2006-03-19

WP prewar reporting on Iraq

2004


2004-08-12-Washington-Post
The Post on WMDs: An Inside Story
Prewar Articles Questioning Threat Often Didn’t Make Front Page
by Howard Kurtz
Washington Post, 2004-08-12

[Paragraph numbers and emphasis have been added.
The Post’s self-references as “The Washington Post”
have been converted to “the Washington Post.”]


[0.1]
Days before the Iraq war began,
veteran Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus put together a story
questioning whether the Bush administration had proof
that Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction.

[0.2]
But he ran into resistance from the paper’s editors,
and his piece ran only after assistant managing editor Bob Woodward,
who was researching a book about the drive toward war,
“helped sell the story,” Pincus recalled.
“Without him, it would have had a tough time getting into the paper.”
Even so, the article was relegated to Page A17.

[0.3]
“We did our job but we didn’t do enough,
and I blame myself mightily for not pushing harder,”
Woodward said in an interview.
“We should have warned readers
we had information that the basis for this was shakier” than widely believed.
“Those are exactly the kind of statements
that should be published on the front page.”

[0.4]
As violence continues in postwar Iraq
and U.S. forces have yet to discover any WMDs,
some critics say
the media, including the Washington Post, failed the country
by not reporting more skeptically on
President Bush’s contentions during the run-up to war.


[0.5]
An examination of the paper’s coverage,
and interviews with more than a dozen of the editors and reporters involved,
shows that
the Post published a number of pieces challenging the White House,
but rarely on the front page.
Some reporters who were lobbying for greater prominence
for stories that questioned the administration’s evidence
complained to senior editors who, in the view of those reporters,
were unenthusiastic about such pieces.
The result was coverage that, despite flashes of groundbreaking reporting,
in hindsight looks strikingly one-sided at times.

[0.6]
“The paper was not front-paging stuff,”
said Pentagon correspondent Thomas Ricks.
“Administration assertions were on the front page.
Things that challenged the administration
were on A18 on Sunday or A24 on Monday.
There was an attitude among editors:
Look, we’re going to war,
why do we even worry about all this contrary stuff?”


[0.7]
In retrospect, said Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr.,
“we were so focused
on trying to figure out what the administration was doing
that we were not giving the same play
to people who said it wouldn’t be a good idea to go to war
and were questioning the administration’s rationale.

Not enough of those stories were put on the front page.
That was a mistake on my part.”

[0.8]
Across the country,
“the voices raising questions about the war were lonely ones,” Downie said.
“We didn’t pay enough attention to the minority.”

[0.9]
When national security reporter Dana Priest
was addressing a group of intelligence officers recently,
she said,
she was peppered with questions:
“Why didn’t the Post do a more aggressive job?
Why didn’t the Post ask more questions?
Why didn’t the Post dig harder?”

[0.10]
Several news organizations have cast a withering eye on their earlier work.
The New York Times said in a May editor’s note
about stories that claimed progress in the hunt for WMDs
that editors
“were perhaps too intent on rushing scoops into the paper.”
Separately,
the Times editorial page and the New Republic magazine
expressed regret for some prewar arguments.

[0.11]
Michael Massing, a New York Review of Books contributor
and author of the forthcoming book Now They Tell Us, on the press and Iraq,
said:
“In covering the run-up to the war,
The Post did better than most other news organizations,
featuring a number of solid articles about the Bush administration’s policies.
But on the key issue of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction,
the paper was generally napping along with everyone else.
It gave readers little hint
of the doubts that a number of intelligence analysts had
about the administration’s claims regarding Iraq’s arsenal.”

[0.12]
The front page is a newspaper’s billboard,
its way of making a statement about what is important,
and stories trumpeted there are often picked up by other news outlets.
Editors begin pitching stories
at a 2 p.m. news meeting with Downie and Managing Editor Steve Coll
and, along with some reporters, lobby throughout the day.
But there is limited space on Page 1 -- usually six or seven stories --
and Downie said he likes to feature a broad range of subjects,
including education, health, science, sports and business.

[A nice idea.
But with war looming, maybe that’s more important?]


[0.13]
Woodward, for his part, said it was risky
for journalists to write anything that might look silly
if weapons were ultimately found in Iraq.
Alluding to the finding of the Sept. 11 commission
of a “groupthink” among intelligence officials,
Woodward said of the weapons coverage:
“I think I was part of the groupthink.”

[More accurately,
that “groupthink” afflicted practically all of the media.
It was an epidemic.]


[0.14]
Given the Post’s reputation for helping topple the Nixon administration,
some of those involved in the prewar coverage felt compelled to say
the paper’s shortcomings did not reflect any reticence
about taking on the Bush White House.
[But how about taking on AIPAC?]
Priest noted, however, that
skeptical stories usually triggered hate mail
“questioning your patriotism and
suggesting that you somehow be delivered into the hands of the terrorists.”

[0.15]
Instead, the obstacles ranged
from editing difficulties and communication problems
to the sheer mass of information the newsroom was trying to digest
during the march to war.



The Doubts Go Inside
[1.1]
From August 2002 through the March 19, 2003, launch of the war,
the Post ran more than 140 front-page stories
that focused heavily on administration rhetoric against Iraq.
Some examples [dates are added]:
2002-08-27: “Cheney Says Iraqi Strike Is Justified”;
2002-09-09: “War Cabinet Argues for Iraq Attack”;
2002-09-13:
Bush Tells United Nations It Must Stand Up to Hussein or U.S. Will”;
2002-10-08: “Bush Cites Urgent Iraqi Threat”;
2003-01-04: “Bush Tells Troops: Prepare for War.”

[1.2]
Reporter Karen DeYoung,
a former assistant managing editor who covered the prewar diplomacy,
said contrary information sometimes got lost.

[1.3]
“If there’s something I would do differently --
and it’s always easy in hindsight --
the top of the story would say,
‘We’re going to war, we’re going to war against evil.’
But later down it would say, ‘But some people are questioning it.’
The caution and the questioning was buried underneath the drumbeat. . . .
The hugeness of the war preparation story
tended to drown out a lot of that stuff.”

[1.4]
Beyond that, there was the considerable difficulty
of dealing with secretive intelligence officials
who themselves were relying on
sketchy data from Iraqi defectors and other shadowy sources
and could never be certain about what they knew.

[1.5]
On Sept. 19, 2002, reporter Joby Warrick described a report
“by independent experts who question
whether thousands of high-strength aluminum tubes recently sought by Iraq
were intended for a secret nuclear weapons program,”
as the administration was contending.
The story ran on Page A18.

[1.6]
Warrick said he was “going out on a limb. . . .
I was struck by the people I talked to --
some on the record, others who couldn’t be --
who were saying pretty persistently that
these tubes were in no way suitable for uranium enrichment.
On the other side were these CIA guys who said,
‘Look, we know what we’re talking about but we can’t tell you.’ ”


[Did the congressional and presidential commissions
which examined the CIA’s prewar errors concerning WMD
know about those anonymous leakers?
Who were they?
Were they, perchance, Jewish?
(Just trying to see the extent to which patterns exist, you know.)]


[1.7]
Downie said that even in retrospect, the story looks like “a close call.”
He said the inability of dissenters “to speak up with their names”
was a factor in some of his news judgments.
The Post, however, frequently quotes unnamed sources.

[Note the blatant double-standard (in fact, blatant bigotry):

If somebody providing antiwar evidence refuses to be quoted by name,
the
Post ignores him.
If somebody providing prowar evidence refuses to be quoted by name,
it goes straight to page 1!


Note also that retired intelligence officers
who were willing to be quoted by name,
and vociferously claimed that the intelligence had been cooked
(e.g., Ray McGovern and the VIPS;
see in particular the two prewar VIPS “memos” cited here),
were totally ignored by the Post.
How does the Post explain that?
Also, too bad that didn’t get pointed out in this article
(but one really can’t blame Kurtz for that).]


[1.8]
Not all such stories were pushed inside the paper.
A follow-up Warrick piece on the aluminum tubes
did run on Page 1 the following January, two months before the war began.
And The Post gave front-page play to a Sept. 10, 2002, story by Priest
contending that
“the CIA has yet to find convincing evidence” linking Hussein and al Qaeda.

[1.9]
That hardly settled the matter.
On Dec. 12, 2002, investigative reporter Barton Gellman --
who would later win acclaim
for his skeptical postwar stories from Iraq on WMDs --
wrote a controversial piece that ombudsman Michael Getler complained
“practically begs you not to put much credence in it.”
The headline:
U.S. Suspects Al Qaeda Got Nerve Agent From Iraqis.”
[Somehow that article is also available at this 2006 URL.]

[1.10]
The story,
attributed to “two officials with firsthand knowledge of the report”
to the Bush administration “and its source,” [??]
said in the second paragraph that “if the report proves true” --
a whopper of a qualifier --
it would be “the most concrete evidence” yet
to support Bush’s charge that Iraq was helping terrorists.

[1.11]
Gellman does not believe he was used.
“The sources were not promoting the war. . . .
One of them was actually against it,” he said.
“They were career security officials, not political officials.
They were, however, wrong.”
[Does Gellman believe that only political officials,
not career security officials,
could have been promoting the war?
And does he believe that career security officials
are incapable of concealing their true motivations and goals?]

Gellman added that
“it was news even though it was clear
that it was possible this report would turn out to be false.”

[1.12]
But sources, even suspect ones, were the only game in town.
“We had no alternative sources of information,” Woodward said.
“Walter [Pincus] and I couldn’t go to Iraq without getting killed.
You couldn’t get beyond the veneer and hurdle
of what this groupthink had already established” --
the conventional wisdom
that Hussein was sitting on a stockpile of illegal weapons.



[1.13]
In October 2002, [Thomas E.] Ricks [author of Fiasco],
a former national security editor for the Wall Street Journal
who has been covering such issues for 15 years,
turned in a piece that he titled “Doubts.”
It said that

senior Pentagon officials were resigned to an invasion
but were reluctant and worried that
the risks were being underestimated.

Most of those quoted by name in the Ricks article
were retired military officials or outside experts.
The story was killed by Matthew Vita,
then the national security editor and now a deputy assistant managing editor.

[1.14]
“Journalistically, one of the frustrations with that story was that
it was filled with lots of retired guys,”
Vita said.
But, he added,
“I completely understood the difficulty of getting people inside the Pentagon”
to speak publicly.

[What a crock.
The Post publishes stories all the time that are
“filled with lots of retired guys.”
Heck, they have no compunctions about publishing
anonymous sources and leaked information—
they do it all the time.
What was their coverage of Watergate but
anonymous sources and leaked information?
Why would they suddenly develop cold feet about using “retired guys”?
There can only be one answer:
They didn’t want to put any bumps on the road to war.]





[1.15]
Liz Spayd, the assistant managing editor for national news,
says The Post’s overall record was strong.

[1.16]
“I believe we pushed as hard or harder than anyone
to question the administration’s assertions
on all kinds of subjects related to the war. . . .
Do I wish we would have had more and pushed harder and deeper
into questions of whether they possessed weapons of mass destruction?
Absolutely,” she said.
“Do I feel we owe our readers an apology?
I don’t think so.”

[America’s dead and wounded servicemen might have a different opinion,
if they could give it.]




Digger or Crusader?
[2.1]
No Post reporter burrowed into the Iraqi WMD story
more deeply than Pincus, 71, a staff member for 32 of the last 38 years,
whose messy desk is always piled high
with committee reports and intelligence files.
“The main thing people forget to do is read documents,”
said Pincus, wielding a yellow highlighter.

[2.2]
A white-haired curmudgeon
who spent five years covering the Iran-contra scandal
and has long been an expert on nuclear weapons,
Pincus sometimes had trouble convincing editors of the importance
of his incremental, difficult-to-read stories.

[2.3]
His longevity is such that he first met Hans Blix,
who was the chief U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq,
at a conference in Ghana in 1959.

[2.4]
“The inspectors kept getting fed intelligence
by our administration and the British and the French,
and kept coming back and saying they couldn’t find” the weapons,
Pincus said.
“I did one of the first interviews with Blix,
and like everyone else he thought there would be WMDs.
By January and February [of 2003], he was starting to have his own doubts. . . .
What nobody talked about was how much had been destroyed,”
either under U.N. supervision after the Persian Gulf War
or during the Clinton administration’s 1998 bombing of Iraqi targets.

[2.5]
But while Pincus was ferreting out information
“from sources I’ve used for years,”
some in the Post newsroom were questioning his work.
Editors complained that he was “cryptic,” as one put it,
and that his hard-to-follow stories had to be heavily rewritten.


[For something the Post isn’t telling you about Pincus,
and for how well-esteemed he is,
see this story.
So much for giving relevant information.]


[2.6]
Spayd declined to discuss Pincus’s writing but said that
“stories on intelligence are always difficult to edit and parse
and to ensure their accuracy and get into the paper.”

[2.7]
Downie agreed that difficulties in editing Pincus
may have been a factor in the prewar period,
because he is “so well sourced”
that his reporting often amounts to putting together “fragments”
until the pieces were, in Downie’s word, “storifyable.”

[2.8]
Some editors, in Pincus’s view, also saw him as a “crusader,”
as he once put it to Washingtonian magazine.
“That’s sort of my reputation, and I don’t deny it,” he said.
“Once I get on a subject, I stay with it.”

[2.9]
On Jan. 30, 2003, Pincus and Priest reported that
the evidence the administration was amassing
about Baghdad hiding weapons equipment and documents
“is still circumstantial.”
The story ran on Page A14.

[2.10]
Some of the reporters who attended the daily “war meetings,”
where coverage was planned,
complained to national editors that
the drumbeat of the impending invasion
was crowding out
the work of Pincus and others who were challenging the administration.


[2.11]
Pincus was among the complainers.
“Walter talked to me himself,” Downie said.
“He sought me out when he was frustrated, and I sought him out.
We talked about how best to have stories be in the kind of shape
that they could appear on the front page.”
Editors were also frustrated, Downie said.
“Overall, in retrospect, we underplayed some of those stories.”



The Woodward Factor
[3.1]
Bush, Vice President Cheney and other administration officials
had no problem commanding prime real estate in the paper,
even when their warnings were repetitive.
“We are inevitably the mouthpiece for whatever administration is in power,”
DeYoung said.
“If the president stands up and says something,
we report what the president said.”
And if contrary arguments are put “in the eighth paragraph,
where they’re not on the front page,
a lot of people don’t read that far.”

[3.2]
Those tendencies were on display on Feb. 6, 2003,
the day after Secretary of State Colin Powell
delivered a multimedia presentation at the United Nations --
using satellite images and intercepted phone calls --
to convince the world that Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction.

[3.3]
An accompanying front-page story by DeYoung and Pincus
examined Powell’s “unprecedented release of U.S. intelligence.”
Not until the ninth paragraph did they offer a “however” clause,
saying that
“a number of European officials and U.S. terrorism experts”
believed that Powell’s description of an Iraqi link to al Qaeda
“appeared to have been carefully drawn
to imply more than it actually said.”

[3.4]
Warrick focused that day
on the secretary’s assertion, based on human sources,
that Iraq had biological weapons factories on wheels.
“Some of the points in Powell’s presentation drew skepticism,” Warrick reported.
His piece ran on Page A28.

[3.5]
Downie said the paper
ran several pieces analyzing Powell’s speech as a package on inside pages.
“We were not able to marshal enough evidence to say he was wrong,”
Downie said of Powell.
“To pull one of those out on the front page
would be making a statement on our own:
‘Aha, he’s wrong about the aluminum tubes.’ “

[3.6]
Such decisions coincided with
The Post editorial page’s strong support for the war,
such as its declaration the day after Powell’s presentation that
“it is hard to imagine
how anyone could doubt that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction.”

These editorials led some readers to conclude that the paper had an agenda,
even though there is a church-and-state wall
between the newsroom and the opinion pages.
Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt, not Downie, runs the opinion side,
reporting to Post Co. Chairman Donald Graham.

[3.7]
In mid-March, as the administration was on the verge of invading Iraq,
Woodward stepped in
to give the stalled Pincus piece about the administration’s lack of evidence
a push.
“We weren’t holding it for any political reason
or because we were being pressured by the administration,” Spayd said,
but because such stories were difficult to edit
at a time when the national desk was deluged with copy.
“People forget how many facets of this story we were chasing . . .
the political ramifications . . .
military readiness . . .
issues around postwar Iraq and how prepared the administration was . . .
diplomacy angles . . .
and we were pursuing WMD. . . .
All those stories were competing for prominence.”

[3.8]
As a star of the Watergate scandal
who is given enormous amounts of time to work on his best-selling books,
Woodward, an assistant managing editor,
had the kind of newsroom clout that Pincus lacked.

[3.9]
The two men’s recollections differ.
Woodward said that after comparing notes with Pincus,
he gave him a draft story consisting of five key paragraphs,
which said the administration’s evidence for WMDs in Iraq
“looks increasingly circumstantial and even shaky,”
according to “informed sources.”
Woodward said Pincus found his wording too strong.

[3.10]
Pincus said he had already written his story when Woodward weighed in
and that he treated his colleague’s paragraphs as a suggestion
and barely changed the piece.
“What he really did was talk to the editors and made sure it was printed,”
Pincus said.

[3.11]
“Despite the Bush administration’s claims” about WMDs,
the March 16 Pincus story began,
“U.S. intelligence agencies
have been unable to give Congress or the Pentagon
specific information about the amounts of banned weapons
or where they are hidden,
according to administration officials and members of Congress,”
raising questions
“about whether administration officials have exaggerated intelligence.”

[3.12]
Woodward said he wished he had appealed to Downie
to get front-page play for the story,
rather than standing by as it ended up on Page A17.
In that period, said former national security editor Vita,
“we were dealing with an awful lot of stories,
and that was one of the ones that slipped through the cracks.”
Spayd did not recall the debate.

[3.13]
Reviewing the story in his glass-walled office last week, Downie said:
“In retrospect, that probably should have been on Page 1 instead of A17,
even though it wasn’t a definitive story and had to rely on unnamed sources.
It was a very prescient story.”

[Like many of the scare-mongering stories about WMD that did make Page 1
didn’t rely on unnamed sources.

Here are the stories that did make Page 1 on 2003-03-16:
  1. Al Qaeda’s Top Primed To Collapse, U.S. Says;
    Mohammed’s Arrest, Data Breed Optimism

  2. Audacious Mission, Awesome Risks;
    Bold War Plan Emphasizes Lightning Attacks and Complex Logistics

  3. Bush Bets Future on Success in Iraq

  4. Bush In Final Push for Support;
    President to Seek End to Diplomacy

  5. Bush, Allies To Meet In Azores On Iraq;
    Summit Shows End Of Effort at U.N.

  6. Contrite, Combative Moran on the Ropes;
    Congressman Fights to Survive

  7. Flu-Like Illness That Kills Spurs Global Alert

  8. Malvo Writings Found in Cell, Authorities Say;
    Notes, Drawings Refer To Reggae, Philosophers
]


[3.14]
In the days before the war,
Priest and DeYoung turned in a piece that said
CIA officials “communicated significant doubts to the administration”
about evidence tying Iraq to attempted uranium purchases for nuclear weapons.
The story was held until March 22, three days after the war began.
Editors blamed a flood of copy about the impending invasion.

[3.15]
Whether a tougher approach by The Post and other news organizations
would have slowed the rush to war is, at best, a matter of conjecture.

[3.16]
“People who were opposed to the war from the beginning
and have been critical of the media’s coverage in the period before the war
have this belief that
somehow the media should have crusaded against the war,”
Downie said.
“They have the mistaken impression that somehow
if the media’s coverage had been different,
there wouldn’t have been a war.”

Copyright The Washington Post Company Aug 12, 2004

[For further comment on this article, see Atrios, Cranium, etc.]

2008


2008-01-27-WP-Pincus
HONORS
Washington Post, 2008-01-27, page A2

Walter Pincus, a reporter covering intelligence
for The Washington Post‘s national news staff,
has been awarded a special citation
for his decades of “scooping the competition”
by the judges of the Edward Weintal Prize for International Reporting.

The Weintal Prize annually recognizes
outstanding journalists covering diplomacy and international affairs.
The 2008 prize was awarded to Margaret Warner of PBS’s “NewsHour With Jim Lehrer“
and Trudy Rubin of the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Pincus, 75, has reported for the national staff since 1975,
when he rejoined the paper
after working for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the New Republic.

He was one of eight Post reporters
whose coverage of the launch of the war on terrorism
won a 2002 Pulitzer Prize.

[Funny how
in the article about how hard his reports were to edit
and why his article on Iraq wasn’t worthy of the front page
the Post never mentioned that he had won a Pulitzer Prize.

Could it be
that the Post’s editors were not giving the real reason
why they didn’t want to feature any story
that might interfere with the march to war?
Nah! They'd never be so dishonest. Would they?]

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