The Reporting Team That Got Iraq Right

As the war in Iraq completes its fifth year this week, The Huffington Post is featuring interviews with and essays by those journalists, elected officials, policymakers and former military officials who spoke out early and boldly against what they saw as an inevitable disaster. They join our Iraq Honor Roll.

In the months before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the reporters in the Knight Ridder Newspapers Washington D.C. bureau were virtually alone in their questioning of the Bush Administration's allegations of links between Saddam Hussein, weapons of mass destruction and international terrorism. The team of Knight Ridder reporters, led by Jonathan Landay, Warren Strobel, John Walcott and Joe Galloway, produced stories that now read like a prescient accounting of how the Bush Administration sought to sell the war to the American people. Walcott and Landay spoke with The Huffington Post about the fifth anniversary of the war. Knight Ridder Newspapers has since merged with McClatchy Newspapers. You can read the entire Knight Ridder and McClatchy archives of their Iraq intelligence reporting by clicking here.

John Walcott, McClatchy Newspapers Washington Bureau Chief

The Knight Ridder team, and now the McClatchy team, has frequently been cited as one of the few that got it right in the run-up to the invasion. At the time a lot of people said the rest of the media was ignoring you. Is that how you and the team felt at the time?

Well we certainly didn't see anyone doing the same kinds of stories, with the exception of some stories by Walter Pincus at the Washington Post, and much, much later after the Los Angeles Times got onto Curveball. But during the period when I guess, arguably, it mattered, when it could have and should have been a debate about whether to engage in this war, I think we felt that we were fairly lonely.

What was it about the way the Knight Ridder bureau was approaching the story that made it so you didn't get lost in the same wave of reporting that overtook the rest of the press corps?

There wasn't any reporting in the rest of the press corps, there was stenography. The administration would make an assertion, people would make an assertion, people would write it down as if it were true, and put it in the newspaper or on television.

Did you guys have secret sources that no one else had access to, or was this just a question of editors approaching the job from a more traditional sense of what a reporter should actually be doing?

It's both of those things. You can't do this kind of reporting without sources and you can't develop these kinds of sources overnight. The fact that Jonathan and Warren and I, and to a great extent Joe Galloway who was also a part of this team, had been working in these vineyards for many, many years was helpful. But it begins with the second part of your question. When the administration made an assertion, a lot of people wrote it down and printed it and we looked at it and said "that doesn't make any sense. Is that true?" And we proceeded to call people. And very often, and very quickly, people said "no, that's not true," or "there is no evidence that that's true," or "they left out part of the story."

How easy or difficult was it, in your view, for the average interested citizen back in 2002 to find out what was going on in Iraq?

Very difficult. But not so much to find out what was going on in Iraq. It was very difficult for the average reader, or TV viewer or internet browser to find out the truth about Saddam's connection with Al Qaeda and international terrorism, about the real state of his nuclear weapons program, and to find out about the real honest assessment of his weapons of mass destruction program.

Of all the stories that were produced by Knight-Ridder in the run-up to the war, are there one or two that you feel were the most important?

February 13, 2002 comes to mind: Bush Has Decided To Overthrow Hussein, February 13, 2002. And the other one I would point you to is September 6, 2002, Lack Of Hard Evidence Of Iraqi Weapons Worries Top U.S. Officials; September 12, 2002: Iraq Has Been Unable To Get Materials Needed For Nuclear Bomb, Experts Say; October 4, 2002: CIA Report Reveals Analysts' Split Over Extent Of Iraqi Nuclear Threat And October 7, 2002: Some In Bush Administration Have Misgivings About Iraq Policy.

How would you compare the level of media skepticism and the caliber of reporting today on Iraq? Five years later, have you seen a shift?

I think that a lot of the media have been very quick to accept the notion that the surge has succeeded and it amounts to some kind of turning point in Iraq. And I'm not sure there is a lot of evidence to support the idea that the improvements in security are long lasting, as opposed to temporary. I think there is somewhat greater skepticism, but I think a lot of people still find it very difficult to question what to most Americans is a patriotic enterprise.

What questions are the press corps still not asking?

They range from the very classic journalism questions like "where did the money go?" All the money we've spent in Iraq to support the Iraq government, where has it gone? I think it has been very hard to play the watchdog role on the U.S. mission in Iraq. We've been fairly lonely on that. I haven't seen other people looking into [delays and mismanagement in the construction of the new U.S. Embassy in Iraq] quite as hard as Warren [Strobel] has. Basic accountability reporting has been lacking. As I said before, I think there was a kind of uncritical acceptance of the success of the surge that may be challenged in the coming weeks or months.

Jonathan S. Landay, McClatchy Newspapers National Security Correspondent

When you look back at that period in the run-up to the war, was there a send in the Knight Ridder bureau that you were being ignored?

Absolutely. It wasn't that we were being ignored, I don't know that anybody was really just paying attention. I know that our stuff was getting picked up in the Early Bird - a daily compendium of national security stories that I believe are put together by one of the offices of public affairs in the Pentagon and then circulated around the government every morning. And I know that some of our stuff was getting picked up there because I was getting backslaps from other correspondents who saw our articles in the Early Bird. That's about as far as it went. As Warren [Strobel] noted in the [Bill] Moyers documentary, some of our own newspapers didn't even run our pieces.

And what was it about the way that you and the Knight Ridder team were approaching the story from a tradecraft point of view that make it different from what the public was seeing in the Times and the Post and the Wall Street Journal?

I think we approached this by asking the question every time the administration made an allegation "is this true?" "Is this true" is the basic question any journalist must ask any time a government, any government, makes an assertion. Governments do things for their own reasons depending on what the administration is. There could be altruistic reasons. But particularly a government that is politicized as the Bush Administration, one has to ask that question even more intensely. So we were doing that. We were also listening to people who were coming to us and saying "we don't think this is right. We don't believe that the intelligence is as strong as the administration is making it out to be." And indeed you saw that in open source reports. I'm referring to the unclassified version of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction which everyone had available to it, including members of congress.

First you had on September 3, 2002 the famous New York Times "aluminum tubes" piece by Judy Miller and Michael Gordon. That same day you had Vice President Cheney and then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice appear conveniently on the Sunday talk shows to talk about what had been extremely classified information that had appeared that day, in the New York Times. And then on September 10 you had the same allegations made to the world by the President of the United States from the podium of the United Nations. And then the following week the President made the same assertion that these aluminum tubes were for a nuclear weapons program that Iraq had hidden from UN weapons inspectors in an address to the nation. Then you had the unclassified version of the National Intelligence Estimate, which said there is division within the intelligence community on exactly what these tubes are all about.

I raise this point because this was one data point in what we had seen was a trend by this administration of exaggerating the intelligence it had on Iraq. We began tracing It back to right after 9/11 when Warren [Strobel] did the first story quoting analysts as saying it was unlikely that Iraq was involved in the World Trade Center attack. Then he went on to disclose that the former director of the CIA [James] Woolsey had made official visits to Britain on behalf of the Pentagon to check out a cockamamie tale that Ramzi Yousef, who we have in jail for the first World Trade Center attack, was not actually Ramzi Yousef but an Iraqi agent. And then right after the US went into Afghanistan, he and John [Walcott] did a story on how the administration had made a decision to oust Saddam Hussein. And we kept asking the question "why do they keep talking about Iraq when the problem is Al Qaeda in Afghanistan? Why do they keep talking about Iraq?" And we were already in that thinking mode when we started working on the stories in the lead up to the war. We were just doing the journalism that our journalism was pushing at.

Why is it that the folks in the Knight Ridder bureau in Washington had this level of skepticism when the rest of the DC press corps didn't and the national press corps didn't? What was everyone else so concerned about?

I think that everyone else, and I have to include myself in this category until we really started peeling back into the onion - everyone was absolutely convinced that Saddam Hussein had a secret weapons program. On the Al Qaeda account, I don't think anybody ever believed that. Ever. It just made no sense. But on the weapons front, until we really started peeling into that story, I took it for granted. I think that that was the problem: that everyone took it for granted - including in the intelligence community - that he had weapons of mass destruction and it was only once we really started doing the journalism that we started seeing that it might not be true. There was this groupthink that extended beyond the intelligence community into the policymaking community and the journalistic community.

How easy or difficult was it, in your view, for the average citizen to find out what was going on in Iraq and DC?

Back then? I think the fact that you had this repetition of stories in the leading print and electronic media accounted for what we see today is still 40 percent of Americans believing that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. This administration drumbeat perpetuated by the mainstream media, except for us and a couple of other people, swung public opinion behind the invasion. I think Moyers illustrated that devastatingly in his documentary.

Looking at the present, how would you compare the level of media skepticism and the caliber of reporting today? Have you seen a shift?

I think there was a kind of almost an epiphany when two things happened. One: Joe Wilson wrote his expose on the 2003 State of the Union and raised question finally - in the Op-Ed pages of the New York Times, of the administration's case for going to war. And then secondly, nothing was found in Iraq in the invasion. Then you had people jump on that bandwagon almost, that bandwagon about the 19 or 16 words on Niger and uranium in the State of the Union address. Then you started seeing the White house Press doing what it had not done in the run-up to the war, and that was ask tough questions of the White House.

But there has also been, I think, backsliding. Last summer, when the administration started banging the drum about Iran and its involvement in Iraq, and the threat posed by Iran and how Iran was responsible for these explosively-formed penetrators. That's all well and good, they were, these penetrators were killing troops. But what this drumbeat did was two things: it obscured the fact that the majority of deaths in Iraq were still being caused by Sunni insurgents, and that this was going on in the middle of the so-called surge. And I think they were trying to tamp down expectations that the surge was going to produce some kind of miracle.

So they needed to shift public focus away from the fact that it wasn't producing a miracle, so they harped on and on about Iran's involvement and you most of the mainstream media once again beat that same drum. I did a story when the President delieverd a speech at the Naval War College, and he mentioned Iran something like 27 times in a speech about Iraq. And so I did a story about how he was bashing Iran when the majority of the deaths in Iraq were still being caused by Sunni insurgents. And they were appearing to try to divert public attention away from that aspect and they were trying to tamp down public expectations about the surge. And my story was noted first by my old boss, Clark Hoyt, who cited my story the next weekend in his column, and the following weekend Frank Rich picked up that story. And compare my story about that speech at the Naval War College and everyone else's where they picked up and ran with the Administration's line about Iran.

Is this because the DC press corps is lazy?

I can't speak for other correspondents and how they operate. I don't want to do that. I, quite frankly, don't know. And maybe that's something that academics can definitely look into. I think the press needs to be held accountable for its failures on Iraq. And, by the way, I they have done some amazing stuff since that turnaround. There has been some amazing journalism that has come out of Iraq. Good skeptical journalism that got it right. And as a result you had the right wing and the administration beating on the press - not responding to the substance that the press was reporting. So you had all these complaints that they were not reporting all this "good" stuff. In fact, if all that good stuff was happening, why did the administration feel the need to send an additional 30,000 troops to Iraq?

Interview conducted, edited and condensed by Max Follmer

Comments

[appleknocker]

05:51 PM on 03/18/2008

Kudos to these guys! It's about time we stopped taking the NYT seriously. I've been reading it for over forty years and, because I'm a creature of habit I still do, but for serious reporting and analysis I go to the McLatchy and GuardianAmerica web sites.

[PioneerKing]

03:50 PM on 03/18/2008

They were not the only ones who got the reporting correct, journalist around the globe were able to suss out the facts. If these were the only reporters who got it righ - tthere would not have been so much world comdenation prior to the invasion. Moreover, Colin Powell would not have needed to lie to the UN.

[sugarmoes]

02:39 PM on 03/18/2008

awwwwwwwwwwwwww... gee duhbyuh wouldn't lie about matters of life and death over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over ... would he?

[realpolitic]

06:55 PM on 03/18/2008

Your post reminds me of Jack Nicholson in the movie "The Shining" writing in a notebook over and over "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy." Then he tried to kill his wife. Very scary!

[thnk4self]

01:36 PM on 03/18/2008

These guys are heroes. Democracy hinges on accountability. Accountability depends upon information, accurate information. It seems to me democracy has been on snooze since 2000. The Fourth Estate has its role to play, and the majority of press did fail the American public after 9/11, and not just on Iraq. But then, just when things are at their darkest, reporters like the Knight-Ridder/McClatchy guys remind us of what it is to be an American, how all of us have the potential to nurture and sustain this fragile thing called democracy.

It is correct that the narrative of the 'Surge' is contrary to the truth: We have bribed Sunni's to keep the peace with money and they in turn, have used these bribes to arm themselves and amass more sectarian power The 'Surge' policy seems to be laying the foundation for civil war. Keep at it McClatchy team, I'll be reading.

[jeersforfears]

11:59 AM on 03/18/2008

It’s pathetic how people choose to miss the point because of their ideology. This Knight Ridder crew falls into that category. Once again, the long realized fear of Saddam Hussein’s stash came to the forefront after 9-11. It was impossible to know for sure whether Hussein had any connection to the WTC, but all reasonable accounts from every intelligence agency in the world were that Hussein did have WMDs. The possibility that those weapons could be dispersed to any Middle Eastern terrorist group, by whatever skulduggerous and incalculable means, was rightly on top of the Bush administration’s list of considerations.

The worldwide Left refuses to look at that because of their hatred of America, and their hatred of George W. Bush. And since things turned out well, i.e. no WMDs were found, the naysayers can go “nah-nah-nah” and look like they’ve got all the right answers.

Quite simply, the US was in a state of war after 9-11, and our countries leaders had the obligation to consider all possibilities. Given the intelligence reports, given the reasonable possibility that things like the aluminum tubes COULD have been used in nuclear development, it was time to make sure. Since Hussein had refused 16 directives to let UN inspectors in, and had actually thrown them out in 1998, it was time to make SURE he was neutralized.

A standard military tactic is to search an area for bad guys and their weapons when REASONABLE reports come in that we know where they are. SOMETIMES THE ENEMY IS CAUGHT RED-HANDED; SOMETIMES THE ENEMY IS GONE BY THE TIME WE GET THERE. That is the intelligent assessment of the WMDs search that the US conducted in Iraq; Hussein got rid of them, somehow.

Partisan politics and Bush Derangement Syndrome drives Knight Ridder and their ilk.

[mengwise36]

01:04 PM on 03/18/2008

I will borrow your opening statement and say it back to you: "It"s pathetic how people choose to miss the point because of their ideology."

Right after 9/11, the intelligence community as a whole agreed that Al-Qaeda was behind it. To hunt down Al-Qaeda, US invaded Afghanistan. The world was behind us and the country was behind the president.

Then a group of people started thinking Iraq. If you ask the Architect behind the Iraq invasion, Paul Wolfwitz, he is going to tell you that WMD is just an excuse. It is the ideology of bring democracy to Iraq that drove his plan to "liberate" Iraq.

[Namtillaku]

01:11 PM on 03/18/2008

Pot meet kettle. If you put YOUR ideology aside, and actually read the McClatchy articles, it's not possible to come to any other conclusion than we were led into war under false information. But I can tell from the tone of your comments that you have no interest in knowing the truth.

[jeersforfears]

03:23 PM on 03/18/2008

I read the McClatchy articles. They are pure propaganda. They take supposition and accusation and wishful thinking (that they can smear Bush), mix it with a refusal to consider facts, and write their own chapter of the Bush Derangement Syndrome, that you, Namtillaku, so eloquently express about yourself.

[jbeach]

11:20 AM on 03/18/2008

I and a majority of my close friends knew all the Bush administration's statements about Saddam and WMD were shite, because we were paying attention. And it was a pretty damn lonely time outside of our circle.

How did we know? We read news on the Internet. Znet, commondreams.org . That, and me personally, I was cynical. That's all.

So kudos to these guys from Knight-Ridder, for maintaining their critical thinking. It's sad that it was and has become so rare in our news media.

But SO MANY of us who aren't reporters knew what was going to happen. And NO ONE was listening to us.

For an idea of how early we knew this President was shite, check out this Onion article from Jan 17, 2001. It's supposed to be satire, but it reads like a *prophecy*.

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/28784

"Bush: 'Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over'"

Some quotes:

"Bush swore to do "everything in [his] power" to undo the damage wrought by Clinton's two terms in office, including selling off the national parks to developers, going into massive debt to develop expensive and impractical weapons technologies, and passing sweeping budget cuts that drive the mentally ill out of hospitals and onto the street.

During the 40-minute speech, Bush also promised to bring an end to the severe war drought that plagued the nation under Clinton, assuring citizens that the U.S. will engage in at least one Gulf War-level armed conflict in the next four years. "

"...Once again, we will enjoy mounting debt, jingoism, nuclear paranoia, mass deficit, and a massive military build-up."

"..."We as a people must stand united, banding together to tear this nation in two," Bush said. "Much work lies ahead of us: The gap between the rich and the poor may be wide, be there's much more widening left to do. We must squander our nation's hard-won budget surplus on tax breaks for the wealthiest 15 percent. And, on the foreign front, we must find an enemy and defeat it."

[CaveatMagnusFrater]

11:13 AM on 03/18/2008

Who's gonna play them in the movie?

[tsloan]

10:24 AM on 03/18/2008

These guys are true patriots...not the neo-cons that crammed this war down america's throat.

[musselmanm]

10:23 AM on 03/18/2008

Happy aniversary to all of the Gerbals. George Bush has taken the United States farther down the road to ruin than his father started. In only seven short, or very long years he has taken the United ? States to the brink of collapse on the economic front, the world stage and the morality of nation building and occupation of a soverign government.
If we are able to bring back our chosen form of government, it will take many years. At 57 years of age I am sure that I will not see the standing of our country be repaired during my life. I pray for our country for your and my children and grandchildren. They will have to do the rebuilding and the financing of the last 30 years of our self destruction.
Will we elect a man that would send them to occupy soverign nations for 50 - 100 years while they pay for the follies of George Bush?
Once again, happy Aniversary, I love my country but I fear my government.

[realpolitic]

07:23 PM on 03/18/2008

I agree. I love my country, love dissent, but I have come to fear and loathe the Bush administration. Thank God for term limits.

[realpolitic]

10:15 AM on 03/18/2008

Part of the problem are these Washington media dinners the press has with politicians. Bush entertains them with dumb jokes, and reporters like David Gregory dance with Karl Rove. These are spectacles of excess not seen since Roman days. How can a reporter report on government figures when he has been laughing and dining with them all night the previous evening? Reporters should recuse themselves from these riotous affairs.

[pahpah25]

11:12 AM on 03/18/2008

david gregory gives media whores a bad name.............he is a dunce.

[TRex86]

10:08 AM on 03/18/2008

Kudos to the intrepid reporters for doing their job. I appreciate their insights, but the fact is that modern journalism is dominated by the cult of celebrity that surrounds TV news. Real journalists n'existe plus. The modern form sucks up to power in order to have "access" to the drivel that passes for government information.
In truth, anyone could figure out the lies that led to Iraq: (1) world's 2nd largest oil reserves; (2) two oil men in office (plus Condi, late of Exxon); (3) rampant anti-Islamicism; (4) neo-con imperialistic grandiosity; (5) inspectors finding nothing; (6) most importantly, considering the source--Cheney's slimey record of mendacity dating to the Nixon administration. It was obvious that we felt safe invading Iraq because WE KNEW THEY DIDN'T HAVE WMD.
Why then, five years later--longer than our role in WWII--with 4000 dead Americans and multi-trillion dollars of added debt does anyone believe a single word that flows from this criminal enterprise. This administration has been wrong on everything they have done. Their pronouncements should be met with scorn, derision, and laughter. Yet our journalistic stenographers maunder on. Ed Murrow is doing calisthenics in his grave.

[realpolitic]

10:01 AM on 03/18/2008

A Bush adviser explained to the press: "Let me clue you in. We don't care. You see, you're outnumbered two to one by folks in the big, wide middle of America, busy working people who don't read the New York Times or The Washington Post or the L.A. Times.

As one can see, the Bush administration counts on people to be uninformed and too busy to pay attention to accomplish whatever foreign policy goals it wants to accomplish that are not in the best interests of the people. Administration cynics count on people not being informed or too busy to care. What a shame? This reality is not Thomas Jefferson's democracy!

[rroy]

09:52 AM on 03/18/2008

I too am just an average guy with no advance degrees,or a PHD,and from the very beginning of the Bush Cheney tirades about The Axis of Evil,Al Quaeda,etal I began to feel deep suspicions about the credibility of the Neocon Right. There were just too many inflamatory and hysterical statements being put forth with norhing in the way of factual evidense to back them up.

When it came to preposterous statements made before the U.N. by mouthpiece Powell,while contradictory evidense was mounting,I really began to seathe!
The question that repeatedly came into my mind was,"how can this be?How can the most powerfull country in the world ,the country that brought the other Super Power to it knees by a policy of Mutualy Assured Destruction,now be placed into a fit of hysteria by a mouse that roared?
Based on highly disputed evidense,this country that could vaporise Iraq in 15 minutes,is reacting in a manner bordering on chaotic hysteria!How can this be?
I found it hard to accept that we would react the way we did resulting in invasion and extremely costly occupation of a tin horn warlord dictatorship.Yet we did,and for five years now there is not a day goes by when I shake my head in astonishment of the collosal blundering my country has become capable of.

[realpolitic]

10:08 AM on 03/18/2008

If only some of our best journalists would have only asked the same questions you did. Except for these reporters at Knight Ridder, there are very few profiles in courage here.

[Lemeritus]

09:51 AM on 03/18/2008

I've been pointing to The McClatchy Group for a long time as miles ahead of the pack on just about everything. They've been shaken by the same head-winds all news operations have been flying into and they still managed to get it right. Good for them! Good for us! And please try to support them.

[hquain]

09:48 AM on 03/18/2008

And of course as a result of their analytical triumph, these individuals now occupy high-prestige positions at the big newspapers, where their skills are given the widest possible exposure.........