Why do I keep going back to the 1970’s? Why do I keep bringing up the Church Committee and thirty year-old articles like Carl Bernstein’s classic CIA and the Media? It’s because America seems to have forgotten the lessons of Vietnam and the Nixon era. This is especially true of journalists that cover journalism. Greg Sargent, over at the American Prospect is a case in point. He seems mystified that Fred Hiatt, the head of the Washington Post’s editorial board, still refuses to apologize for the Post’s pre-war reporting on Iraq.
The big news organizations need to come to terms with their role in spreading White House misinformation — and their failure to dig out the truth — in the run-up to the Iraq war. Because if they don’t, they risk making the same catastrophic mistakes again in the run-up to the possible conflict with Iran — and those mistakes could have even graver consequences. Bill Keller [of the New York Times] understands this. Fred Hiatt doesn’t.
The fact that some powerful media figures still won’t accept accountability for their pre-war blunders is awfully discouraging — it suggests that they’re fully prepared to commit those blunders all over again.
The Washington Post is not blundering. Their reporters are doing their job. Dafna Lizner has a front-page article today that is honest.
Update [2006-4-13 18:37:30 by BooMan]: Meteor Blades points out a major error on my part. Lizner’s article did not appear today, but back in August. This makes Hiatt’s behavior even more reprihensible, but it also screws up my narrative here.
Until recently, Iran was judged, according to February testimony by Vice Adm. Lowell E. Jacoby, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, to be within five years of the capability to make a nuclear weapon. Since 1995, U.S. officials have continually estimated Iran to be “within five years” from reaching that same capability. So far, it has not.
The new estimate extends the timeline, judging that Iran will be unlikely to produce a sufficient quantity of highly enriched uranium, the key ingredient for an atomic weapon, before “early to mid-next decade,” according to four sources familiar with that finding. The sources said the shift, based on a better understanding of Iran’s technical limitations, puts the timeline closer to 2015 and in line with recently revised British and Israeli figures…. The timeline is portrayed as a minimum designed to reflect a program moving full speed ahead without major technical obstacles.
But that doesn’t fit with the administration’s foreign policy goals. Fred Hiatt is happy to ignore the reporting on his front-page and print this rubbish on the editorial page.
Some in Washington cite a U.S. intelligence estimate that an Iranian bomb is 10 years away. In fact the low end of that same estimate is five years, and some independent experts say three.
This isn’t just some mistake. This is a pattern. It might seem inexplicable to you if you haven’t read Bernstein’s article. If you have never heard of Frank Wisner or Operation Mockingbird, you might think that the Washington Post’s editorial board is free of the taint of misinformation. It’s not. Fred Hiatt cannot be trusted. Distorting the intelligence on Iran is just a favor Hiatt carries out for the administration. It’s not unlike the collective attempt to demonize Hugo Chavez. It is precisely the fact that the big-foot opinion leaders are in the pocket of the Council on Foreign Relations that makes the blogging world so essential.
When Fred Hiatt prints disinformation about Iran, he is carrying water for an administration that is contemplating using nuclear weapons to destroy a nuclear program that is nine to ten years away from producing a nuclear weapon. That’s dangerous business. That’s criminally irresponsible.
E-mail the Washington Post and tell them to correct the record. Do it now, before Hiatt’s comments become conventional wisdom and help contibute to an unprovoked nuclear attack on Iran.
