Falluja & Those Mass Graves

...Meanwhile, this week Human Rights Watch issued its long-awaited conclusive report on Saddam’s genocidal record. As far as I know, the major news media has not picked up the report, which is available on the internet at HRW’s website,
http://www.hrw.org/reports/2004/iraq1104/1.htm

I read about the report in the British press. It turns out that in 19 months HRW’s experts have not been able to find the missing 100,000 bodies it said were of Kurds who had been rounded up and trucked south of Kurdistan, machine-gunned to death and buried in mass graves. In fact, it now blames the U.S. coalition for not securing those mass graves containing smaller numbers of Iraqis or keeping looters from carrying off official Iraqi records of the genocide and the mass graves.

You should read the report in its entirety, David, and maybe you will get your editors to take a look too. Do you see what I mean? Saddam Hussein will soon be put on trial for crimes against humanity, and the Iraqi prosecutors will not have the goods on him. Now that the election is over, maybe you will have more time to devote to this exercise. You should at least give a call to Dr. Stephen Pelletiere, the retired CIA analyst who has never believed in the genocide stories, but has awaited the report of Human Rights Watch to see what it has found...

November 5, 2004

Memo To: David Broder, Washington Post
From: Jude Wanniski
Re: Those Mass Graves

Remember,David, back on Sept. 27 I posted a memo on the margin that I wrote to you (see below), complimenting you on your column about how the news media had been “losing their way”? It had to do with your observation that the major news media was chasing sham stories while not asking serious questions about the most important topics of the day, including the war in Iraq - which both your newspaper and The New York Times acknowledged in price, apologizing for not being more aggressive in the months leading up to the President’s decision to go to war. In my note you, I suggested you look into the long-held conventional wisdom that Saddam Hussein committed genocide, a view largely propagated by Human Rights Watch. The organization estimated that as many as 290,000 Iraqis were killed by Saddam during his reign, with 100,000 Kurds slaughtered in 1988, in the last months of the Iran/Iraq war. Prime Minister Tony Blair at one point said as many as 400,000 Iraqis had been killed by Saddam’s regime.

Partly as a result of the HRW assertions, the Bush administration justified its use of force to replace the duly constituted government in Baghdad. The most recent estimates of the dead total 100,000 Iraqi civilians and 60,000 to 80,000 Iraqi military, plus the almost 1200 Americans who have died during the course of the war. We are currently bombing the 300,000 people of Falluja in hopes of pacifying the city and may wind up leveling it altogether. Is the sky the limit on what it will take to bring freedom and democracy to the people of Iraq? Don’t you wonder?

Meanwhile, this week Human Rights Watch issued its long-awaited conclusive report on Saddam’s genocidal record. As far as I know, the major news media has not picked up the report, which is available on the internet at HRW’s website,
http://www.hrw.org/reports/2004/iraq1104/1.htm

I read about the report in the British press. It turns out that in 19 months HRW’s experts have not been able to find the missing 100,000 bodies it said were of Kurds who had been rounded up and trucked south of Kurdistan, machine-gunned to death and buried in mass graves. In fact, it now blames the U.S. coalition for not securing those mass graves containing smaller numbers of Iraqis or keeping looters from carrying off official Iraqi records of the genocide and the mass graves. You should read the report in its entirety, David, and maybe you will get your editors to take a look too. Here are two pertinent graphs from the summary:

In the case of both documents and mass graves, U.S.-led coalition forces failed to secure the relevant sites at the time of the overthrow of the former government. They subsequently failed to put in place the professional expertise and assistance necessary to ensure proper classification and exhumation procedures, with the result that key evidentiary materials have been lost or tainted. In the case of mass graves, these failures also have frustrated the goal of enabling families to know the fate of missing relatives. The findings of the report are all the more disturbing against the backdrop of a tribunal established to bring justice for serious past crimes, the Iraqi Special Tribunal. Human Rights Watch has serious concerns that the tribunal is fundamentally flawed and may be incapable of delivering justice.

The extent of the negligence with which key documentary and forensic evidence has been treated to date is surprising, given that the U.S.-led coalition and Iraqi authorities alike knew that trials of Hussein and key Ba’th government officials would be important landmarks in Iraq’s political recovery, that successful trials require solid evidence, and that, as international experience has shown, preserving such trial-ready evidence is a difficult task. Some of the evidence has been destroyed, but it is not too late to assume custody of millions of additional pieces of evidence. Some of this material, if it is given the urgent attention it needs and deserves, may prove critical in the proceedings of the upcoming trials. It will also play an important role as Iraqis attempt to construct an accurate historical record of their traumatic experiences under Ba’th Party rule.

Do you see what I mean? Saddam Hussein will soon be put on trial for crimes against humanity, and the Iraqi prosecutors will not have the goods on him.

Now that the election is over, maybe you will have more time to devote to this exercise. You should at least give a call to Dr. Stephen Pelletiere, the retired CIA analyst who has never believed in the genocide stories, but has awaited the report of Human Rights Watch to see what it has found. After reading the report in its entirety, he told me they had, as he expected, come up empty:

This claim of HRW that they haven’t got evidence that will stand up because the graves have been compromised, overlooks one key fact: they were claiming that the Ba’th killed hundreds of thousands. If these graves really contained all the bodies they’re supposed to contain, the numbers of dead alone would convict the Ba’th. If you read the report, they say over and over again they "believe" such-and-such a grave actually contains thousands of bodies; but all they’ve been able to find is a few score (at best). I think that’s what gives the scam away. They can’t produce the hundreds of thousands, or even the tens of thousands they promised they would.

. I’ve tried to get lots and lots of reporters interested in the story, David, but in every case they have a reason why they just can’t do it at this time. They’ve lost their way, as you noted. As the dean of the Washington press corps, you should please help them find it.

http://wanniski.com/

The Media, Losing Their Way

September 27, 2004

Memo To: David Broder
From: Jude Wanniski
Re: Your Sunday column

Dear David: I read your excellent Sunday column in the Washington Post, “The Media, Losing Their Way.” As the dean of the Washington press corps, you certainly have the standing to make the argument as you did in your opening paragraph: “We don’t yet know who will win the 2004 election, but we know who has lost it. The American news media have been clobbered.”

As you correctly note, the standards of American journalism that you and I grew up with several decades ago have deteriorated in a most fundamental way. Major news organizations in print and electronic media are more and more having to apologize for falling down on the job, with both the New York Times and your newspaper recently having to run mea culpas for doing such a poor job of covering the issues leading up to the President’s decision 18 months ago to take the country to war with Iraq. Your column put it well:

In a year when war in Iraq, the threat of terrorism and looming problems with the federal budget and the nation’s health care system cry out for serious debate, the news organizations on which people should be able to depend have been diverted into chasing sham events: a scurrilous and largely inaccurate attack on the Vietnam service of John Kerry and a forged document charging President Bush with disobeying an order for an Air National Guard physical.

With these events coming after the editors of two respected national newspapers, the New York Times and USA Today, were forced to resign because their organizations were duped by lying staff reporters, it is hard to overcome the sense that the professional practices and code of responsibility in journalism have suffered a body blow.

After almost a half-century in this business, I certainly feel a sense of shame and embarrassment at our performance. The feeling is not relieved by the awareness that others in journalism not only did fine work on other stories but took the lead in exposing these instances of gross malpractice.

The common feature — and the disturbing fact — is that none of these damaging failures would have occurred had senior journalists not been blind to the fact that the standards in their organizations were being fatally compromised.

We need to be asking why this collapse has taken place.

You will get lots of different answers to that question, David, including those you raise. On this website, I have made a nuisance of myself with the many journalists I know who are in senior positions, at times begging them to ask questions of our political leaders that were not being asked in the run-up to the war. What you and I were taught in the old days was to ask questions and get answers and to take them wherever they lead, not simply to a preconceived objective that would in itself dictate the reporting process. Nowadays, even the best reporters are taking short cuts, rushing to print in order to get ahead of the competition.

Just last week, as an example, I wrote Steve Weisman of the NYT this week when he had a report on the Iran nuclear issue, near the top referring to Iran’s "nuclear weapons program," as if it were a fact, when it is not. The AP reporter in Vienna who covers the International Atomic Energy Agency has also been slipshod for as long as I have been observing him, apparently being spoonfed by John Bolton, whose mission in life at the State Department is to destroy the credibility of the IAEA. Weisman wrote back that he should have said "suspected" nuclear weapons program. But there is nobody at the Times, or Post, who is willing to pick up the phone and get the story straight. If there were, they would find Tehran has agreed to everything Saddam Hussein agreed to in terms of intrusive, perpetual inspections, and that there should be no "suspected" nuclear program. Unless the free press we have stops political propaganda in its tracks, we will find ourselves in more unnecessary wars.

If you will remember, I tried to get the senior print reporters to look into the charge that Saddam had "gassed his own people," and committed genocide a la Hitler. I’ve urged them to read the reports of the CIA and DIA analysts on what happened at Halabja and they would find that Saddam did not gas the Kurds there. I’ve also urged them to look into the reports that Saddam killed between 80,000 (George Shultz) or 200,000 (Kenneth Pollack of Brookings) or 300,000 (Sen Pat Roberts, chairman of Senate intelligence) Kurds in 1988 in the last year of the war with Iran. If there were a serious attempt to certify these charges, David, you would find enough material to write a column stating authoritatively that these assertions were all part of the process to demonize Saddam by the Iraqi exile crowd, i.e., Ahmed Chalabi and Iyad Allawi, plus the Iraqi Kurds, Talibani and Barzani, who fought on the Iranian side in the Iran-Iraq war. Imagine the sensation it would cause, to have the Dean of the Washington Press Corps find there is no factual support for the genocide assertion — an assertion that continues to be made every day by supporters of the President as a "good enough" rationale for having gone to war with Iraq.

If you would like to start the process of getting the press corps used to taking the time it needs to get to the bottom of things instead, I will suggest you start with Stephen Pelletiere, the CIA’s top analyst covering this period. Give him a call or send him an e-mail. He will be happy to talk to you. You can then call Pat Lang of the DIA, who will back up Pelletiere. They will explain to you that there was no genocide at Halabja. This was such a stupendous error by the press corps in taking the word of Iraqis who had an interest in Saddam’s downfall, instead of the work of our intelligence community, that in itself paved the way to the war last year. I’ll bet you a dollar President Bush still believes that “disinformation.”

You will say, "What about the mass graves?" Prime Minister Allawi mentioned them in every interview this last week. As far as I know, there was no genocide involved in any of the “suspected” sites and no forensic work completed to even determine who is buried in what in most cases appear to be cemeteries. To this day, Human Rights Watch has not been able to find the sites of the 100,000 Kurds they claim were killed by Saddam in the last year of the war with Iran. HRW says it is still looking. Ask Pelletiere about them. He will surprise you with his explanation. I’ve tried again and again to get old friends in journalism to call up Pelletiere and dig into the story, but I suppose it is too hot to handle. You can even ask George Tenet if he believes Saddam gassed Halabja, which Bush believes, when the CIA’s top guy on that topic said he didn’t. See what I mean?

What I mean to say, David, is that you hit the nail on the head in your column yesterday. But if you can’t drive it home yourself, you can’t expect the rest of your colleagues in the press corps to do so. Don’t you agree? Go ahead and take the lead. At least put a fire under the Post editors to assign reporters to the story. Bob Woodward? They’ll be astonished at how much they will learn. And you will have served the cause of restoring journalistic standards.

Best wishes, as always,

Jude

PS There are a host of other questions the news media is not asking. I’ll supply them one at a time.