And until now we have not reported that to our readers. It is still possible that chemical or biological weapons will be unearthed in Iraq, but in this case it looks as if we, along with the administration, were taken in. 20, 2001, another front-page article began, “An Iraqi defector who described himself as a civil engineer said he personally worked on renovations of secret facilities for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons in underground wells, private villas and under the Saddam Hussein Hospital in Baghdad as recently as a year ago.” Knight Ridder Newspapers reported last week that American officials took that defector - his name is Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri - to Iraq earlier this year to point out the sites where he claimed to have worked, and that the officials failed to find evidence of their use for weapons programs. These accounts have never been independently verified. 8, 2001, for example, articles cited Iraqi defectors who described a secret Iraqi camp where Islamic terrorists were trained and biological weapons produced. In some cases, there was no follow-up at all. Articles based on dire claims about Iraq tended to get prominent display, while follow-up articles that called the original ones into question were sometimes buried. Accounts of Iraqi defectors were not always weighed against their strong desire to have Saddam Hussein ousted. 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. Our examination, however, indicates that the problem was more complicated. Some critics of our coverage during that time have focused blame on individual reporters. So did many news organizations - in particular, this one. Administration officials now acknowledge that they sometimes fell for misinformation from these exile sources. He became a favorite of hard-liners within the Bush administration and a paid broker of information from Iraqi exiles, until his payments were cut off last week.) Complicating matters for journalists, the accounts of these exiles were often eagerly confirmed by United States officials convinced of the need to intervene in Iraq. ![]() ![]() (The most prominent of the anti-Saddam campaigners, Ahmad Chalabi, has been named as an occasional source in Times articles since at least 1991, and has introduced reporters to other exiles. They depended at least in part on information from a circle of Iraqi informants, defectors and exiles bent on “regime change” in Iraq, people whose credibility has come under increasing public debate in recent weeks. The problematic articles varied in authorship and subject matter, but many shared a common feature. Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged - or failed to emerge. In some cases, information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged. That is how news coverage normally unfolds.īut we have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been. ![]() And where those articles included incomplete information or pointed in a wrong direction, they were later overtaken by more and stronger information. In most cases, what we reported was an accurate reflection of the state of our knowledge at the time, much of it painstakingly extracted from intelligence agencies that were themselves dependent on sketchy information. In doing so - reviewing hundreds of articles written during the prelude to war and into the early stages of the occupation - we found an enormous amount of journalism that we are proud of. It is past time we turned the same light on ourselves. We have studied the allegations of official gullibility and hype. We have examined the failings of American and allied intelligence, especially on the issue of Iraq’s weapons and possible Iraqi connections to international terrorists. Over the last year this newspaper has shone the bright light of hindsight on decisions that led the United States into Iraq.
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