with us.
We understand that.
We're sophisticated enough to know that the government is going to tell you a story.
It's your job as a journalist to try to poke holes in that story and to try to show where there are weaknesses.
And that is the principal failure of the media in the run up to the Iraq war.
And 10 years later, if they're unwilling to accept that, then it really raises fundamental questions about what they're there for.
You know, you mentioned The New York Times had its, as Greg Mitchell put it, their mini culpa.
That was, in fact, one of the more honest appraisals of media performance by a media outlet, as I think as sort of a half step as that was.
They did a lot better than most of the other major media outlets that never presented anything to the public to account for their many failures.
Yeah.
Well, it's just amazing to hear them all pretending that everybody got it wrong, that everybody was willing to settle for we are being told X or we are being told Y.
You had the veteran intelligence professionals for sanity and Scott Ritter and all these others running around debunking every bit of this.
I remember Ray McGovern said we already know that they destroyed the factories that made this stuff.
It's just impossible that what Cheney claims to know for a fact is true.
And that's, you know, just one example.
That's nine months before the war started.
Of course, I interviewed Jonathan Landay from McClatchy Newspapers, where he and his colleagues completely debunked every bit of this from September 11th on the connection to Iraq and the weapons, mass destruction and the rest of it.
So Brian Williams and the Michael Gordons and all the leaders of the major media, they don't have any excuse in the world when the competition was getting it right on the lowest level even.
Yeah.
You know, there is this fiction that everyone knew.
And, you know, if you watch media on the right, but also in the middle, they'll say, you know, there was this intelligence industry consensus in the United States and across the world.
All the major intelligence agencies in the United States and Europe and so on and so forth agreed that Iraq had these fearsome weapons of mass destruction.
They have to tell you that.
And you have to believe that because the alternative is that people who aren't intelligence experts, who aren't professionals, somehow have the right idea about this.
And that's impossible.
That can't be.
We can't allow that to stand.
But in fact, that's exactly the truth.
And the truth is that in the run up to the war, there were intelligence professionals in this country and elsewhere who were raising serious doubts.
You know, you had a reporter for the AP, Charles Hanley, who was going to the sites in Iraq that Colin Powell, that the Bush administration was naming as being the places they were most concerned with.
He was there and with the weapons inspectors, and they weren't finding anything.
They were declaring that there was not a suspicious activity going on at these sites.
So that is reality.
And that was you did not need to have super secret intelligence.
You did not need to have access to classified information.
It was all there out in the open.
You had to pay attention to it.
You had to read it.
And we didn't have a media system that reinforced those messages or amplified that skepticism.
We had a media system that did exactly the opposite.
So if you comb the archives of some of the big papers, The New York Times, The Washington Post, you can find a story here or there that tells you what would turn out to be the truth.
And it's not because those reporters had crystal balls.
They were talking to the right people, and they were voicing the right kinds of questions.
The intelligence failure is one aspect of the Iraq failure from a media standpoint, just one.
But I think it's one of the most important ones, because it is what led us into the war.
The early days of the war were characterized by other kinds of media failures.
But this intelligence failure, I think, is still important.
And the fact that media outlets don't want to grapple with it and don't want to account for how they got this so wrong is very, very revealing.
In any other industry, you would expect people who got something this wrong to explain themselves publicly.
You would expect the outlets to take it seriously because their credibility was at stake.
But they don't want to draw much attention to these things, even though, as you say, people who were out on the fringes looking at this process were in many ways correct.
Yeah.
Well, and the thing is, too, I guess the biggest lie of all of it wasn't just, oh, he's trust us.
We know he's got a warehouse somewhere with canisters of VX gas in it or some nonsense like that.
But it was the idea that Iraq could possibly be a threat at all.
After we completely smashed them in 91, after then a decade of blockade and bombing after that, the no-fly zones that basically cut Saddam's government off from the north and the south of the country left them controlling basically the what they later called the Sunni triangle or whatever was the whole of Iraq at the time.
And none of his neighbors, not the Turks, the Jordanians, the Saudis, the Iranians or anybody else feared him or thought that he was a threat whatsoever.
So, I mean, they knew they were lying.
That's the whole thing about Brian Williams and whatever is he's not a failure.
He's a success.
That was what he was supposed to do was scare everybody's grandma into thinking that this had to be done or else until she was afraid enough to give her consensus or her part of the consensus.
And then they did it.
And I say grandma, because that's who watches Brian Williams.
But the same goes for for the rest of the channels and the rest of the newspapers, too.
Yeah.
And, you know, I think a lot of people have read this Andrew Bacevich letter to Paul Wolfowitz that's in Harper's magazine.
And they've made it available on their website because a lot of people wanted to read it because he's trying to come up with another rationale for the war.
And in his letter to Wolfowitz is trying to get him to respond to the idea that this was not about a threat from Iraq and this was not about weapons of mass destruction because it's so plainly, obviously concocted.
But it was about testing a theory about U.S. imperial power in a way, the need for the United States to strike out and and assert total dominance in the world.
And Iraq was essentially a test case for that.
And, you know, that, I think, is a totally different kind of conversation that is probably worth having, but almost impossible to imagine in a in a corporate media system because it raises fundamental questions, not about people getting the intelligence wrong, but about the government deciding that they were going to pursue a very radical foreign policy idea and pursue it by invading another country to basically prove a theory about U.S. power.
It's compelling.
And the way he writes it is compelling.
And it would be fascinating for, you know, Bush officials to explain this and to respond to it.
Good luck with that happening.
Yeah.
Well, you know, Michael Gordon at The New York Times, who did so bad on the aluminum tubes before the war, he's also the guy who almost succeeded in lying us into war with Iran in 2007 when David Petraeus and them and the Cheneyites came up with the slogan.
Really, I don't think there was ever much more to it than that.
But that any roadside bomb that goes off in Iraq from now on has to have come from Iran somehow.
They never proved it.
They never even tried to prove it.
But they told that lie 10,000 times.
And it was Michael Gordon who led the thing.
And they were trying to use it to get airstrikes against Revolutionary Guard Corps bases inside Iran in order as an end run around since the nuclear threat wasn't working out to find another way to start a war with Iran for Israel.
Yeah.
And, you know, that moment, I think, was the first of many where you could test the idea of whether or not an outlet like the New York Times had learned its lesson from Iraq.
Those Gordon stories were remarkable at the time.
And people paid close attention to them because they were entirely based on anonymous government officials telling him things and the government trying to unveil this case.
You know, they were going to make a dramatic presentation of the bomb parts to show that they could only have been from Iran.
And the only upside to this was that there was some pushback, I think more pushback than there was in the Iraq example, where people from kind of the middle of the road were asking, well, you know, how solid are these stories really?
And you saw Gordon kind of backtracking and saying, well, you know, I didn't say it was the Iranian government who was behind this.
I just said Iran, which, you know, in the context of a story like that is essentially the same thing.
So, you know, he went through that.
He went through a period where he was publishing articles about the need to stay in Iraq.
There was, you know, a push to withdraw troops.
And he was a member of the front page article for the New York Times, you know, get out now, not so fast, say experts.
So he went to a bunch of experts who wanted to prolong the war and add them and only them tell him that, no, you can't leave Iraq.
The United States military has to stay there.
This is how this is how the system works in a lot of ways.
And, you know, I think the final lesson from that is seeing him on PBS as a serious analyst of Iraq 10 years later, where he was still pushing the idea that the United States has a counterinsurgency theory that the military can put into practice.
Maybe not right now, because the public isn't keen on this idea, but it works and it'll work again in the future.
And I remember watching him say that and thinking, you know, so long as somebody like Michael Gordon is at an outlet like the New York Times and willing to give anonymous government officials free reign to make accusations about whatever the enemy country is of the moment, then it is a threat.
There is a real threat, a real possibility that the country could find itself marching toward war again, because outlets like the New York Times are helping government officials make their case.
These are the fundamental questions about what kind of media system we have and whether or not it's changed much.
And, you know, the answer is whether you're looking at the fear mongering over Iran or over chemical weapons in Syria, the answer is not a lot has changed.
The hopeful thing is that there's a lot more independent media, and I think readers and viewers and citizens are a lot more skeptical from the Iraq experience.
So in a way, the rest of us have learned a lesson about the media and Iraq that the media haven't learned, or at least they don't want to learn.
So the rest of us have moved on, and we understand that there's something different that we have to do.
But the press, you know, wants to pretend that everything is fine.
And so long as they keep doing that, you know, the rest of us will be on the outside, but we'll be finding media outlets that do a better job than the New York Times.
Yeah, I mean, that really is the ticket.
Right now on MSNBC, they're interviewing Michael O'Hanlon, who represented the center-left Brookings Institution Democratic Party, Bill Clinton-esque sort of attitude on the Iraq war, which is let's do it back in 2002 and 2003.
And here he is right now as we're recording this Friday afternoon, the 22nd of March, 2013.
There he is, and he's saying, yes, of course, we have to escalate our arming and training of the rebels in Syria, who are, of course, al-Qaeda in Iraq veterans who are now our friends helping overthrow Bashar al-Assad.
You know, I saw two nights ago on PBS, on the NewsHour, they had a segment about Syria and chemical weapons.
And one of the quote-unquote experts was David Ignatius, the Washington Post columnist who a couple of weeks ago was writing these very Judith Miller-type columns about a defector who had second-hand intelligence about what was happening in Syria, who told him that Assad's people were delivering the chemical weapons via biological mobile labs to Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Right.
Of course, these are Saddam's chemical weapons, right?
Exactly.
These are why you can't find them.
Saddam moved them all to Syria, remember?
Yeah, it's the exact same story.
And, you know, he's writing in the Washington Post and then going on television as an expert on the very same subject.
So, you know, you look at it and you think, no, these people haven't learned these lessons.
And the next time around when something like this happens, we'll have, just like we had in early March 10 years ago, or the middle of March 10 years ago, stories about precision weapons and these are bombs that can't find civilians.
They only land on their targets.
Shock and awe, all of that stuff, which was just out-and-out propaganda.
And the idea that it'll be different next time around, I think, is fanciful.
We heard the same things about the NATO bombing in Libya.
The precision of the weapons was so awesome that the idea that civilians were going to die or be injured was just a remote, remote possibility.
And then, you know, you find out days later, weeks later that, no, in fact, these things did happen.
So, you know, the lessons, I think, are very clear.
The media don't want to talk about certain parts of the Iraq legacy because all of it reflects poorly on the terrible job that they did in the run-up to the war and in the early days of the war and in the middle of the war and in the end of the war.
There isn't an upside to this, but, you know, so they have to kind of ignore what I think are very obvious realities in order to make you think that they've kind of absorbed some of this or are at least confronting it when, in fact, for the most part, they're not.
Yeah.
Well, and like you say, you know, the people, more and more, they have their Pacifica radios and their fairness and accuracy and reportings, et cetera, so that they can find ways around this.
But the people who make the policy, they still only listen to each other up there, the different think tankers and the politicians and even Rand Paul, who's the son of Ron Paul, was up there the other day picking on Iraqi asylum seekers and saying with a straight face, not being sarcastic, saying with a straight face, we've given them a democracy over there.
I thought asylum was for the victims of dictatorships.
These Iraqis ought to have to go home and build their society, blah, blah, blah.
You know, like America really just finished setting them free over there is what happened.
And so, you know, the lessons don't get learned.
Right.
I mean, as long as Michael Gordon's still writing at The Times, we can expect Michael Gordon-esque policies or the kind of policies that flow from those half-truths and untruths to continue on, even at the hands of a son of a Paul.
One of the most jarring things that I heard was from Jeremy Scahill, a reporter who spent a lot of time in Iraq before the war and has been back a number of times since.
And he was talking about the brutality of Saddam Hussein's rule in Iraq.
And the reason he brought this up and described it in pretty harrowing terms was that he is of the opinion, and he's certainly not the only one, that life for the average Iraqi in the country now is worse than it was then.
And that, I think, is a reality or an argument that very few people want to confront.
Yeah, Darja Mail told me the same thing the other day.
Darja Mail, who was the great unembedded reporter during the worst days of the war, has just gone back and done a tour all around the country.
And he says everybody calls Nouri al-Maliki, the American-installed, Iranian-backed dictator there, they call him the Shia Saddam.
And in fact, you know what he said, Peter?
He said that they now miss the days when it was the Americans who would come and kidnap their sons and take them off to be tortured, because at least maybe we'll get them back at the end.
Whereas now, when Maliki's men come to take you away to be tortured, you're never heard from again.
And that's, you know, it's an astounding idea.
Understanding even those of us who obviously have not been to Iraq, understanding the level of violence and brutality that was unleashed as a result of the war.
I think that even comes through in a lot of the mainstream coverage.
But if you were to have a conversation with the American public where you said, the price we know has been enormous any way you measure it, and life in Iraq could very well be worse, that's a pretty astounding conclusion to reach, and one that I think media are avoiding and would run from.
You know, I watched a 10 Years Later segment on ABC World News, and they talked to three severely wounded vets, all of whom said that they would, if they had a chance to do it over again, would in fact do it over again.
And, you know, this is not a criticism of them, but it is a criticism of a journalistic approach that says, these are the veteran stories that we're going to tell, the vets who've lost a limb, who've suffered severe brain damage, but hold no grudge and, you know, are happy with the way their lives have turned out.
It sends a very jarring message to the public, I think, and it ignores the very brave veterans who were speaking out against the Iraq War and against war in general, to exclude them from any look back at the Iraq War from a veteran's perspective, I think does a great disservice to them and to the country, which, you know, we are the ones who are supposed to be grappling with this legacy and thinking about how we will react the next time the government announces its intention to start a war.
You know, if I can ask you one more thing, it would be about the accountability and the way it sort of didn't happen back in 2002 and 2003, and I mean for the media.
Was it just that the way that the administration kind of put us off with the great WMD hunt, where it's not like they admitted in June of 2003 that, geez, you're right, that's it, we can't find any.
They sort of said, wait, give us a couple of years.
We still have to look some more, and it kind of dragged out, instead of the outrage kind of exploding all at once, they're kind of, the pro-Bush-leaning people of America all kind of still had the argument to glom on to that.
Well, they're not done yet, and so, you know what I mean, where the backlash wasn't, you know, they successfully sort of dragged out the backlash and diminished it.
You know, I think there's something to that.
There was a sense in real time, even among people who were very skeptical of this case, that, well, what if they do find something?
You know, intelligence is just that, it's intelligence, it's not reality, and there was, I think, a lot of trepidation about being too certain about anything, and if you remember the first weeks of the war, every week or so there was a discovery that was certainly the WMDs have been found, and then it would wash out.
Usually the story about it washing out was not nearly as prominent as the story about them finding the mobile weapons labs, or this bunker with this, you know, cache of chemical weapons, or what have you.
Those stories happened throughout, so it did take a long time for there to be any sense that, you know, maybe there's nothing here, and I think that did blunt some of the criticism, and then the insurgency really became the story in Iraq.
So in some ways that was more important to discuss than the original problem, and of course, you know, when you go back and look at how the administration sold the war and the phases of the sales job, you know, depending on the day, we were not there about weapons at all.
We were there to promote democracy, or we were there to help write a constitution.
Those became the rationales that the administration and subsequently the media wanted to focus on.
They didn't want to talk about the WMDs.
I thought the most telling example of that was when George W. Bush gave that speech laughing about the failure to find weapons of mass destruction, and it did not offend many people in the media whatsoever.
Right.
They laughed.
They thought it was great.
Yeah, and I thought that, I think, was one of those moments where you realized that, you know, this is 2004, that he's joking about not finding weapons the year after launching the war, and if you go back and look at the press reaction to it, it was mostly to have a good laugh along with him.
There were still army men being sent on missions looking for the weapons and dying on those missions at that time.
And, you know, there were a couple of instances around that time and then later where Bush was pressed on some of this, and he said in a couple of different settings that one of the problems was that Saddam Hussein wouldn't let the weapons inspectors in, and that was one of those moments.
And I remember we wrote about it at the time because it was such an obvious distortion of reality that the run-up to the war was marked by this tremendous push to get the weapons inspectors around the country to hear what they had to say and to decide what you were going to do based on their reporting from inside the country.
And then Bush, not 18 months, two, three years later, was saying, well, you know, we didn't have inspectors going in looking around Iraq.
And you thought, what on earth is he talking about?
One of the times he did this was on a plane trip with a bunch of reporters, and almost none of them wrote about it.
And that's when you start to feel like they're avoiding a reality that's smacking them right in the face.
And, you know, that's why I say there were so many tests along the way for the press.
It wasn't just about making a bet about whether or not there were going to be WMDs in Iraq.
There were subsequent stories that tested the media's independence, their willingness to serve as a check on government power.
And along the way, they failed time and time again.
And the thing is, too, is it's so easy to imagine a real house cleaning, right, where the people who, you know, were the most willing tools on this in the newspapers and on TV would have to go.
And in fact, you know, Eric Margulies, who they quit interviewing because how right he was on all this stuff, he would now be the host of the show.
And, you know, I'm sure you we could probably do a whole show about the the Hall of Fame and all the reporters who did great work in the run up to the Iraq war.
And it's so easy to imagine them all being promoted and the losers all being held accountable and having to go.
Yeah.
And, you know, as we put it, there's you know, they're lucky to work in a business where there's no accountability, because if there were, then they would have to find another line of work.
That's the story of the Iraq war, that the people who were so wrong suffered little to no consequences outside of Judith Miller.
You know, you can't think of high profile people who lost their perch specifically because of the Iraq war.
The Pentagon correspondents who basically spoon fed you whatever the Pentagon was telling them, they are still there doing the same thing.
And, you know, these are the people who are relying on to sort out fact from fiction when it comes to Iran.
You know, good luck.
And Syria and Mali and all the rest of our wars, too.
All right.
Well, we got to go.
Thank you so much for your time, Peter.
I really do appreciate it.
My pleasure.
All right.
So that is the great Peter Hart from fairness and accuracy in reporting at fair dot org.
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