Anderson Cooper kept a couple of vigils on CNN recently. One New Year’s Eve, in Times Square. The other, Saddam Hussein’s execution, Friday December 29th. He was joined in the studio for an extended period of time by Feisal Amin al-Istrabadi, Iraq’s Deputy (acting) Ambassador to the UN.
Between reports from Baghdad and Dearborn MI, Cooper turned to al-Istrabadi for commentary but never seriously challenged al-Istrabadi’s assertions or explored his role in the Iraq quagmire while al-Istrabadi was allowed to spin the incoming reports.
The closest Cooper ever got to a challenge ended with this response:
I’ll let you pass on that one.
In 2002 al-Istrabadi, an attorney in private practice, submitted a paper to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations asserting the threat of weapons of mass destruction and the preposterous notion that in the absence of a Saddam Hussein’s tyranny, Sunnis and Shiites would live in harmony.
Wolf Blitzer blinked a few days later on CNN’s Late Edition, Sunday December 31st:
Ambassador al-Istrabadi, unfortunately, we have to leave it right there.
Al-Istrabadi was also a member of the State Department’s “Future of Iraq Project” which produced a lengthy report largely ignored by the Department of Defense on the instructions of Donald Rumsfeld and never publicly released until FOIA requests were made.
According to The Northwest Indiana Times:
Istrabadi has lived in the United States since he was 8. His parents, Rasoul and Amel, immigrated here two years after Saddam Hussein came to power. With the Governing Council, Istrabadi played an integral role in helping write the country’s interim constitution.
The closest Cooper ever got to a challenge of al-Istrabadi was this exchange from one of the Anderson Cooper 360 transcripts:
COOPER: How do you try to overcome that, that notion that the U.S. is still pulling all the strings?
AL-ISTRABADI: Well, I mean, I think that one possible — and I think very likely explanation is that having a somewhat higher budget, they (Arab TV) just are able to put news up, you know, on the air a little sooner.
And there’s no question…
(CROSSTALK)
COOPER: Think our budget’s higher though, and they still got — they still got it ahead of us.
(CROSSTALK)
AL-ISTRABADI: Well, that may be. They’re on the — they’re there in Iraq. Their entire infrastructure is there as opposed to being in Atlanta. So…
COOPER: I’ll let you pass on that one.
Not recorded in this transcript or the second transcript is a moment when a reporter in Iraq speaking to Cooper made reference to the “civil war” between militia in Iraq. Al-Istrabadi interjected at the end of the report that this was not a civil war of militia-on-militia but parsed it as terrorist conflict with Shia militia attacking Sunni civilians and Sunni militia attacking Shia civilians. Anderson Cooper did not challenge this assertion.
Al-Istrabadi repeated the assertion in an exchange with Wolf Blitzer on CNN’s Late Edition Sunday December 31st and again went unchallenged by Blitzer:
BLITZER: Here’s what a U.S. major, William Vorhees, was quoted as saying in The New York Times this week. He’s one of the U.S. forces, U.S. military commanders training Iraqi troops. It was very depressing to hear this quote: “I have come to the conclusion,” he says, “that this is no longer America’s war in Iraq, but the Iraqi civil war where America is fighting.”
He’s on the ground. He’s training Iraqi troops. He’s come to the conclusion that, guess what? This is, after all, a civil war. What do you say about that?
AL-ISTRABADI: Well, this has been an ongoing discussion, particularly in the media in this country, whether Iraq is or is not in a civil war. I think there are good reasons why we are not. Your previous guests talked about Iraqi sectarian troops fighting each other. I’ve forgotten the exact wording. That was the idea.
In fact, that’s not the case. What’s happening now is we have death squads operating in Iraq, targeting the other side’s civilians. We have not had, with one or two very minor exceptions, we have not had forces of one side fighting the forces of another.
And so I think that it is very — for that reason, that’s one of the basic reasons why we say that we are not, in fact, in civil war. We have death squads operating in Baghdad, and it’s essential that these death squads be disarmed. And then that is one of the priorities of the government, is to disarm these death squads.
And Wolf Blitzer’s hard hitting response:
BLITZER: Ambassador al-Istrabadi, unfortunately, we have to leave it right there. Thanks very much for joining us once again here on “Late Edition.”
AL-ISTRABADI: Thank you.
Al-Istrabadi has been peddling the illusion of Iraqi unity for some time now. In his 2002 paper to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations he claimed:
Another reason to be optimistic about Iraq’s future involves the high degree of cohesion enjoyed by Iraq’s various ethnic and confessional groups. On this issue, we must guard against myths which the media have begun to peddle. A highly respected commentator, for example, recently observed that Iraq’s ethnic and confessional groups are “long-time enemies.” Another recent writer described Iraq as an “apartheid” state where Iraq’s Sunnis playing the role of the Afrikaners. While such observations may contribute to an emerging orthodoxy, they are utterly wrong, and completely ignore Iraq’s history as a nation over the last eighty years.
::::::::::
The point is this: When Iraq’s central government does not play a malevolent role, Iraq’s ethnic and religious groups have maintained a high degree of harmony and accord.
He re-iterated this in 2004 as reported by the Columbia Spectator:
Like Fa’ik, al-Istrabadi described the Iraqi people as essentially unified. Genocide, he said, was historically perpetrated by the central government, not by individuals, and national unity could be accomplished in the absence of an oppressive regime.
As to Saddam’s record of genocide al-Istrabadi also asserted on Anderson Cooper 360 that Saddam was responsible for the deaths of two million Iraqis even though best estimates put that at 1 million and even he himself claimed in his 2002 paper that the number over a 20 year period approached 1 million including Iraqis killed by Allied forces in the first Gulf War. Are we to believe that Saddam killed 1 million more Iraqis in less than one year? Al-Istrabadi went on to say:
so two million, that’s the equivalent of 20 million Americans.
Also in his 2002 paper to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations al-Istrabadi made this cleverly parsed admonition that mirrored Administration talking points:
In the post-September 11th world, there is no reasonable doubt that Iraq’s current regime constitutes a clear and present danger to the vital national interests of the United States and our allies in the region. Whatever one may think of Iraq’s current capabilities of projecting weapons of mass destruction, two things are known to an absolute certainty: This regime has spent untold billions of dollars in acquiring or attempting to acquire chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons; and it has actually used weapons of mass destruction against its own population as well against at least one neighboring country. Only the naive could find any comfort in their supposition that the regime does not now have such weapons in its armamentarium; no rational observer could doubt the demonstrated desire of this regime to amass such weapons.
So here is a man who has peddled the illusion of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, the notion that Iraqis would live in harmony once Saddam was removed and avoids acknowledging the existence of a civil war sitting in a CNN studio making questionable statements and gets a free pass from Cooper and, Blitzer who ask no hard questions. I guess I shouldn’t expect more from a media organization where anchors interview each other and call it news.
