Where's the Judy Miller firing squad? I generally avoid the "hey-look-at-this" post, but since I haven't seen any of the bigger blogs direct attention to it—the excellent Jonathan Landay, for Knight-Ridder, adds another to the tally of WMD lies, and INC-proferred disinformation:

The Bush administration helped rally public and congressional support for a preemptive invasion of Iraq by publicizing the claims of an Iraqi defector months after he showed deception in a lie detector test and had been rejected as unreliable by U.S. intelligence agencies.

The defector, Adnan Ihsan Saeed al Haideri, claimed he'd worked at illegal chemical, biological and nuclear facilities around Baghdad. But when members of the Iraq Survey Group, the CIA-run effort to trace Saddam Hussein's illegal weapons, took Saeed back to Iraq earlier this year, he pointed out facilities known to be associated with the conventional Iraqi military. He couldn't identify a single site associated with illegal weapons, U.S. officials told Knight Ridder. ...

The White House used Saeed's claims in a background paper nine months after CIA and DIA officers had dismissed him as unreliable.

"White House released claims of defector deemed unreliable by CIA"

That paper, by the way, "A Decade of Deception and Defiance," was released in Sept. 2002 to provide support for a Bush speech before the U.N. General Assembly; Landay calls it "the administration's first major compendium of 'specific examples of how Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has systematically and continually violated 16 United Nations Security Council resolutions over the past decade.'" Landay further notes that the paper is still available at White House and State Dept. websites. He leaves it open to question whether the White House knowingly repeated discredited defector information in this case, or simply managed to overlook the fact that Saeed al Haideri had been tainted by U.S. intelligence.

Shall we add that this is also another nail, a great big one, in the coffin of Judith Miller's pre-war reporting? Miller was set up on a date with Haideri by the INC in late 2001, resulting in a splashy front-page Dec. 20 report ("Iraqi Tells of Renovations at Sites For Chemical and Nuclear Arms"—sorry, unable to retrieve an article link), one of those flagged by Slate's Jack Shafer last year as in need of "revision, redaction, or retraction." Landay notes the article, which the White House background paper cites as its source for Haideri's claims (thus completing a neat circuit), but is too polite to mention Miller by name. He's also too polite to mention a Miller article written Jan. 24, 2003, almost two years later ("Defectors Bolster U.S. Case Against Iraq, Officials Say"), that flogs Haideri as a source for important intelligence about Iraqi chemical/biological weapons labs being hidden beneath hospitals and presidential palaces. Which is especially interesting, seeing that Haideri was in the process of being given the heave-ho by American spooks even before Miller's Dec. 2001 article was published:

The article appeared three days after CIA and DIA experts dismissed Saeed as unreliable—after he showed deception in the CIA-administered lie detector test, said the U.S. officials.

CIA experts conducted the polygraph at the request of DIA officials who'd spent some eight hours questioning Saeed in the Thai resort of Pataya prior to his interview with The New York Times, they said.

The polygraph "raised doubts" about Saeed's credibility, said one senior U.S. official. Said the second official: "The results were not good for him."

After the test, the CIA flew Saeed out of Thailand and resettled him in a country of his choice, said the senior U.S. official. He declined to identify the country but said it wasn't the United States and that Saeed wasn't admitted to a U.S. witness protection program.

The boys seem to have kept Haideri around just long enough for him to do his song-and-dance in front of Judy Miller before booting him.

It's one thing to see Miller played for a dupe within a few days of her source being discredited. But a harder question has to be asked: What, if anything, did Miller know about Haideri's status in 2003, when she reported an assessment from "intelligence officials" that made Haideri a source of "some of the most valuable information" about Iraqi weapons programs? Ironically, that later piece is specifically a review of the issue of defector credibility, written largely to support the claims of neo-cons (she quotes Richard Perle and David Albright, among others) that the CIA had proven too globally skeptical of defector-provided intelligence. It's amazing to see Miller ending the article with the claim that Haideri's "interviews with the Defense Intelligence Agency ultimately resulted in dozens of highly credible reports on Iraqi weapons-related activity and purchases." And yet Landay reports now that it was one of those very DIA interviews, two years earlier, that prompted a call to the CIA for the fatal polygraph tests. And got Haideri booted into whatever limbo he currently occupies. Miller's report of the DIA's faith in Haideri is not just demonstrably untrue—it had been untrue for two full years. How can she have failed to learn that?

Update (5/21): I didn't notice before posting this that Jack Shafer, in his Tuesday "Press Box" column in Slate, had written about the significance of Landay's article for the question of Miller's WMD journalism ("Surrender, Judith Miller! Knight Ridder has the goods on you"). Shafer doesn't connect the last dot, to the 2003 Haideri article, which to my mind is the most damning single piece of evidence yet accusing Miller of bad faith. But Landay's report of itself fully satisfies him that the Times can't continue to avoid an accounting for the scandal of Miller's work.

Update 2 (5/21): Enduring Friedman usefully posts the text of Miller's Dec. 20, 2001 article here.

posted by michael  2:24:43 PM  
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The Century 21 agents will be viewed as liberators! I noticed a couple of days ago that Steven R. Weisman was busying himself generating murk about the (already murky enough) Iraq "sovereignty" handoff, when admirable clarity had already been achieved in a Wall Street Journal report, detailing arrangements that will maintain Americans in effective control of "Iraqi" ministries, that Weisman studiously ignored. The Times' Christopher Marquis has an A14 piece today that constitutes official NYT notice of—not the WSJ report itself, God forbid, but of its subject ("U.S. Advisers to Stay in Iraq After June 30"), which is now an allowable topic since the Administration has gone public with it. (If they were motivated in that decision by the WSJ story, the Times sure as hell ain't gonna say.) What the WSJ failed to notice, Marquis seems to imply, was the degree to which caring motivates the policy:

About 200 American and international advisers will continue to work at 26 Iraqi ministries as consultants after the June 30 transfer of authority to Iraq, Bush administration planners said Wednesday.

"We want the Iraqis to understand that we are not abandoning them," said Ambassador Francis J. Ricciardone, who is managing the transition for the State Department. He spoke at a briefing sponsored by the United States Institute of Peace.

Awwww ... And they think we're just in it for the torture and sexual humiliation ...

Marquis notes that after the "transfer of power," the American authorities "plan to retain control of numerous buildings within the so-called Green Zone," and that the area "will probably remain cordoned off, with checkpoints run by members of the multinational force." As Eric Umansky, in Slate's "Today's Papers" column, writes:

The piece reads like a mix between an administration press release ... and a Real Estate section dispatch: "It is still unclear whether the administration will try to buy or rent the properties it now occupies or otherwise negotiate a deal with Iraq."

But then, in these uncertain economic times, don't we all face the rent-or-buy question?

What is clear is that, when it comes to issues of personnel, security, and communcations, as well as real estate, as Ricciardone admits "many of their solutions [will] be improvised at the last minute." Also clear, again from Ricciardone, is that "the embassy [will] rely on outside contractors, at significant expense, to provide security in the Green Zone. ... Privileges and immunities for the contract workers have yet to be resolved." (Does that last line mean we are sort of still in it for the torture and sexual humiliation?) None of this lifts Marquis out of his deadpan, nor does he stir to note that the use of contractors to provide security is already an established aspect of the Green Zone operation. For myself, I'm glad to see that not much has changed yet in the neo-con playbook. Improvisation has worked so well up to now in Iraq.

posted by michael  10:33:13 AM  
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