by Jonathan Young

Created on: November 09, 2007

No news agency is perfectly impartial. Even if major newspapers and networks did nothing but report the news without propagandizing, their op-ed pieces would reveal institutionalized ideological biases.

Journalism is supposed to be relatively balanced, but in some instances, journalists must take sides, for the sake of their own self-respect.

In the run-up to the most recent invasion of Iraq, journalists across the country attempted to report the story without bias. Clearly, based on what the Bush administration had said about Iraq attempting to purchase thousands of aluminum tubes for uranium enrichment, it was safe for Judith Miller and Michael Gordon to write a story entitled "US Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts" (New York Times, September 8, 2002).

Of course, later intelligence assessments would conclude that those aluminum tubes were intended to be used for traditional weapons: short-range rockets, not nukes.

Judith Miller wrote several other stories on the Bush administration's allegations of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, all based on fabrications provided by Iraqi defectors, including bank embezzler Ahmed Chalabi. All of the information Chalabi gave to the U.S. intelligence community turned out to be false.

It's hard to appoint blame, in retrospect. The Bush administration's case for war certainly seemed solid. The administration offered information from another Iraqi defector, Rafid Ahmed Alwan, who claimed that he had worked in a facility in Iraq that was manufacturing biological weapons. We now know that U.S. intelligence never actually spoke to Alwan, who fabricated the entire story in the interest of securing asylum in Germany.

The Bush administration also claimed that Iraq had attempted to purchase uranium from Niger. This claim was based on documents that turned out to be crude forgeries, complete with incorrect names of Nigerian officials.

In covering the WMD story, Judith Miller tried to be balanced and non-judgmental. "My job isn't to assess the government's information and be an independent intelligence analyst myself," she later remarked. "My job is to tell readers of The New York Times what the government thought about Iraq's arsenal."

And the Times has admitted that in trying to be balanced and non-judgmental, it lapsed into the role of a cheerleader for an unneccesary war. In a May 2004 editorial, the Times admitted that its coverage of the WMD argument was "not as rigorous as it should have been."

As a lifelong reader of the Times, I was somewhat disappointed by their coverage of the run-up to the Iraq War. It seemed to me that the best source of information about WMDs would have to be the UN weapons inspectors who had been on the ground in Iraq since the end of the Gulf War. So I read a book by Scott Ritter, chief UN weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998. This book, "Endgame: Solving the Iraq Crisis," argued that while Iraq was in fact obstructing the work of UN inspectors, this was only because the CIA had attempted to infiltrate UNSCOM in the interest of making a case for regime change.

Prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, in interviews and a documentary, Scott Ritter argued that Iraq did not pose a threat to U.S. interests, and had no WMDs.

Again, Scott Ritter was chief weapons inspector for UNSCOM. So it seemed to me that his opinion mattered more than the opinions of people who had not been in Iraq for 7 years, searching for weapons.

I will always wonder why he was paid so little attention.

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