One from the Vaults: "The List"

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Fascinating article written in 2004, right after Judy Miller and all those sucker/reporters had to backtrack for misleading the American public on WMD/Saddam. Remember that? Remember Chalabi? Remember how his offices were raided and suddenly our big informant was a big con artist? Well, this story writes about all those poor Americans reporters who were duped by Chalabi, the Iraqi National Congress and its Information Collection Program?

an excerpt:

...In fact, perhaps no list of reporters has commanded such attention in Washington since Richard Nixon compiled his enemies list more than thirty years ago. In the months since the INC list was made public in a story by Jonathan Landay, senior national correspondent for the Washington bureau of Knight Ridder, it has taken on an almost emblematic quality. Reporters appearing on the list rail against the injustice of their inclusion. Those who didn’t make the cut congratulate themselves anew for resisting the lure of the INC and revel in the schadenfreude of watching others’ once-envied scoops turn to ashes. What few have done, it would appear, is take the time to read all the stories.

I did. The first thing that became apparent was that the list is a bit of a hodge-podge. The 108 stories ran between October 2001 and the end of May 2002, a period when the INC was laboring mightily to make sure that America’s burgeoning “war on terror” reached to the heart of Baghdad. Still, about a quarter of the articles have little to do with the INC’s agenda of promoting the ouster of Saddam Hussein; some even raise questions about evidence supplied by the INC. The balance of the stories, however, advanced almost every claim that would eventually become the backbone of the Bush administration’s case for war, including Saddam Hussein’s contacts with al Qaeda, his attempts to develop nuclear weapons, and his extensive chemical and bioweapons facilities — all of which are now in grave doubt. Similar stories appeared earlier and later, but this nine-month period following the terrorist attacks of 9/11 was crucial in creating the perception that the Iraqi dictator was a grave threat to the U.S. “The INC’s agenda was to get us into a war,” says Helen Kennedy, a reporter for the New York Daily News, whose name appears on the list. “The really damaging stories all came from those guys, not the CIA. They did a really sophisticated job of getting it out there.”

link: http://www.cjr.org/issues/2004/4/mccollam-list.asp

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1. a wee kick

:)