'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Washington Post news division regains sanity!

Praise the Lord! The Washington Post's news division, which for long months before the US invasion of Iraq had suffered from what I thought of as the "Hoaglandization" of the entire newspaper, seems finally to have rediscovered its sanity, focus, and journlistic ethics.

("Hoaglandization", after prominent WP columnist Jim Hoagland who for some years prior to the invasion had been acting as one of the chief flaks in US journalism for any slight whim or preference expressed by wellpknown Iraqi snake-oil salesman Ahmed Chalabi. And yes, that included Jim acting as an influential cheerleader for the invasion.)

I may be wrong in suspecting that Jim's general influence on 15th St NW was instrumental in skewing not just the WP's notoriously pro-war editorial and op-ed pages in that direction but also, over the crucial months prior to March 17, skewing the paper's news coverage, too.

In those months, anti-war activities and demonstrations got short shrift. The administration's claims re Saddam's weapons programs got generally uncritical coverage, with many vital questions about those claims getting unasked, or at least, unreported.

But now, the news division is back on the job, in the time-honored tradition of independent journalism and much more in line with the heroic kind of role that the WP itself played in the days of, for example, the Vietnam war.

(The op-ed pages are still terrifically skewed. And my personal jury is still out on the paper's own editorial line on war/occupation issues. I'm ready to be persuaded the line is getting better... )

But back to the big, definitive story in today's paper-- the one whose headline states baldly-- based on leaks from within David Kay's "Iraq Survey group"-- Iraq Survey Fails to Find Nuclear Threat.

Bart Gellman, who wrote this story, writes:

Although Hussein did not relinquish his nuclear ambitions or technical records, investigators said, it is now clear he had no active program to build a weapon, produce its key materials or obtain the technology he needed for either.

Among the closely held internal judgments of the Iraq Survey Group, overseen by David Kay as special representative of CIA Director George J. Tenet, are that Iraq's nuclear weapons scientists did no significant arms-related work after 1991, that facilities with suspicious new construction proved benign, and that equipment of potential use to a nuclear program remained under seal or in civilian industrial use.

This is truly a great scoop. When Kay was in Washington a couple weeks ago, all he would say in public was that it "would take more time" to come to a definitive judgment on whether Saddam did indeed have any active nuclear program prior to March 17, 2003.

Now, what Kay's people-- including plucky Australian General Stephen D. Meekin, who heads "the largest of a half-dozen units that report to Kay"-- and some of the key ISG documents that were leaked to Gellman all reveal is that no amount of extra searching is going to turn up evidence for a program that, these impeccable sources have concluded, never even existed post-1991.

Gellman's piece, which I urge you all to go and read in full, underlines that it was the nuclear weapons allegations against Saddam that were crucially used by Bush and Blair to explain why they had to launch their invasion right then, in March 2003, rather than leaving more time for UNSCOM's inspections to do their work. The specter of a nuclear-weapons "mushroom cloud"--and not the much less fearsome threat of a chemical or bio weapons attack-- was what was invoked by those two leaders anmd their key advisors as they made their case for the war...

Well, good for Bart Gellman getting the story. Good for General Meekin, for being the only person on Kay's staff who was willing to be quoted on the record regarding the content of what the ISG had actually found. (Several others spoke "off the record," Gellman reported-- but having Meekin's assessments there on the record gives the piece a huge amount of heft it would not otherwise have had, and presumably allowed the Post's lawyers to let its publication go ahead.)

And good for the Post's new division, having finally gotten back into the business of independently and where necessary critically reporting the news.