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by Russ W. Baker
Columbia Journalism Review,
March/April 1993
Baker, a member of the adjunct
faculty at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, is a
free-lance writer who regularly contributes to The Village Voice. Research
assistance was provided by Julie Asher in Washington and Daniel Eisenberg
in New York.
ABC News Nightline opened last June
9 with words to make the heart stop. "It is becoming increasingly clear,"
said a grave Ted Koppel, "that George Bush, operating largely behind the
scenes throughout the 1980s, initiated and supported much of the
financing, intelligence, and military help that built Saddam's Iraq into
the aggressive power that the United States ultimately had to destroy."
Is this accurate? Just about every
reporter following the story thinks so. Most say that the so-called
Iraqgate scandal is far more significant then either Watergate or
Iran-contra, both in its scope and its consequences. And all believe that,
with investigations continuing, it is bound to get bigger.
Why, then, have some of our top
papers provided so little coverage? Certainly, if you watched Nightline or
read the London Financial Times or the Los Angeles Times, you saw this
monster grow. But if you studied the news columns of The Washington Post
or, especially, The New York Times, you practically missed the whole
thing. Those two papers were very slow to come to the story and, when they
finally did get to it, their pieces all too frequently were boring,
complicated,and short of the analysis readers required to fathom just what
was going on. More to the point, they often ignored revelations by
competitors.
The result: readers who neither
grasp nor care about the facts behind facile imagery like The Butcher of
Baghdad and Operation Desert Storm. In particular, readers who do not
follow the story of the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, which apparently
served as a paymaster for Saddam's arms buildup, and thus became a player
in the largest bank-fraud case in U.S. history.
Complex, challenging, mind-boggling
stories (from Iran-contra to the S&L crisis to BCCI) increasingly define
our times: yet we don't appear to be getting any better telling them. In
the interest of learning from our mistakes, this reporter examined several
hundred articles and television transcripts on Iraqgate and spoke to
dozens of reporters, experts, and generally well-informed news consumers.
Before evaluating the coverage,
let's summarize the Iraqgate story itself:
ARMING SADDAM
The United States and its European
allies have laws and policies designed to prevent arms and military
technology from getting into the hands of developing countries, especially
where there is a likelihood of their reckless deployment. If these
controls were aimed at anyone, certainly they were aimed at the highly
repressive, swaggering Iraqi regime, with its history of threatening both
its neighbors and its citizens.
Still, when Saddam went to war
against Iran, becoming the world's chief practitioner of chemical warfare,
U.S. realpolitikers dubbed him the lesser of two evils, and the one less
likely to disrupt the oil flow. The essence of Iraqgate is that secret
efforts to support him became the order of the day, both during his long
war with Iran and afterward.
Much of what Saddam received from
the West was not arms per se, but so-called dual-use technology -- ultra
sophisticated computers, armored ambulances, helicopters, chemicals, and
the like, with potential civilian uses as well as military applications.
We've learned by now that a vast network of companies, based in the U.S.
and abroad, eagerly fed the Iraqi war machine right up until August 1990,
when Saddam invaded Kuwait.
And we've learned that the obscure
Atlanta branch of Italy's largest bank, Banca Nazionale del Lavoro,
relying partially on U.S. taxpayer-guaranteed loans, funneled $ 5 billion
to Iraq from 1985 to 1989. Some government-backed loans were supposed to
be for agricultural purposes, but were used to facilitate the purchase of
stronger stuff than wheat. Federal Reserve and Agriculture department
memos warned of suspected abuses by Iraq, which apparently took advantage
of the loans to free up funds for munitions. U.S. taxpayers have been left
holding the bag for what looks like $ 2 billion in defaulted loans to
Iraq.
All of this was not yet clear in
August 1989, when FBI agents raided U.S. branches of BNL, hitting the
jackpot in Atlanta. The branch manager in that city, Christopher Drogoul,
was charged with making unauthorized, clandestine, and illegal loans to
Iraq -- some of which, according to the indictment, were used to purchase
arms and weapons technology. Yet three months after the raid, White House
officials went right on backing Saddam, approving $ 1 billion more in U.S.
government loan guarantees for farm exports to Iraq, even though it was
becoming clear that the country was beating plowshares into swords.
At the time, inquiring minds
wondered whether Drogoul could possibly have acted alone in such a mammoth
operation, as the U.S. government alleged. Was there a formal, secret plan
to arm Iraq? And did the U.S. government engage in a massive coverup when
evidence of such a plan began to emerge?
In fact, we now know that in
February 1990, then Attorney General Dick Thornburgh blocked U.S.
investigators from traveling to Rome and Istanbul to pursue the case. And
that the lead investigator lacked the basic financial know-how to handle
such an investigation, and made an extraordinarily feeble effort to get to
the bottom of things. More damningly, we know know that mid-level staffers
at the commerce department altered Iraqi export licenses to obscure the
exported materials' military function -- before sending the documents on
to Congress, which was investigating the affair.
Eventually, it would turn out that
elements of the U.S. government almost certainly knew that Drogoul was
funneling U.S.-backed loans -- intended for the purchase of agricultural
products, machinery, trucks, and other U.S. goods -- into dual-use
technology and outright military technology. And that the British
government was fully aware of the operations of Matrix Churchill, a
British firm with an Ohio branch, which was not only at the center of the
Iraqi procurement network but was also funded by BNL Atlanta. (Precision
equipment supplied by Matrix Churchill was reportedly a target this
January when the Western allies renewed their attack on Iraq).
It would later be alleged by bank
executives that the Italian government, long a close U.S. ally as well as
BNL's ultimate owner, had knowledge of BNL's loan diversions. It looked to
some like an international coalition. As New York Times columnist William
Safire argued last December 7, "Iraqgate is uniquely horrendous: a scandal
about the systematic abuse of power by misguided leaders of three
democratic nations to secretly finance the arms buildup of a dictator."
Safire had been on the case since
1989, turning out slashing op-ed pieces. But readers of the Times's news
pages must have wondered where Safire's body-blows were coming from, since
the news columns contained almost nothing about Iraqgate for the longest
time.
THE COVERAGE
Not everyone was slow to spot
trouble. The coverage might be said to have begun in 1987, when Alan
Friedman, a correspondent in Italy for the London Financial Times who was
writing a book -- Agnelli: Fiat, and the Network of Italian Power --
learned of a European-based arms-procurement network that had gathered
equipment for Iraq. In the book, published in 1988, he explored a
five-year-old joint Argentine-Egyptian-Iraqi effort to build a ballistic
missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead, code-named Condor 2.
Friedman's claims that Iraq was developing a nuclear weapon were shrugged
off by colleagues in the press.
In August 1989, while working in
Milan, Friedman noticed a four-line press release from Banca Nazionale del
Lavoro. "Irregularities," it seemed, had been uncovered at BNL's Atlanta
branch. (Later, Friedman would learn that this was the bank's way of
acknowledging something troubling that had just transpired, unnoticed by
the press: the FBI raids on BNL's U.S. branches.) Shortly thereafter, a
London tipster told Friedman to look at a seemingly unrelated story -- the
possible role of a British company, Matrix Churchill, in secretly arming
Iraq. When Friedman phoned a source in Rome and mentioned both firms, he
was told to get on a plane and come down for a little chat. It lasted all
night.
Beginning in September 1989, a
Financial Times team, reporting from Milan, Baghdad, and London, laid out
the first charges that BNL, relying heavily on U.S. government-guaranteed
loans, was funding Iraqi chemical and nuclear weapons work. Led by
Friedman, who relocated to New York City in early 1990, the reporters went
on to produce about 300 articles over three years, painting a compelling
portrait of a massive -- and seemingly coordinated -- international effort
to aid Iraq. For the next two and a half years, the Financial Times
provided the only continuous newspaper reportage on the subject.
The London paper tied CONDOR 2 to
BNL Atlanta -- which had just been publicly identified as the source of $
3 billion in unauthorized loans to Iraq. And in one 1989 article it warned
that the BNL story was more than just another dull tale of banking
malfeasance: "The CONDOR story raises questions about the effectiveness of
the commitment of Western governments to preventing military technology
transfer." It pointed out that, while U.S. intelligence had long bragged
about aggressively monitoring the transfer of military technology,
Washington had fallen down on the job. The paper noted that if government
sleuths had been serious about stopping the arms flow, they could have
followed either the money trail or the technology trail. "In each case,
they appear to have slipped up," it concluded.
The Financial Times extensively
quoted top former officials at the International Monetary Fund, the
Pentagon, and elsewhere, who expressed alarm over Export-Import Bank loan
guarantees to Iraq. Some asserted that Washington had, as one of them put
it, "allowed and abetted the development and stockpiling of a major
chemical warfare capability" in Iraq. Among the companies shipping
militarily useful technology under the eye of the government, according to
the Financial Times, were Hewlett-Packard, Tektronix, and Matrix
Churchill, through its Ohio branch.
The most striking thing about the
paper's revelations is that they were published before Saddam Hussein
invaded Kuwait in 1990. Douglas Frantz of the Los Angeles Times, who
deserves a lot of credit for his own reporting on Iraqgate, nevertheless
says the Financial Times was without question the early leader on the
story. "Events subsequent have shown inmost cases they were on the money,"
he says.
By early 1990 the Financial Times
was no longer alone. Representative Henry Gonzalez, chairman of the House
Banking Committee (who also had noticed the four-line BNL press release
back in 1989), began a long, lonely crusade to expose the affair. Soon he
would be entering related documents into the Congressional Record in
late-night speeches before an empty chamber. Attorney General Thornburgh
even wrote to him, demanding that he stop looking into BNL in the
interests of "national security." He didn't. Meanwhile, many reporters,
accepting the administration's line that it was shocked -- shocked! -- to
discover the BNL subterfuge, treated Gonzalez as a crank.
On August 2, 1990, Saddam Hussein
invaded Kuwait and the debate began in the U.S. over an appropriate
response. But only a handful of reporters bothered to ask where he had
acquired the military muscle for the invasion. One who did, Thomas L.
Flannery of the Intelligencer Journal, a 45,000-circulation paper in
Lancaster, Pennsylvania, warned in November: "If U.S. and Iraqi troops
engage in combat in the Persian Gulf, weapons technology developed in
Lancaster and indirectly sold to Iraq will probably be used against U.S.
forces. . . . And aiding in this . . . technology transfer was the
Iraqi-owned, British-based precision tooling firm Matrix Churchill, whose
U.S. operations in Ohio were recently linked to a sophisticated Iraqi
weapons procurement network." Flannery, who wrote in impressive string of
stories identifying Pennsylvania companies that supplied Iraq, had been
hired by the Financial Times as an occasional stringer the year before.
Meanwhile, The Village Voice
published a major investigation by free-lancer Murray Waas in its December
18, 1990, issue. Under the headline Gulfgate: How the U.S. Secretly Armed
Iraq, Waas pulled together a massive amount of information, ranging from
senior White House officials' accounts that George Bush was a
behind-the-scenes advocate of a pro-Iraq tilt, to an accounting of U.S.
trade with Iraq that had a potential military application. "That American
troops could be killed or maimed because of a covert decision to arm
Iraq," Waas wrote, "is the most serious consequence of a U.S. foreign
policy formulated and executed in secret, without the advice and consent
of the American public."
The gulf war began shortly after,
on January 16, 1991, and the media went wild. But when it ended six weeks
later, most Americans knew little more about the war's root causes then
they did before.
There would, however, be more to
the story. Within hours after hostilities ceased on February 27 -- and
nine-teen months after the FBI had raided BNL -- the government indicted
Drogoul, painting him as a lone-wolf financier of the Iraqi war machine.
He was charged with defrauding his Rome employers of billions of dollars.
Nightline, which had been looking
at Iraqgate for some time, hooked up with the Financial Times in an
unusual and productive arrangement. On May 2, 1991, the team reported the
secret minutes of the President's National Advisory Council, at which,
despite earlier reports of abuses, an undersecretary of state declared
that terminating Iraqi loans would be "contrary to the president's
intentions."
Nightline/Financial Times also
cited intelligence reports that Iraq was using U.S. government farm
credits to procure military technology. On July 3, 1991, the Financial
Times reported that a Florida company run by an Iraqi national had
produced cyanide -- some of which went to Iraq for use in chemical weapons
-- and had shipped it via a CIA contractor.
In another unusual and productive
partnership, Douglas Frantz of the Los Angeles Times teamed up with The
Village Voice's Murray Waas. The Times published the first of their
three-part series on February 23, 1992. "Classified documents obtained by
the Times show . . . a long-secret pattern of personal efforts by Bush --
both as President and as Vice-President -- to support and placate the
Iraqi dictator," the paper reported. It cited a top-secret National
Security decision directive signed by President Bush in 1989, ordering
closer ties with Baghdad and paving the way for $ 1 billion in new aid.
Although the directive had been briefly described in other publications,
the Times put it in context. Assistance from Washington was critical for
Iraq, Frantz and Waas pointed out, since international bankers had cut off
virtually all loans to Baghdad because Iraq was falling behind on
repayments -- precisely because it was busily pouring millions into arms
purchases.
And it emphasized the striking fact
-- buried deep in a 1991 Washington Press piece -- that Secretary of State
James Baker, after meeting with Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz in
October 1989, intervened personally to support U.S. government loan
guarantees to Iraq.
"Nobody responded to that [February
1992] series," says Frantz. "That week, Gonzalez went onto the house floor
to deliver another speech, and nobody followed that either." The Los
Angeles Times went on to publish 100 articles exploring the history of
U.S.-Iraq relations before and after the war. The reportage was,
admirably, light on anonymous sources and heavy on information from
internal documents, shared with the paper by government employees troubled
by what they had seen.
Still, the top national papers
ignored most of the Financial Times/Nightline and Los Angeles Times
revelations. In fact, when in March an obscure Italian newspaper reported
Drogoul's claim that both the Italian and U.S. governments had known and
approved of his lending operation, only the Financial Times picked up the
story.
Things began to heat up last June
when, in an abrupt turnabout, the feds suddenly agreed to drop 287 of 347
charges against Drogoul in return for a guilty plea and pledge of
cooperation. Drogoul, who had asked for an opportunity to explain his
actions fully, suddenly decided to go mute. A troubled Judge Marvin Shoob,
presiding over Drogoul's case, wrote to the head of the House Judiciary
Committee: "[Drogoul] decided not to provide a statement until sentencing,
after debriefing over a two-month period by the government."
By July, five other congressional
committees had joined Gonzalez's banking panel in launching probes into
various aspects of the Iraqgate affair, and Democrats were demanding that
an independent prosecutor be named to investigate it.
Since Drogoul had made a deal, the
fall sentencing hearings were expected to be brief. But they turned into a
major show when, in October, Drogoul's lawyer suddenly began introducing
new evidence that the head office of the Italian-government-owned bank had
known all along what Drogoul was up to. He also produced testimony
suggesting that figures with ties to U.S. intelligence may have been
involved. The prosecution quickly asked to withdraw its plea bargain, and
agreed to a trial (which had the net effect of postponing public airing of
the affair until after the November election).
Earlier, The Village Voice's Robert
Hennelly had assembled a massive timeline documenting a pro-Saddam U.S.
tilt dating back a full decade. He concluded: "At worst, that support was
a frightening exercise in capitalistic opportunism (we made money both
supporting and attacking Hussein). . . ."
THE PACK JOINS IN
Drogoul's plea bargain and
sentencing hearing provided a perfect new peg, and everyone finally jumped
in. With the Financial Times far in the lead and the Los Angeles Times,
The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal -- got into Iraqgate
late, leaving beat reporters struggling to untangle the story's many
complex international strands.
The Journal set the pace. Chiefly
through reporter John Fialka, the paper made up for its late awakening by
demystifying technicalities through striking headlines and crystal-clear
prose. Despite a small general news hole, the Journal constantly found
space for explanatory Iraqgate pieces.
The Post's early coverage had a
protective tone. In July, reporter John Goshko wrote about Bush
administration actions that "unwittingly bolstered" Iraq's military. And
he asserted: "The record suggests that Bush . . . Baker and other senior
foreign policy advisers were not paying much attention to Iraq. . . ."
The Post's R. Jeffrey Smith, whose
Iraqgate coverage included the Drogoul hearing, produced several
exclusives from Washington sources. Yet the paper did not significantly
advance the story. "It was a story with high political content, and a
paucity of hard evidence to back up charges of conspiracy," Smith says.
"Some papers allowed themselves to be manipulated, acting almost as agents
of the Democratic opposition. Some people made this a crusade."
The New York Times, meanwhile,
shifted into high gear -- and promptly crashed into a pile of charges and
countercharges. To cover BNL and the Drogoul sentencing, the Times brought
in Elaine Sciolino, the national security correspondent, who had returned
to daily reporting after writing a book about Iraq. She had other
credentials that might have been helpful: she had served as Newsweek's
Rome bureau chief before coming to the Times, and had covered intelligence
matters for years.
She came in cold, and her sudden
coverage was almost without context, since, aside from columnist William
Safire, the newspaper had failed to follow up on the massive amount of
evidence already gathered by others in the greater Iraqgate story. When
much of the Financial Times's early scoop material resurfaced during the
trial, the Times reported some of it -- without noting who had originally
unearthed it. Safire, on the other hand, cited the Financial Times often
in his early crusade to rise above his paper's seeming indifference to the
larger scandal. During Drogoul's hearings, the Times brought in Martin
Tolchin, an old Washington hand. He had covered the Neil Bush S&L affair,
and seemed adept at telling this story clearly, but he made only a cameo
appearance.
THE FOOL ON THE HILL
The Times largely ignored
Representative Gonzalez, meanwhile, as he made his allegations and entered
supporting documents into the Congressional Record. Sciolino got around to
a close look at the man making the charges on July 3. Her piece, headed
Eccentric Still But Obscure No More, cast Gonzalez as something of a
buffoon, and included charges that his disclosure of sensitive information
was a threat to national security -- without explaining why it would be.
The piece could almost be read as a justification for the Times's failure
to follow Gonzalez's earlier charges.
The Journal, which regularly
reported Gonzalez's steady flow of documents and pronouncements, was far
more charitable in Fialka's July 31 profile of the congressman. Headed
Loner Gonzalez Toils to Expose White House Role in Aiding Iraq in Years
Leading Up to Gulf War, it presented a tough, incorruptible maverick.
WHAT THEY MISSED
Many incendiary allegations
reported by the Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and The Atlanta
Constitution (covering the Drogoul hearing in its home town) were simply
ignored by The New York Times, and sometimes by The Washington Post, as
well. A few of many examples, all from 1992:
Intelligence Connections?
On October 3, the Journal reported
Drogoul's assertion that the director general of Iraq's Ministry of
Industry and Military Production had told him "We are all in this
together. The intelligence service of the U.S. government works very
closely with the intelligence service of the Iraq government." Three weeks
later, the Journal reported that Gonzalez "produced a phone-book-sized
packet of documents" showing the involvement of U.S. exporting firms. The
documents mentioned one, RD&D International of Vienna, Virginia -- which
designed parts for Iraq's howitzers and was financed through BNL -- that
was run by a man with reputed connections to U.S. intelligence. The Times
and the Post missed the first story and failed to follow up on the second.
Quayle involvement?
On three separate occasions it was
reported (first by Representative Gonzalez, then by The Atlanta
Constitution, and finally by the Journal) that BNL bankers claimed that
companies seeking Iraqi business had come to the Atlanta branch at the
urging of Vice-President Dan Quayle. One such corporation was owned by a
man with close personal and business ties to the Quayle family; he built a
brass refinery that recycled spent Iraqi artillery shells. Neither the
Times nor the Post reported this.
Scuds and Superguns?
September 16: the Journal, in a
piece headed Iraq Funded Scuds With Money Gained Fraudulently in U.S.,
Investigator Says, recounted prosecution testimony that Drogoul had toured
an Iraqi military facility, was shown a drawing of a missile, and was told
that it had been financed through BNL Atlanta. The Atlanta Constitution
reported this, as did the Los Angeles Times, whose lead stated: "Loans
from an Italian bank branch here paid for improving Iraqi Scud missiles
like the one that killed 28 Americans in the Persian Gulf War, a top
federal investigator testified Tuesday." The Times and Post didn't report
the story.
How high does it go?
September 23: The Constitution
reported that Judge Shoob, complaining in open court about the
prosecution's failure to call BNL officials to testify, actually sought to
call his own witness. The Journal quoted Shoob: "I've read all the secret
documents, and I can't believe [Drogoul] was the sole actor or principal
actor in the enterprise." The Times and Post were AWOL on this story.
A question of bribery?
Even when the Times raised
startling facts, it often failed to follow up on itself. On October 17 the
newspaper noted that the CIA had "uncovered a document suggesting the
possible payoff of government officials in the United States and Italy in
the elaborate bank-fraud case." Readers of the Times never learned more
about this development.
DON'T FOLLOW ME, I'M LOST
In other cases, the Big Two -- but
particularly The New York Times -- simply muddled matters.
In October, it was revealed that
the CIA had withheld from Congress -- and possibly from prosecutors --
crucial documents showing what the government knew about BNL. The Justice
department blamed the CIA the CIA blamed the Justice department; and
Senator David Boren, chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, got
angry at everyone.
Sciolino did her most energetic
work covering this turf battle, often using unnamed sources, which made it
difficult to discern whose agenda was being advanced. And although the
Times finally started producing exclusives in its coverage of this matter,
its daily revelations over the finger-pointing were hard to follow and did
little to foster understanding of the bigger story. (In the end, evidence
suggested that the CIA had withheld the documents at the request of
Justice. If so, in retrospect, the story was the collusion, not the feud.)
Readers' comprehension suffered
when this complex story was reported as a he said-she said exercise.
Here's Sciolino on October 11, writing about the intergovernmental feud:
"The unusual finger-pointing over the case came after reports that CIA
officials had disclosed to Congress on Thursday that, at the urging of the
Justice Department, they had deliberately withheld information about the
bank fraud from federal prosecutors in Atlanta. . . . CIA and Justice
Department officials denied those reports today. . . . But their denials
came amid a new disclosure by lawmakers that the Justice Department also
had withheld information that the CIA wanted to make public. . . . The
CIA, the Justice Department, and the Bush Administration have all denied
wrongdoing in the case. . . . In a sharply worded statement today, the CIA
denied that its officials had told the Senate Committee that it had
deliberately withheld information from Federal prosecutors in Atlanta at
the urging of the Justice Department."
Wording like this, one television
producer who has followed Iraqgate observed, "makes The New York Times
responsible for gross public apathy."
Dean Baquet, who had earned a
reputation as a formidable investigative reporter during his years with
the Chicago Tribune, worked to advance the story on several occasions,
especially covering Matrix Churchill developments in a separate trial in
London. But he was only sporadically assigned to the story.
On October 18, Sciolino and Baquet
wrote an overview piece, a belated effort to advance the story, although
they appeared hesitant to state what, for others, had been all but proven
long ago. Notice the qualifiers: "Some Congressional Democrats say the
recent revelations are only a tiny part of a two-pronged Government-wide
cover-up; to protect and conceal its dealings with Mr. Hussein, and to
accommodate the Italian government. Even more ominously, these critics,
without any real proof, have begun to suggest that the administration knew
about the loans all along."
Six congressional committees was
hardly "some" Democrats; the revelations were hardly "recent"; the
evidence of administration knowledge was, by now, fairly overwhelming. As
even the national-security minded columnist Jim Hoagland, writing a week
earlier in The Washington Post, put it, "That Bush is tolerating a coverup
on Iraq conducted by others on his behalf can no longer be seriously
doubted. That Bush has lied about his knowledge of shipments of U.S. arms
to Iraq can no longer be seriously disputed."
On November 2, Representative
Gonzalez announced that the Agriculture department, which had approved BNL
loans, had learned back in 1990 for the CIA that BNL Rome was involved in
the alleged Atlanta fraud. This revelation not only challenged the
government's assertion that Drogoul had acted alone, but also implied that
a coverup was under way.
Gonzalez's disclosure represented
another news peg. The Journal covered the disclosure in a piece headed
Farm Agency Knew Scope of BNL Fraud. Working from the same material that
same day, the Times, in a story headed 1990 Letter Adds New Questions on
CIA Role in Iraq Bank Case, chose to emphasize the CIA-Justice turf
battle, obscuring the main point: that the Agriculture department was in
the BNL loop. (And while the Journal cited Gonzalez in the second
paragraph, the Times waited until the very last sentence to credit the
congressman.)
Times deputy national editor Philip
Taubman, who was deputy bureau chief in Washington until late last year
and supervised much of the reporting on Iraqgate (except when it was
assigned to the paper's business or foreign desk), sees the Times's heavy
coverage of the CIA-Justice fight as a plus. "I don't think it's inside
baseball when two major branches of government are involved in a
donnybrook, both accusing each other of malfeasance," he says.
Many reporters from other
newspapers criticize the Time's coverage of Iraqgate, and much of its
coverage in general, for a bias toward authority, an unwillingness to
challenge power. Taubman, however, sees his newspaper as properly
cautious. "I think it's off base to suggest that our coverage was somehow
deficient because we attempted to lay out what charges were confirmed and
which might still fall short of being confirmed," he says. "We try in all
our stories to make clear what we don't know, as well as what we know. And
in a complicated story of this type I think it's good journalism to clue
the reader in where inflammatory accusations are not yet, and may never
be, confirmable or provable."
Sciolino, who recently moved on to
become the paper's chief diplomatic correspondent, admits that coming in
late to such a complicated story was tough. "I couldn't summarize the
story in one sentence," she says. "That's what made it so difficult to
explain -- to an editor, to people at a cocktail party. It's even more
complicated than Iran-contra."
In retrospect, she says, "I think
our paper could have done a better job, especially in the beginning. One
spinoff could be to look at the whole arms procurement network around the
world, how independent arms dealers, banks, and governments who own
weapons-production facilities promote arms proliferation." Yet, Sciolino
adds, arms proliferation "is not a sexy story."
She praises the Los Angeles Times
for putting two people on the story, and for treating it as an
investigation rather than as a beat story. She says her paper was hobbled
because the story affected several sections of the paper -- foreign,
national, and business -- and was parceled out to them. So no one editor
was in charge of coordinating coverage.
LESSONS
With Dragoul's new trial set for
October, there is still time for news organizations to wise up. Some
things everyone agrees on: besides exploring the proliferation of weapons
into unstable or dangerous hands, a serious Iraqgate investigation would
look at the power of America's largest corporations to sway foreign policy
in ways that help them make sales. The Los Angeles Times, the Financial
Times, and others did explore this, but there was little follow-up. One
exception was the Journal, which led an October 12 piece this way: "In the
unfolding drama of how the U.S. financed and supplied Saddam Hussein's
Iraq, there's more than a walk-on part for corporate America." The
Journal's John Fialka cited a list of major U.S. corporations that "saw
Iraq as a gusher of business -- so long as credits were wrung out of
government agencies such as the Agriculture department, Commodity Credit
Corp., and the Export-Import Bank."
Serious coverage would also examine
geopolitical arrangements between countries like the U.S. and Italy, the
place of banks in global scandals, and the role of American and foreign
intelligence agencies in secretly carrying out policies that the American
people have not endorsed. And to do this it would also seem necessary to
report this story with some distance from partisan sources, whether Robert
Gates or Henry Gonzalez, and not just count on leaks alone.
As it was, for a long time
reporters couldn't even count on partisan political warfare to generate
scoops. In Congress, both parties had repeatedly backed legislation
authorizing farm credits to Iraq -- despite warnings from Kurdish
representatives that the funds would end up being used against them, in
the form of poison gas. With no one to hand the story to the media on a
platter, unraveling it required following hunches, and spending time and
money -- serious investigative reporting that roams far afield from the
constraints of the conventional beat.
For ABC, which broke plenty of
stories in concert with London's Financial Times, only to watch them sink,
covering Iraqgate has been a sobering experience. "It's been very
frustrating for us," says Gordon Platt, a Nightline producer. "We'd put it
on the air, but there would be no follow-up by the other press. We'd
expect the Times or Post would pick up on it. But until this last summer,
they didn't."
As for why much of the press fears
this kind of story, perhaps Ted Koppel put it best. "There's a good reason
why we in the media are so partial to a nice, torrid sex scandal," he said
as he opened yet another Nightline Iraqgate report last July. "It is,
among other things, so easy to explain and so easy to understand. Nothing
at all, in other words, like allegations of a government coverup, which
tend to be not at all easy to explain, and even more difficult to
understand."
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