You may only read this site if you've purchased Our Kampf from Amazon or Powell's or me
• • •
"Mike and Jon, Jon and Mike—I've known them both for years, and, clearly, one of them is very funny. As for the other: truly one of the great hangers-on of our time."—Steve Bodow, head writer, The Daily Show

"Who can really judge what's funny? If humor is a subjective medium, then can there be something that is really and truly hilarious? Me. This book."—Daniel Handler, author, Adverbs, and personal representative of Lemony Snicket

"The good news: I thought Our Kampf was consistently hilarious. The bad news: I’m the guy who wrote Monkeybone."—Sam Hamm, screenwriter, Batman, Batman Returns, and Homecoming

July 20, 2010

New York Times Maintains Unblemished Record of Wrongness on Iraq WMD Story

On Sunday David Sanger of the New York Times wrote an article about Shahram Amiri, the Iranian nuclear scientist who defected to the U.S. and then recently defected back. This is the beginning:

Would [Amiri] end up like Vitaly Yurchenko, the one-time K.G.B. officer who defected to Washington exactly a quarter-century ago, revealed some of the deepest secrets of a collapsing empire, and then bolted from his C.I.A. handlers...?...

[R]emarkably, Mr. Yurchenko is still around. And as his interrogation by Iranian intelligence began on Friday, Mr. Amiri could only hope for the same fate.

Because there’s an alternate ending to such dramas that Mr. Amiri no doubt doesn’t want to think about. It is the case of Hussein Kamel, a son-in-law of Saddam Hussein. Mr Kamel escaped from Iraq to Jordan in 1995, and gave the West an insider’s view of Mr. Hussein’s then-active research projects on chemical, biological and other weaponry, not unlike the view of Iran’s nuclear program that American officials say they got from Mr. Amiri. Mr. Kamel, too, went back home, promised by his father-in-law’s lieutenants that all was forgiven. He was shot a few days later.

From afar, it appears that the Iranians are still uncertain which model should best apply to the bizarre case of Shahram Amiri.

Of course, like everything ever published by the New York Times about Iraq and WMD, this is completely wrong.

1. Hussein Kamel did not "give the West an insider's view of Mr. Hussein's then-active research projects on chemical, biological and other weaponry."

That's because there were no "then-active research projects." As Kamel said, Iraq had no actual non-conventional weapons left—they'd all been either turned over to the UN for destruction or destroyed by Iraq itself. And all of Iraq's WMD programs had ceased to function soon after the Gulf War in 1991. You can read the CIA's report regarding their CW program here, and their BW program here. You can also read what Kamel told the UN and IAEA here, and what he told the CIA here.

As you'll see, what actually happened was that Kamel gave the UN, IAEA and CIA an insider's view of Iraq's pre-Gulf War chemical, biological and nuclear weapons projects. This was significant because Iraq had never come completely clean about what they'd developed during the eighties. Moreover, from 1991-95 Iraq had been hiding large quantities of documentation about their pre-91 projects in hopes they could eventually use it to restart the programs—and they surrendered it all when Kamel defected. So Kamel's defection demonstrated that Iraq was lying about the past, but not that it was lying about the present.

2. To the New York Times' credit, while they're completely wrong, they're actually less wrong about this than many other publications. For instance, back in 2003 Slate wrote this:

[Saddam] certainly had such weapons as late as 1995 (his son-in-law told us where they were, whereupon the U.N. inspectors of the day went and destroyed them)...

In the buildup to war this was a particularly popular lie about what had happened, told by such people as Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and Tony Blair.

3. It's especially funny for the New York Times to compare Shahram Amiri with Hussein Kamel, because—beginning with the Clinton administration—the U.S. government relentlessly lied about what Kamel had told us. So if they're similar situations, Amiri will have told us Iran has no nuclear weapons program, and then we'll lie relentlessly about him saying that. Ha ha!

BONUS: Back in 2006, David Sanger co-wrote an article for the New York Times with this sentence:

The possibility that Saddam Hussein might develop “weapons of mass destruction” and pass them to terrorists was the prime reason Mr. Bush gave in 2003 for ordering the invasion of Iraq.

After I pointed that out, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting complained about it, and the Times ran a correction:

An article that appeared on NYTimes.com for part of the day on Sept. 5 incorrectly described President Bush's statements about Iraq's chemical and biological weapons programs at the time of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Mr. Bush said it was Iraq's possession of those weapons that was the main justification for the invasion, not the possibility that the weapons could be developed.

However, I've just noticed that at some point in the past four years, they un-corrected it, removing the correction from their website and posting the story with the false sentence exactly as it first appeared.

You have to admit they're good.

—Jonathan Schwarz

Posted at July 20, 2010 06:58 PM
Comments

It blows my mind that you could notice this. How are those OCD treatments coming along?

Posted by: Aaron Datesman at July 20, 2010 07:23 PM

How are those OCD treatments coming along?

Clearly not as well as we'd hoped, although I think it's improved marginally since this.

Posted by: Jonathan Schwarz at July 20, 2010 08:01 PM

"However, I've just noticed that at some point in the past four years, they've un-corrected it, removing the correction from their website and posting the story with the false sentence exactly as it first appeared."

This reminds me of a section of a publication I used to read called the "Washington Report on Middle East Affairs". In this section, they would present some zionist propaganda that had appeared in the main stream press and debunk it using a different article from the corporate press.

My favorite reason why Ayatolla Bush decided to invade Iraq is to strike a blow against the forces of Gog and Magog. This is described here:

http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=library&page=haught_29_5

Posted by: Edward at July 20, 2010 08:02 PM

Yes, they are indeed good. But everybody also makes it a little too easy for them these days.

OCD? No wonder I love this site.

Posted by: N E at July 20, 2010 10:26 PM

100 hours? 1991 until NOW and it ain't over yet. Yeah, that 38 days-o-bombing HAD to have been a bitch, BUT, ya gotta admit, the NEXT 19 years beat that "flatfuckin'footed".

Posted by: Miek Meyer at July 20, 2010 10:37 PM

Really good work.

Posted by: Jack Crow at July 20, 2010 11:20 PM

This post belongs in the best of. A+

Posted by: jeffbbz at July 21, 2010 02:58 AM

Clearly not as well as we'd hoped, although I think it's improved marginally since this. The link you provided, while interesting, contained similar half-truths, the clown who wrote the letter did mention the 38 days of intense blitzkrieg-style bombing that precede the 100 hours but neglected the 10 years of near daily bombing enforcing the so-called no fly zone.

Give yourself $5 on Friday.

Posted by: drip at July 21, 2010 04:57 AM

I thank any gods that might exist that I, and the dozen or so people who read this site, know the true story, and will go to my grave knowing that the NYT didn't get away with it....

Posted by: NomadUK at July 21, 2010 07:40 AM

When will writers start de-identifying with the lying government and media? This Tiny Rev item adopts the near universal "us" essentially unconsciously as for example:
"the U.S. government relentlessly lied about what Kamel had told us. So if they're similar situations, Amiri will have told us Iran has no nuclear weapons program, and then we'll lie relentlessly about him saying that." (my emphasis)

In the light of this, why not conclude the piece with:
"You have to admit we're good.

Posted by: No Comment at July 22, 2010 03:16 PM

Un-correcting a correction? I know you're even more untouchable than the average DFH, but it still seems that they could be convinced to pretend to have some sense of shame about that. Which would be useful.

Posted by: homunq at July 23, 2010 01:26 AM