Tuesday, June 1, 2004

Meet the new boss ... Juan Cole tells us more about Iraq's new Prime Minister and CIA associate, Iyad Alawi: The CIA will reportedly put $3 billion into building up a new Iraqi secret police. Iyad Allawi, who is called "Iyad al-Baathi" on the streets in Iraq, has long had an interest in rebuilding the secret police which seems to me sinister. Sounds like a man who values freedom. Postscript: How well do you know your Central Asian strongmen? Time for a QUIZ! Try to connect each name with its corresponding picture. The options: (1) Iyad Alawi, the new Prime Minister of Iraq (2) Islam Karimov, President of Uzbekistan (3) Saparmurad Niyazov, President of Turkmenistan (4) Nursultan Nazarbayev, President of Kazakhstan A B C D 8:24:56 PM    comment [] Al Capone's Vault From Frank Foer's piece on Judith Miller: The war in Iraq was going to be Miller's journalistic victory lap. Just before the bombs began falling on Baghdad, Miller embedded with Mobile Exploitation Team (MET) Alpha -- the unit charged with scouring Iraq for weapons of mass destruction. No other journalist would have such access, which meant she would have the exclusive when they uncovered the WMD stockpiles, the smoking gun. As one reporter who covered the war told me, "This was going to be the show." Back in Kuwait, the Coalition had arranged for helicopter pools that would swoop reporters into WMD sites as MET Alpha uncovered them. [snip] Last month, I traded e-mail with Eugene Pomeroy, a former National Guard soldier who is now working in Baghdad as a contractor for a security firm. During the war, Pomeroy served as the public-affairs officer for MET Alpha. This meant that he had one primary duty: to shepherd Judy Miller around Iraq. It wasn't a particularly happy experience. In one e-mail to me, he joked, "As far as I can gather, not many people at Defense liked this woman, and the sense I got was that she wasn't their problem anymore now that she was in Iraq. Maybe they were hoping that she'd step on a mine. I certainly was." [snip] According to Pomeroy, as well as an editor at the Times, Miller had helped negotiate her own embedding agreement with the Pentagon -- an agreement so sensitive that, according to one Times editor, Rumsfeld himself signed off on it. Although she never fully acknowledged the specific terms of that arrangement in her articles, they were as stringent as any conditions imposed on any reporter in Iraq. "Any articles going out had to be, well, censored," Pomeroy told me. "The mission contained some highly classified elements and people, what we dubbed the 'Secret Squirrels,' and their 'sources and methods' had to be protected and a war was about to start." Before she filed her copy, it would be censored by a colonel who often read the article in his sleeping bag, clutching a small flashlight between his teeth. (When reporters attended tactical meetings with battlefield commanders, they faced similar restrictions.) As Miller covered MET Alpha, it became increasingly clear that she had ceased to respect the boundaries between being an observer and a participant. And as an embedded reporter she went even further, several sources say. While traveling with MET Alpha, according to Pomeroy and one other witness, she wore a military uniform. When Colonel Richard McPhee ordered MET Alpha to pull back from a search mission and regroup in the town of Talil, Miller disagreed vehemently with the decision -- and let her opinions be loudly known. The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz reprinted a note in which she told public-affairs officers that she would write negatively about his decision if McPhee didn't back down. What's more, Kurtz reported that Miller complained to her friend Major General David Petraeus. Even though McPhee's unit fell outside the general's line of command, Petraeus's rank gave his recommendation serious heft. According to Kurtz, in an account that was later denied, "McPhee rescinded his withdrawal order after Petraeus advised him to do so." Miller guarded her exclusive access with ferocity. When the Washington Post's Barton Gellman overlapped in the unit for a day, Miller instructed its members that they couldn't talk with him. According to Pomeroy, "She told people that she had clearance to be there and Bart didn't." (One other witness confirms this account.) As MET Alpha began its work in April, Miller sent home a blockbuster about an Iraqi scientist in her unit's custody. According to Miller, the scientist had told the unit that Iraq had destroyed chemical- and biological-warfare equipment on the eve of the war. And -- here's the real coup -- the scientist had led the squad to buried ingredients for chemical-weapons production. Although she told readers that her unit prevented her from naming these precursor elements or the scientist, the military did permit Miller to view him from a distance. "Clad in nondescript clothes and a baseball cap, he pointed to several spots in the sand where he said chemical precursors and other weapons material were buried," she wrote. And on PBS's NewsHour, she was even more emphatic: "What they found is a silver bullet in the form of a person." But these scoops, like the story about the scientist, tended to melt quickly in the Iraqi desert. And very soon into the postwar era, the costs of her embedding agreement and her passion for the story became clear. Even though she had more access to MET Alpha, the best seat in the house, she was the only major reporter on the WMD beat to miss the story so completely. MET Alpha was a bumbling unit; and even if it hadn't been bumbling, it wouldn't have made a difference -- there were no WMDs. The Post's Gellman, on the other hand, hadn't embedded with a unit, and didn't negotiate any access agreements. What's more, he had the intellectual honesty to repudiate some of his own earlier reporting. He came away from Iraq with a stark, honest story: "Odyssey of Frustration: In Search for Weapons, Army Team Finds Vacuum Cleaners." And over here, we see a couple of dusty bottles, perhaps from Saddam's own collection. 2:17:13 AM    comment [] Affording Compassion Three statistics from Harper's Index, June 2004: Amount by which total Social Security contribtuions since 1983 exceed total benefit payments since then: $999,059,000,000 Year in which the Medicare hospital trust fund will be "completely exhausted," according to the trustees: 2019. Year in which trustees predicted in 1991 that the fund would be exhausted: 2005. 1:49:49 AM    comment [] Iraq goes green Greens will be pleased to learn May 28th's Iraq fact of the day: Iraqi Leaders Assume Responsibility for New Ministry of Environment Iraq Fact of the Day The Ministry of Environment is the 14th of 26 ministries to transition to Iraqi leadership. This transition has extra significance since the Ministry of Environment did not exist in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Since its creation, the Ministry has drafted an environmental protection law, established a council for environmental cooperation in each governate, and conducted a comprehensive survey of drinking water across Iraq. This emphasis on Iraq's environment stands in stark contrast to the environmental abuse and neglect by the former regime. Source: Coalition Provisional Authority Gee, that's the second time I've been envious of the Iraqis and their new government. 1:30:55 AM    comment [] Courage Mom In this month's Harper's Magazine, Scott Ritter (a.k.a. the Invisible Man) has a short piece on the story of Lt. Com. Scott Speicher, the pilot who was shot down during Operation Desert Storm and whose mysterious status contributed to the argument for war with Iraq. Ritter himself investigated the pilot's disappearance in the years after the first Gulf War. On January 17, 1991, Speicher's plane was hit by an air-to-air missile over Iraq's western desert. On the basis of the evidence (e.g. no signs of ejection or parachute, no activation of rescue beacon, fellow pilots saw his plane explode in a ball of flame and blow apart), he was officially declared killed in action. Speicher remained K.I.A. for ten years, until January 2001, when the secretary of the Navy changed his status to M.I.A. Sen. Pat Roberts (R - Kansas), an advocate for regime change in Iraq, was the prime mover behind the correction. On scanty and dubious evidence, Speicher's status changed to "probably survived" in March 2002, and then to "missing/captured" on October 11, 2002, the day after Congress authorized military action in Iraq. He thereby became just the second person in human history to rise from the dead (Praise the Lord). He also had been promoted twice to the rank of captain in the ten years since his disappearance. President Bush appealed to Speicher's status in his September 2002 address to the United Nations General Assembly. In 1991, the U.N. Security Council, through Resolutions 686 and 687, demanded that Iraq return all prisoners from Kuwait and other lands ... One American pilot is among them. Ritter focuses on the story as emblematic of the way the whole case for war was spun by the Administration and covered by the media. Alongside arguments about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, Scott Speicher offered Americans a human and less abstract rationale for war. In the six months leading to war, there were at least 135 news stories about Speicher, speculating about his fate and the character of those who would keep him prisoner. In March 2002 the Washington Times ran a front-page article on Speicher for five consecutive days. One was titled "Bush denounces 'heartless' Saddam; He suspects Navy pilot is a live captive," and another cited an informant inside Iraq who "stated that the pilot was being kept in isolation." CNN's Wolf Blitzer called Speicher's situation "shocking," and on MSNBC a former Pentagon official discussed the likelihood that the pilot was being tortured. When asked about the hypothetical treatment of the Navy pilot, President Bush said, "It reminds me once again about the nature of Saddam Hussein." In this manner, Speicher's case became an argument for the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Only a monster and a war criminal would hold a prisoner incommunicado for eleven years; and, so the syllogism went, surely such a monster and war criminal would acquire and deploy unconventional weapons. An ongoing investigation into Speicher's status will be issuing its final report in a couple of weeks. Like WMD's, there is no evidence that the Iraqis held Speicher in captivity and it will likely conclude that he perished in the missile attack or shortly afterwards. Shocking, indeed. 12:51:58 AM    comment []

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