Manufacturing Consent_ The Political Economy of the Mass Media - Edward S. Herman [221]
The primary administration argument for the invasion-occupation of Iraq was the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD), although it was often supplemented with claims of his alleged links to Al Qaeda and vague references to the West’s democratic-liberation-stabilization aim.16 The WMD threat was said by President Bush on March 6, 2003, to be the “single question,” whose answer led to the eventual attack,17 although Bush quickly made it clear that only we can evaluate the answer to that single question, given that “when it comes to our security we really don’t need anyone’s permission.” The MSM repeated the claims of a WMD threat on an almost daily basis in the run-up to the invasion, for the most part just reiterating assertions by officials, but sometimes reporting on claims by Iraqi defectors and expatriates. MSM sourcing bias, favoring officials and former officials and military personnel, some of the latter pre-cleared with the Pentagon and many of them fed (and feeding) a party line, was massive.18 The high gullibility level in reporting the official claims, without verification or presentation of counter-evidence, is a hallmark of propaganda service. In one notable case, the New York Times placed an article by Judith Miller on its front page that passed along claims of Iraqi WMD by an alleged Iraqi scientist whom Miller hadn’t even spoken to but was allowed to see at a distance; the actual information was provided to Miller by U.S. officials.19
But beyond gullibility, there was evidence of a partnership in propaganda between officials and the media. Thus, while the government subsidized Iraqi expatriate Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraq National Congress, Chalabi both directly and through a number of Iraqi defectors fed war-supportive “information” to Judith Miller and the New York Times, who reported this material as fact without any independent corroboration. Government officials could then cite these reports as supportive evidence for the kind of claims they were making to the public, coming as it did from the Newspaper of Record. Thus, when the escalated war propaganda campaign began in September 2002,20 the New York Times soon ran a long front-page article by Judith Miller and Michael Gordon headlined “Threats and Responses: The Iraqis: U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts” (Sept. 8, 2002), which was based entirely on official and anonymous sources—Howard Friel and Richard Falk list 18 statements in the article based on unnamed sources that turned out to be false.21 The article focused heavily on the “aluminum tubes” that Saddam supposedly acquired for nuclear bomb making, which turned out (and were quickly recognized by many in the intelligence community) to be unusable for that purpose. On that very same day, September 8, 2002, Dick Cheney, appearing on NBC – TV’s Meet the Press, cited this Times article at length as backup for his own (false) assertions on the subject.22
The claim that Saddam Hussein had WMD or any active WMD “program” was contradicted by the testimony of former chief weapons inspector Scott Ritter, by Iraqi defector, Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law, and former head of Iraq’s WMD program, Hussein Kamel, as well as by the reports of International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) head Mohamed Elbaradi and United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) head Hans Blix. Ritter, after a brief period in which he had some coverage, was abandoned by the media and even treated there as borderline treasonous for disagreeing with the party line.23 Hussein Kamel’s claim that Saddam’s WMD had been destroyed in 1991 was first reported in Newsweek on March 3, 2003, and subsequently