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An overdue correction
By Bivash Mukherjee 2004-6-7

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THE New York Times has finally come clean on its coverage of the fallacious weapons of mass destruction that fueled public opinion in favor of the war in Iraq.

“In some cases, information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand “unchallenged,” the Times said in an editorial on May 26.

“Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged 鈥?or failed to emerge.”

While the long-delayed “correction” can be forgiven for being a tad late, the timing of its release does little to shield the credibility of the paper that took a huge beating after last year’s plagiarism scandal.

Their integrity at stake, the Times editors were quick to seize the opportunity presented to them following the fall from grace of Ahmed Chalabi.

Chalabi was the single, big “source” behind the series of front-page “scoops” on the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

The paper waited to issue the correction until the US forces raided Chalabi’s residence in Baghdad last month on suspicion that he was passing off secrets to Iran.

It thus brought to an end an extended honeymoon period between the Iraqi exile and his protectors in Washington.

The former head of the Washington-created Iraqi National Congress is a convicted criminal, accused of embezzling millions.

Pentagon still found no reason to doubt Chalabi, who fed them what they exactly wanted to hear.

In return, he pocketed a decent US$340,000 monthly stipend for his cooked-up intelligence.

The question is: why did this newspaper wait so long to issue a rectification?

Mind you, it wasn’t apologetic about the long period of disinformation that it churned out but instead chose to pass the onus on to a person, who suddenly stood discredited.

“Editors at several levels who should have been challenging reporters and pressing for more skepticism were perhaps too intent on rushing scoops into the paper,” it claimed.

“It looks as if we, along with the administration, were taken in.”

Along with the administration?

A veiled admission by the paper that it implicitly 鈥?or is it tacitly 鈥?played into the hands of the Bush administration in the run-up to the mayhem in Iraq?

The reproof also conveniently fails to mention Judith Miller, the reporter who relied on Chalabi the most and came up with the exclusives.

A Pulitzer Prize winning writer, Miller has managed to keep her job at the paper, which last year wasted little time in belittling a young Black reporter after “exposing” him in a five-page rebuke for cooking up stories.

Will Miller and her ilk ever be held accountable for perpetrating the lies that went a long way in building public opinion in the case for war?

Do they feel any sense of remorse and guilt as pictures of the horrors of war emerge every single day 鈥?a reality they cannot escape of being party to?

That Miller indulged in intellectual dishonesty is hardly in doubt.

What is disconcerting however, is the level of complicity by the paper in allowing uncontested government half-truths to make it to fine print.

If anything, the Times, along with the Washington Post, showed remarkable intellectual and moral bankruptcy if one were to discount the theory of their being politically naive to allow themselves to be so easily manipulated by Chalabi and the White House.

Indeed, its argument that it was a victim of lies and duplicity is nothing but an attempt to cover up its own labyrinth of deceit and fabrication that has come back to haunt them.

Meanwhile, far away in distant Iraq a nation mourns, as lives are lost in the thousands.

But honestly, does anybody care?

An overdue correction by — THE New York Times has finally come clean on its coverage of the fallacious weapons of mass destruction that fueled public opinion in favor of the war in Iraq.

http://www.shanghaidaily.com/article/?id=124434