inside the glass house

Iraq reports: Sorry, we were hoaxed, says NY Times
NEW YORK - As a general rule, most newspapers in the world are reluctant to admit mistakes - and rarely publish retractions. And even if they do, they are unrelentingly stubborn: "Our reporter stands by his story," the last sentence would read.

A former president of France, Charles de Gaulle, once remarked that you should never pick a fight either with a young kid or a newspaperman: the kid will throw the last stone at you, and the newspaperman will have the last word.

In journalism schools in the US, they relate the anecdote of an irate reader who phones the editor of his small town newspaper to complain he is very much alive even though the paper carried his name in the morning's obituary columns.

Refusing to concede the newspaper's obvious blunder, the unyielding editor says: "I am sorry we cannot carry a retraction, but we will make amends by publishing your name in tomorrow's 'birth' columns."

Just goes to prove that you will invariably lose your battle when you try to cross swords with a sharp-tongued journalist - as former Foreign Minister Tyronne Fernando may have realized, as he gets pummelled by fellow columnist Neville de Silva (who has still not lost his cynical touch since his bygone days on the Observer and the English tutorial classes in the Peradeniya campus in the 1960s).

The New York Times, which claims it is made of sterner stuff, is perhaps one of the few newspapers in the world which carry a daily "Corrections" column of "mistakes", "misspellings" and "misstatements"-- not excluding "editing errors".

On Friday, there were no less than 11 items where the Times said it had erred on stories from its previous day's issue or early in the week. But the Times' major journalistic blunders - being overtly or covertly used by US government and intelligence agencies to plant fabricated stories inside its pages - are usually hidden from the public view.

Last week, there was an unusual item in the newspaper under the heading "The Times and Iraq. From the Editors". While the Times was proud of the hundreds of articles written during the prelude to the war and into the early stages of the US military occupation of Iraq last March, the editors said they had also been taken for a mighty ride.

The "problematic articles" depended heavily on information given to the Times by Iraqi informants, defectors and exiles, whose credibility has now been challenged.

One of them is the head of the Iraqi National Congress, Ahmed Chalabi, who was funded by the Pentagon and nurtured and touted by right wing neo-conservatives as the next president of Iraq.

Chalabi is now accused of feeding false information to deliberately mislead the mainstream US media, through Iraqi defectors and informants. Having run the stories, the Times has admitted that it did double-check them, but mostly with US intelligence sources, which in hindsight were equally dead wrong.

In short, the Times was manipulated not only by Iraqi defectors but also by American intelligence and government agents. The front-page stories, which have proved to be either flawed or false, include details of secret Iraqi camps where "Islamic terrorists were trained and biological weapons produced."

Another story focused on an "Iraqi defector who described himself as a civil engineer who had personally worked on renovations of secret facilities for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons in underground wells, private villas and under the Saddam Hussein hospital in Baghdad as recently as an year ago."

A series of stories, which have now proved to be wrong, ran with the following headlines: "US Says Hussein Intensified Quest for A-Bomb Parts" and "Illicit Arms Kept Till Eve of War, an Iraqi Scientist is Said to Assert."

The informant claimed that Iraq had transferred its weapons of mass destruction to Syria and that Saddam Hussein had also been cooperating with Al-Qaeda. All of them have proved to be wrong.

The Times now says that it published some of these stories without checking the veracity of its sources or even attempting to verify those claims.

And now, more than one year after the US military attack on Iraq, it has been proved that the reasons for the war were mostly based on false assumptions - either deliberate or manipulated.

Still, the US is refusing to publicly admit an enormous blunder that has cost lives and billions of dollars of taxpayer money. In publishing the note of self-criticism, Times Executive Editor Bill Keller says: "The purpose of the note is to acknowledge that we, like many of our competitors and many officials in Washington, were misled on a number of stories by Iraqi informants dealing in misinformation."

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