Not All US Papers Were Wrong About Iraq

Starting in September of 2002 and continuing to this day, Knight Ridder aggressively pursued the failure and abuse of intelligence in making the case for the war in Iraq. Until well after Baghdad fell, it was a lonely endeavor. Other news organizations mostly amplified the Bush administration's claims that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction and had ties to al Qaida, even as we reported that many of the intelligence officials and military officers who were handling this top-secret information thought those claims were false or exaggerated.

[That continues,] Jonathan Landay, Warren Strobel and John Walcott reported for our Sunday newspapers that the Defense Department is still paying millions of dollars to an Iraqi exile group that was the source of some of the fabricated and exaggerated intelligence President Bush used to make the case for war.

As momentum for war increased, Landay, Strobel and Walcott reported that many intelligence and military officials did not think Saddam was a growing threat. The reporters wrote that some of these officials believed that classified information was being distorted to make the argument for war. Knight Ridder stories have described Pentagon offices, staffed by hard-liners, that were created after top civilian officials pushing for war felt they weren't getting enough intelligence ammunition from the CIA and other established intelligence agencies. The offices relied heavily on information from suspect sources, such as the Iraqi National Congress, made up of exiles with their own motives for promoting a U.S. invasion.

After President Bush declared an end to major combat operations, only to be faced with a violent insurgency, Landay, Strobel and Walcott disclosed that the administration had failed to plan for a difficult post-war period.

Just a week ago, Michael Getler, the outstanding journalist who is ombudsman of The Washington Post, under the headline, "Not Everyone Was Wrong," wrote about recent coverage of intelligence failures without noting Knight Ridder's work. Under information "we now know," Mike listed without credit a story that Knight Ridder papers published on Oct. 5, 2002. He praised a recent Washington Post story on the how the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate
that was used to help make the case for war contained caveats that were ignored. What he didn't note was that on the same day many Knight Ridder papers carried a 1A story by Landay describing how that intelligence document was actually rewritten before it was released to the public to delete all the warnings about the intelligence community's lack of knowledge about Saddam's weapons programs.

Source - a memo TO: Knight Ridder Publishers, Knight Ridder Editors
FROM: Clark Hoyt [KR Washington editor]
DATE: February 23, 2004

Why the memo? - "because of those stories, many of you have been receiving letters to the editor complaining that Knight Ridder's coverage has not been sufficiently supportive of President Bush's decision to invade Iraq."

el - A good portion of the American public wants to be lied to?