The Urgent Need for Adversarial Journalism ❧ Current Affairs
On Sunday, September 8th, 2002, the New York Times ran the front-page headline “U.S. SAYS HUSSEIN INTENSIFIES QUEST FOR A-BOMB PARTS.” A subheadline read: “New Information Is Central To White House Argument For Urgent Action On Iraq.” The article, written by Michael R. Gordon and Judith Miller, began like this:
More than a decade after Saddam Hussein agreed to give up weapons of mass destruction, Iraq has stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb, Bush administration officials said today. In the last 14 months, Iraq has sought to buy thousands of specially designed aluminum tubes, which American officials believe were intended as components of centrifuges to enrich uranium. American officials said several efforts to arrange the shipment of the aluminum tubes were blocked or intercepted but declined to say, citing the sensitivity of the intelligence, where they came from or how they were stopped. The diameter, thickness and other technical specifications of the aluminum tubes had persuaded American intelligence experts that they were meant for Iraq’s nuclear program, officials said, and that the latest attempt to ship the material had taken place in recent months.
This is a curious piece of news reporting. As you can see from the words I’ve bolded, all of the claims in the article come straight from U.S. officials. The story itself, about Saddam buying aluminum tubes to make nuclear weapons, turned out to be false. In fact, “Iraq’s nuclear program had been dormant for more than a decade” and “the aluminum tubes had been used only for artillery shells.” The New York Times itself reported in 2004 that even though the Bush administration had told the press it thought the tubes were for a nuclear weapons program, behind the scenes “the government’s foremost nuclear experts seriously doubted that the tubes were for nuclear weapons.”
