What We Knew and When We Knew It

Yesterday's Washington Post story on the manipulation of intelligence on Iraq was brilliant, a tour de force of the Post's best younger reporter (Bart Gellman) and best seasoned veteran (Walter Pincus). It had real sources, not just spinners, who asked not to be identified for legitimate reasons, and it had levels of intrigue unknown to us -- travels to Vienna and previously unreported U.S. investigations of suspected Iraqi nuclear sites. If there was any doubt that there is enough material in this sad episode to fully dominate the news over the last year and a half of a crippled and failed administration, this story should put that doubt to rest. If, that is, there were a bipartisan, House-Senate committee or an independent counsel ready to take it on.

As good as the reporting in the story was, it was remarkable how much of the story required no reporting at all, but was stuff that everyone knew all along. For example, the story quotes Dick Cheney: "We now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons," he said. "Among other sources, we've gotten this from firsthand testimony from defectors, including Saddam's own son-in-law." And Gelllman and Pincus point out that Saddam's son-in-law, Hussein Kamal, defected in 1995, returned to Iraq and was murdered in 1996, so he could not be a source for current information about Saddam resuming his quest for nukes. Touche! But wait -- wasn't this obvious at the time? Is there any real reason we need investigative reporters to tell us this several months later. Can't we have some system where a red light goes off at the moment someone like Cheney makes such an absurd statement, and points out that it "appears to conflict with the actual events," or whatever the press corps phrase of choice is this week?

Another example: Gellman and Pincus recall Bush and Blair's assertion that Iraq could build a nuclear weapon in six months if it had access to enriched uranium. They quote an intelligence analyst who says, "That is just about the same thing as saying that if Iraq gets a bomb, it will have a bomb." But wasn't that also obvious at the time? Don't most of us know someone of whom it could be said, "They could build a nuclear weapon in six months if they could get hold of some enriched uranium"? My college roommate Chris Beggy could. That doesn't make him Saddam. It just means we should lock up the damn enriched uranium!

Three questions to consider: Why is it impossible to just say that a presidential statement is a ridiculous lie? Why does the U.S. press need a source to say such a very obvious thing? And has the Bush administration figured out that they can say anything as long as they maintain such discipline that no one ever makes themselves available as a source to the press to admit what is perfectly obvious?

Gellman and Pincus don't mention my own favorite obviously false statement: Bush's charge that the Iraqi's could fly drone aircraft into U.S. territory to spray us with sarin or Easy-Off or Round-Up or whatever noxious chemical they can find in the back of the shed. I remember assuming at the time that that didn't pass the laugh test, given that the earth is ROUND, which makes it pretty hard to control a drone from Iraq to the U.S. without a satellite. Right? And so I was particularly interested in this from Slashdot about an attempt to fly an 11-pound model airplane from Newfoundland to Ireland. A bunch of American geeks can't pull this off, and we're supposed to believe that Saddam was going to be able to send one of his balsa wood drones undected at least three times as far?

Mark Schmitt

08/11/2003

What We Knew and When We Knew It

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