| Report: Newspapers Were Deceived by Iraqi Defectors |
NEW YORK Bush administration officials were not the only people duped by tips from Iraqi defectors in the run-up to the 2003 war. Newspaper reporters also received, and printed, information from them, much of which has turned out to be false, according to a lengthy report this morning by Jonathan S. Landay and Tish Wells of Knight Ridder news service.
Knight Ridder's Washington bureau, which has broken numerous stories related to the Iraq war in recent months, has obtained a June 26, 2002, letter from the Iraqi National Congress (INC) to a U.S. Senate committee that listed 108 articles based on often fabricated information provided by the INC's "Information Collection Program," which was funded by the U.S. These articles appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Chicago Sun-Times, The Times of London and two Knight Ridder papers, The Kansas City (Mo.) Star and The Philadelphia Daily News, among others.
"Feeding the information to the news media," Landay and Wells write, "as well as to selected administration officials and members of Congress, helped foster an impression that there were multiple sources of intelligence on Iraq's illicit weapons programs and links to Bin Laden. In fact, many of the allegations came from the same half-dozen defectors, weren't confirmed by other intelligence and were hotly disputed by intelligence professionals at the CIA, the Defense Department and the State Department."
In at least one case, the reporters reveal, the INC made a defector available to a reporter even before the information had been vetted by U.S. officials. That defector claimed in a Dec. 20, 2001, article by Judith Miller in The New York Times that there were biological, nuclear and chemical warfare facilities located underground in Iraq. Nothing of the sort has since been found.
"U.S. intelligence officials have determined that virtually all of the defectors' information was marginal or useless, and that some of the defectors were fabricators or embellished the threat from Saddam," Landay and Wells write. "Many of the articles relied on interviews with the same defectors, who appeared to change facts with each telling."
The INC remains on the Pentagon payroll.
A copy of the INC letter can be found at krwashington.com.