To the Editors:
In your February 26 issue, Michael Massing [“Iraq: Now They Tell Us”] attempts to take the media to task for its pre-war coverage of the WMD issue. Mr. Massing asserts that the media was aware of specialists within the government and among the expert community who challenged the Bush administration’s allegations on Iraq’s purported programs to develop nuclear, biological, and chemical arms but chose not to report dissenting views.
In making this argument Mr. Massing leaves out references to my work that do not fit his thesis. He also provides an incomplete account of the views of the expert community. In short, Mr. Massing commits the very sins for which the critics have taken the Bush administration to task: to bolster his case he has cherry-picked the evidence.
The issue of WMD is complex and more complicated than Mr. Massing suggests. It was possible, for example, to challenge the CIA’s claim that Iraq had sought to purchase aluminum tubes to produce enriched uranium and still hold the view that Saddam Hussein was probably trying to reconstitute his nuclear weapons program, had stockpiles of poison gas, and had an active germ weapons program.
That, as we now know, was the view of the Energy Department, according to the declassified National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002. It was the position British intelligence took in its September 24 White Paper on “Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction,” the document that British Prime Minister Tony Blair used to persuade his nation to go to war.
David Albright, a knowledgeable and honorable former weapon inspector on whom Mr. Massing relies for much of his critique, held a similar view. Mr. Albright argued that the Bush administration did not have a firm basis for asserting that the tubes were suitable only for making centrifuges to enrich uranium. At the same time, he and a colleague published a paper that suggested that new activity at al-Qaim in western Iraq might be part of a secret Iraqi effort to make a nuclear bomb. The paper was published on September 12, 2002, four days after the Times article on the tubes appeared, and is still on his Web site. In other words, Mr. Albright was concerned that Iraq might be moving to regenerate its nuclear weapons program but held that tubes were likely not part of that effort.
The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a respected organization whose work Mr. Massing cites approvingly, noted in Deadly Arsenals, its survey of world proliferation issues, which was published in the summer of 2002, that there was “heightened anxiety” concerning the possibility that Iraq was involved in a covert nuclear program and added that Iraq could well have stocks of germ weapons and poison gas.
I stand by my assertion to Mr. Massing that the notion that Iraq had some form of WMD was a widely shared assumption inside and outside of the government. I made that comment not to excuse any limitations on the part of the media but to paint the context in which American intelligence was prepared and discussed. Mr. Massing takes that assertion out of context, and he cites Mr. Albright’s work to challenge that observation though his work actually supports it.
Nonetheless, the aluminum tubes figured prominently in the debate. In a September 8, 2002, article, which I coauthored, I reported the view of the CIA and a majority of the intelligence community that the tubes were being sought by the Iraqis to make centrifuges to enrich uranium as part of a nuclear weapons program. In the fall and winter of 2002 I was in Kuwait, Israel, Qatar, Bahrain, Djibouti, and Turkey, among other locations, in my role as a military reporter.
In the meantime, the debate over Iraqi WMD continued to evolve. By January, weapons monitors had returned to Iraq and begun to conduct their first inspections since 1998, which was an important development. Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the IAEA, was preparing to deliver his assessment to the United Nations Security Council. It was clear that the initial claims made to me by some administration officials (and which I noted in a September 13 article) that the debate over the tubes was simply a technical dispute between the CIA and the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research were no longer plausible.
I reported the IAEA’s assessment in a January 10 article, which bears the headline “Agency Challenges Evidence Against Iraq Cited by Bush.” The IAEA’s dissent was strong, though not unqualified. That article noted other dissenting views by the State Department, the Energy Department, and British intelligence. It quoted Gary Samore, an expert at the International Institute of Strategic Studies and the senior proliferation official on President Clinton’s National Security Council, as saying that the IAEA presentation had weakened the Bush administration’s argument that Iraq was trying to revive its gas centrifuge program for making bomb-grade materials. Mr. Massing briefly alludes to that article but only to complain that it ran inside the paper. Strangely, he does not mention that I wrote it.
I have gone back to see what other coverage the Times had that day about Dr. ElBaradei’s presentation. It was a day in which Hans Blix, the chief UN weapons inspector, also appeared before the Security Council to provide his assessment that Iraq had failed to provide sufficient information to dispel concerns over its weapons activities. The front-page article by our UN correspondent reported both presentations and took note of Dr. ElBaradei’s position on the tubes. The Times also included a text sidebar, which provided excerpts from Dr. ElBaradei’s formal presentation. The purpose of my article was to provide additional information to supplement the front-page article and the ElBaradei text.
On January 27, Mr. Blix and Dr. ElBaradei returned to the United Nations to provide their updates following their visit to Iraq. These were much-awaited presentations. Again, our UN correspondent covered each of the assessments, including Dr. ElBaradei’s report that his inspectors had detected no sign of nuclear activities in Iraq and his assertion that the presence of inspectors in Iraq would serve as a deterrent to the resumption of a nuclear program. As part of our coverage that day, I coauthored a January 28 article with James Risen, the Times intelligence reporter, which bears the headline “Findings of UN Group Undercut US Assertion.” The article outlined the IAEA case and explained what inspections the agency had conducted in Iraq. This article is not mentioned in Mr. Massing’s account.
For the record, there were several other stories in which I and other Times correspondents noted positions that challenged the Bush administration’s case. In a front-page article on November 10, I recounted the CIA’s assessment that Iraq was unlikely to cooperate with terrorists who sought to attack the United States. Specifically, I wrote that an assessment conveyed to Congress in a letter by CIA Director George J. Tenet and other intelligence reports “do not support the White House’s view that Iraq presents an immediate threat to the American homeland and may use Al Qaeda to carry out attacks at any moment.”
Mr. Massing mentions this article briefly and in passing but does not seem to appreciate the significance of this issue. The Bush administration case for preemptive war turned not only on allegations that Iraq had WMD but also on the assertion that it would give such weapons to terrorists. The CIA assessment of the absence of a terrorist link is contained in the same National Intelligence Estimate that makes the case on the aluminum tubes, which shows just how complex the issue of pre-war intelligence can be.
This was hardly the only time the Times cited evidence that challenged this administration’s efforts to draw a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda. Mr. Risen’s front-page October 20 story from Prague, which Mr. Massing does not mention, is another example.
An important question is why the testimony by Dr. ElBaradei did not have more influence on the public debate in the United States. It may have been because of public attitudes toward international organizations. The public may have discounted Dr. ElBaradei’s testimony because the IAEA grossly underestimated Iraq’s nuclear efforts before the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Secretary Powell’s skills at persuasion may have been a factor.
Another reason Dr. ElBaradei’s views did not have more influence, I believe, was that he presented his assessment in tandem with Mr. Blix and Mr. Blix generally delivered negative reports about Iraqi cooperation with weapons inspection efforts. On January 27, for example, Mr. Blix told the Security Council that “Iraq appears not to have come to genuine acceptance—not even today—of the disarmament which was demanded of it and which it needs to carry out to win the confidence of the world and live in peace.” He then outlined a list of ways in which Iraq had failed to dispel concerns about its weapons activities. That was a dramatic assertion and made headlines. It was made the same day that Dr. ElBaradei repeated his verdict on the aluminum tubes.
While the main focus of Mr. Massing’s critique is about intelligence about Iraq’s nuclear program, and the nuclear allegations were a key element of the Bush administration’s case, it is worth recalling that Iraq’s suspected biological weapons program was also cause for concern. The CIA held, as the Times and most of the major media reported, that Iraq was five to seven years away from making a nuclear weapon if it produced the fissile material itself and less than a year away from a bomb if it succeeded in buying the material on the black market. But germ weapons, if they existed, would have presented a current danger. In his January 27 assessment, Mr. Blix warned there were “strong indications” Iraq had made more anthrax than it declared, and “at least some of this was retained after the declared destruction date.” When the Iraqis sent a letter asserting their germ weapons had been destroyed Mr. Blix responded that this was not evidence.
Since the war, Mr. Blix has theorized that Saddam’s greatest deception may have been to maintain a sense of ambiguity over the status of his weapons programs even after Iraq had disposed of its stocks. As Mr. Blix has put it, “You can put a sign on your door, ‘Beware of Dog,’ without having a dog.” That is an intriguing theory about how Saddam may have hoped to use the threat of WMD to maintain control at home and deter attacks from his foreign adversaries while cooperating just enough to stave off a United Nations Security Council vote authorizing military action. But it was not an assessment I heard Mr. Blix make before the war.
After the war, the Carnegie Endowment prepared a lengthy January 2004 report, which concluded that Iraq’s nuclear program had been dismantled by inspectors after 1991 and could not have been resumed without detection. Mr. Massing cites this report to suggest that the absence of an Iraqi nuclear program should have been apparent to the media in the fall of 2002, which was when the CIA’s new nuclear allegations were being reported. The Carnegie report, however, makes no such assertion. Joseph Cirincione, a senior associate at Carnegie and one of the authors of that document, recently told me that his view is that the absence of an Iraqi nuclear program could have been discerned “in the months after the inspectors came back, not in the fall of 2002.” That is an important distinction to keep in mind in assessing the media’s performance.
