| April
18 , 2006
Who is That Masked Man?
The Zarqawi Gambit,
Revisited
By GREG WEIHER
The
Washington Post recently printed an interesting article (“Military
Plays Up Role of Zarqawi”, 4/10/06) that has gone substantially
unnoticed by the remainder of the American corporate media. The
first sentence gives the gist of the story: “The U.S. military
is conducting a propaganda campaign to magnify the role of the leader
of al-Qaeda in Iraq, according to internal military documents and
officers familiar with the program.”
You
may recall that a little over two years ago (February 9, 2004),
a story appeared on the front page of the New York Times about a
letter supposedly from Abu Musab al Zarqawi to al-Qaeda leaders
lamenting the slow progress of the insurgency in Iraq, and announcing
plans to foment civil war between Iraq’s Shia and Sunni. The
story was the result of an exclusive to Times reporter Dexter Filkins
by unnamed senior American officials.
At
that time, I wrote a short essay
that appeared on the CounterPunch website questioning the veracity
of the story. It didn’t pass the smell test for a number of
reasons. One was that it was just too pat a reflection of the administration’s
line on the insurgency. The Bushies were burning up the airways
insisting that the insurgents were terrorist infiltrators from other
lands, not democracy loving Iraqis. Zarqawi’s supposed letter
sounded more like the script of a play written by Karl Rove.
A
second cause for skepticism was the letter’s contention that
the insurgency was being smothered by the American occupation –
“By God, this is suffocation!” Zarqawi was supposed
to have opined. We needn’t belabor the absurdity of that one.
Finally,
and most tellingly, the whole thing reeked of the Judy Miller model
of journalism. The letter was provided directly to the Times by
government officials. There was no attempt to verify its authenticity
or provide any context by consulting other sources. And none of
the bevy of senior government officials cited by the Times was willing
to vouch for the authenticity of the letter by actually providing
his or her name. In exactly the same way did Miller’s infamous
(and bogus) story about the aluminum tubes that were going to be
used by the Iraqis to enrich uranium appear on the Times front page.
There was too much of the Judy Miller technique in the publishing
of this story to take it seriously.
So
it was with great interest that I read these lines in the Washington
Post piece: “One slide in the same briefing . . . noted that
a ‘selective leak’ about Zarqawi was made to Dexter
Filkins, a New York Times reporter based in Baghdad.
Filkins’s
resulting article, about a letter supposedly written by Zarqawi
. . . ran on the Times front page on Feb. 9, 2004.”
Reached
by e-mail by the author of the Post story, Filkins “said that
he was not told at the time that there was a psychological operations
campaign aimed at Zarqawi.” He went on to say that “he
was skeptical about the document’s authenticity then, and
remains so now, and so at the time tried to confirm its authenticity
with officials outside the U.S. military.” It is hard to regard
this comment as anything other than a blatant lie.
To
make an elementary initial point, let me ask the obvious question.
If he was skeptical of the authenticity of the letter, why did he
go with the story? Why did his editors go with the story?
Nothing
of this skepticism appears in the story itself. There are no references
to any sources other than U.S. government officials, even though
there is no shortage of experts familiar with Zarqawi’s career.
At no point does Filkins say that he is skeptical about the authenticity
of the letter.
I
quote from my CounterPunch article of February 26:
“Note
the lack of any confirmation of the authenticity of this letter/CD
from experts or authorities aside from ‘U.S. officials.’
Note the failure to consult third-party intelligence experts,
authorities on Al Qaeda, authorities on wars of national liberation.
Note the failure to provide any background on the validity of
claims that Zarkawi actually could have written such a letter,
is still in Iraq, or collaborated with Saddam Hussein. There is
one disclaimer, two lines in a three-page piece: ‘Yet other
interpretations may be possible, including that it was written
by some other insurgent, but one who exaggerated his involvement.’
. . . In a follow-up story (‘Al Qaeda rebuffs Iraqi Terror
Group,’ 02/21/04) the administration’s version of
the facts is entirely unquestioned.”
There
is nothing surprising about finding out that, once more, the Bush
administration played fast and loose with the truth as it pertains
to matters Iraqi. After all, as the Zarqawi gambit is being exposed,
we are also finding out that Bush prattled on about mobile weapons
labs for more than a year after a secret CIA report dismissed the
vehicles in question as the biggest sand toilets in the world.
It
is just as important to note, however, that these feats of mendacity
could not have been achieved without the willing, if not eager,
complicity of the American establishment media. Eventually, the
Times was criticized pretty severely in the pages of Editor and
Publisher, and The Columbia Journalism Review for its slipshod journalistic
practices. In his mea sorta culpa in May, 2004, the Times public
editor, Daniel Okrent, put his finger on the essence of the problem:
“There
is nothing more toxic to responsible journalism than an anonymous
source . . . a newspaper has an obligation to convince readers
why it believes the sources it does not identify are telling the
truth. That automatic editor defense, ‘We’re not confirming
what he says, we’re just reporting it,’ may apply
to the statements of people speaking on the record. For anonymous
sources, it’s worse than no defense. It’s a license
granted to liars.”
In
this context, it is relevant to note that the Times has yet to own
up to its role in helping the liars in the Bush Administration to
pull off the Zarqawi gambit.
Greg
Weiher is a political scientist and freelance writer living
in Houston, Texas. He can be reached at gweiher@uh.edu.
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