Today New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman (12/21/11) gives readers a sense of what the Iraq War was all about:

Iraq was always a war of choice. As I never bought the argument that Saddam had nukes that had to be taken out, the decision to go to war stemmed, for me, from a different choice: Could we collaborate with the people of Iraq to change the political trajectory of this pivotal state in the heart of the Arab world and help tilt it and the region onto a democratizing track?

Huh. A collaborative effort with the people of Iraq? Friedman goes on:

But was it a wise choice?

My answer is twofold: "No" and "Maybe, sort of, we'll see."

Hmm.

Others remember a different Tom Friedman, interviewed by Charlie Rose on May 30, 2003.

"Now that the war is over," Rose began his question--a conclusion widely jumped to in the early days of the war. When asked if invading Iraq was worth it, Friedman responded that it was "unquestionably worth doing."

The war, back then, was an attack on the "terrorist bubble," which in Friedman's mind meant that "we needed to go over there and take out a very big stick... and there was only one way to do it."

He went on:

What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, and basically saying: "Which part of this sentence don't you understand? You don't think, you know we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy, we're just gonna to let it grow? Well, suck. On. This." That, Charlie, is what this war is about. We could have hit Saudi Arabia; it was part of that bubble. Could have hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could.

The house-to-house, "suck on this" democracy campaign. That's how it's normally done.

I guess one great thing about being a Times columnist is that you not only  get to write about the present--you can also re-write your own past.

The Sunday New York Times (12/18/11) featured a powerful investigation of civilian casualties resulting from the NATO war in Libya--casualties that, to hear NATO officials tell it, maybe don't even exist.

The Times' C.J. Chivers and Eric Schmitt report:

But an on-the-ground examination by The New York Times of airstrike sites across Libya--including interviews with survivors, doctors and witnesses, and the collection of munitions remnants, medical reports, death certificates and photographs--found credible accounts of dozens of civilians killed by NATO in many distinct attacks. The victims, including at least 29 women or children, often had been asleep in homes when the ordnance hit.

The Times even took its research--based on a small number of incidents--to NATO, which seemed to change its story immediately:

Two weeks after being provided a 27-page memorandum from the Times containing extensive details of nine separate attacks in which evidence indicated that allied planes had killed or wounded unintended victims, NATO modified its stance.

"From what you have gathered on the ground, it appears that innocent civilians may have been killed or injured, despite all the care and precision," said Oana Lungescu, a spokeswoman for NATO headquarters in Brussels. "We deeply regret any loss of life."

The Times reports that  it "found significant damage to civilian infrastructure from certain attacks for which a rationale was not evident or risks to civilians were clear." The paper also noted that many witnesses talked about "warplanes restriking targets minutes after a first attack, a practice that imperiled, and sometimes killed, civilians rushing to the wounded." That is a tactic often associated with terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda.

The Times also offers a sickening glimpse into the denial of NATO leaders after civilians were killed in an airstrike in Tripoli:

Initially, NATO almost acknowledged its mistake. "A military missile site was the intended target," an alliance statement said soon after. "There may have been a weapons system failure which may have caused a number of civilian casualties."

Then it backtracked. Kristele Younes, director of field operations for Civic, the victims' group, examined the site and delivered her findings to NATO. She met a cold response. "They said, 'We have no confirmed reports of civilian casualties,'"  Ms. Younes said.

The reason, she said, was that the alliance had created its own definition for "confirmed": Only a death that NATO itself investigated and corroborated could be called confirmed. But because the alliance declined to investigate allegations, its casualty tally by definition could not budge--from zero.

If you recall the corporate media coverage of the war while it was happening, Libyan leaders were churning out laughably clumsy propaganda about civilian deaths.  "Libya Stokes Its Machine Generating Propaganda" was the June 7 headline of a New York Times story by John Burns, who scoffed at the "nightly propaganda tour" of the Libyan capitol. It seemed obvious at the time that Burns and his ilk were offended by by the Libyan government's inability to lie as effectively as the NATO generals.

The Times also investigated August airstrikes that it termed "NATO's bloodiest known accidents in the war"--a series of strikes on buildings in the town of Majer:

The attack began with a series of 500-pound laser-guided bombs, called GBU-12s, ordnance remnants suggest. The first house, owned by Ali Hamid Gafez, 61, was crowded with Mr. Gafez's relatives, who had been dislocated by the war, he and his neighbors said.

The bomb destroyed the second floor and much of the first. Five women and seven children were killed; several more people were wounded, including Mr. Gafez's wife, whose her lower left leg had to be amputated, the doctor who performed the procedure said.

Minutes later, NATO aircraft attacked two buildings in a second compound, owned by brothers in the Jarud family. Four people were killed, the family said.

Several minutes after the first strikes, as neighbors rushed to dig for victims, another bomb struck. The blast killed 18 civilians, both families said.

The death toll has been a source of confusion. The Qaddafi government said 85 civilians died. That claim does not seem to be credible. With the Qaddafi propaganda machine now gone, an official list of dead, issued by the new government, includes 35 victims, among them the late-term fetus of a fatally wounded woman the Gafez family said went into labor as she died.

The Zlitan hospital confirmed 34 deaths. Five doctors there also told of treating dozens of wounded people, including many women and children.

The airstrikes in Majer were discussed by FAIR in an August 18 media advisory, where it was noted that several reports talked about a death toll of about 30. The deaths were barely covered at all. As we pointed out, the Paper of Record did not think much at the time:

The New York Times (8/10/11) ran a 170-word version of a Reuters dispatch which noted: "There was no evidence of weapons at the farmhouses, but there were no bodies there, either. Nor was there blood."

Corporate media were more offended by inflated Libyan claims about civilian casualties than they were about the false denials coming from the people doing the killing. What's worse, to kill people and then deny that you did so, or to overstate how many people your enemies were killing? Many reporters--too many--seemed to think the latter was the more serious crime.

The Washington Post's Scott Wilson has a piece (12/13/11) looking back on the Iraq War, where he writes of  the "arc of the American experience in Iraq" being "from hope to barbarity, from swaggering invasion to quiet departure."

When it comes to the rationale for the entire war, things get a bit fuzzy. Like we pointed out recently about CBS Evening News, the main driver of the invasion--the threat of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction--is reduced to something like a footnote:

The premise was contested from the start, a new doctrine of preemptive war tailored to an era in which stateless militants could batter the once-distant United States with the everyday tools of modern society--commercial jets as missiles, cellphones as triggers, trucks as bombs.

The neoconservatives at the Pentagon and in the West Wing argued that the invasion of Iraq was necessary. Hussein, the longtime U.S. nemesis who once tried to kill then-President Bush's father, was openly encouraging Palestinian militancy at a time when Hamas was blowing up cafes and pizzerias in Jerusalem. A model of democracy in the Middle East--imposed by the U.S. military--would inspire change in its neighbors or frighten them into reform.

Besides, Hussein had murdered hundreds of thousands of his own people in the Anfal campaign against the Kurds, and in the aftermath of the 1991 Persian Gulf War to put down a Shiite rebellion that the United States failed to support after pledging to do so--a broken promise that helped fill the mass graves of Hilla, south of Baghdad. And he supposedly had an arsenal of some of the world’s nastiest weapons that had to be found and destroyed before they ended up with Al-Qaeda.

In this bizarre re-telling, Saddam Hussein's support for Hamas and a plot to kill George H. W. Bush seem to matter more than the bogus stories about Iraq's WMDs. Perhaps all you can say about this is that it makes a certain kind of sense for the U.S. government and elite media to want people to forget the falsehoods that launched the war.

Of course Newt Gingrich (you know, the "big thinker" in the Republican campaign) made a lot of news by declaring that the Palestinians are an "invented" people.

As As'ad AbuKhalill--aka Angry Arab--pointed out, the New York Times ran a piece on this controversy on December 10 quoting exactly two sources: former U.S. ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk and David A. Harris, chief executive of the National Jewish Democratic Council.

Times reporter Trip Gabriel also noted of Gingrich:

He described Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, as denying Israel's right to exist.

"You have Abbas, who says in the United Nations, 'We do not necessarily concede Israel's right to exist,'" Mr. Gingrich said. "So you have to start with this question: 'Who are you making peace with?'"

It would be rather unusual for Abbas to have said such a thing. I cannot find any evidence of it (a conclusion reached by others, too).  A Reuters piece about Abbas' UN speech noted that he "told the United Nations he had no intention of denying Israel's right to exist, but said he did want to delegitimize the settler movement."

So "invented" people aren't given a chance to respond,  and apparently words can be put in their mouths by history professor Republican candidates.

Over on Twitter, Glenn Greenwald recommended this USA Today profile of Boston University historian Andrew Bacevich, who has been one of the most prolific and incisive critics of U.S. foreign policy in recent years.

Greenwald called it "surprisingly good," which is right. But one thing about the piece really bothered me--how it dealt with the death of Bacevich's son in Iraq. Reporter Rick Hampson tells that story via the classroom:

The students knew that Bacevich had always opposed the war in Iraq. They may have known that his only son, Lt. Andrew J. Bacevich, Jr., was an Army officer there. They did not know that the day before he had been killed there.

That awful irony--a son follows his father into the military and dies in a war the father fought to end--has helped make Bacevich one of the most prominent and credible critics of U.S. foreign policy.

I doubt that USA Today really means to say that the death of Bacevich's son "helped" make Bacevich's critique more "credible," but that's certainly what comes across here. As a politically conservative critic of Clinton, Bush and now Obama policies, one would hope that his record speaks for itself.

Bacevich doesn't speak publicly much about his son's death--I recall that from an interview he did with Bill Moyers in 2008. And Bacevich says much the same later on in the USA Today article:

Bacevich says his son's loss does not affect his analysis and should not affect how it is received. "I've never said, 'You need to listen to me because my son died in Iraq.'"

Again, this is one troubling aspect to an otherwise interesting piece about an important voice in our national debate. But that passage was a little off.

The New York Times today (12/8/11), reporting on the CIA drone that went down in Iran, refers in passing to the

recent public debate in Israel about whether time is running out for a military strike to slow Iran's progress toward a nuclear weapon.

Of course, the assumption here is that Iran is making "progress towards a nuclear weapon." That is what some political elites and many in the media say, but that doesn't make it true. And there is no evidence to support that assertion. And basing a debate around an assumption that might be entirely false is, of course, a problem. (Consider the run-up to the Iraq invasion, 2002-03.)

Today's piece also includes what some might read as justification for the secretive surveillance program over Iran:

In Iran, among other missions, it is looking for tunnels, underground facilities or other places where Iran could be building centrifuge parts or enrichment facilities. One such site, outside Qum, was revealed by President Obama and the leaders of France and Britain in 2009, though it appears that Israel played a major role in detecting that site.

This is a strange assertion, since many accounts have suggested that the facility was revealed by Iran. In fact, that's how the Times reported it last month (11/9/11):

Iran told the nuclear agency about that facility days before President Obama and European leaders reported its existence two years ago, and Iran has recently said it is moving some of its nuclear activity to that underground facility, at a well-defended military base.

Political campaign watchers seem to agree that the election will be about the economy, and that Republicans probably won't have much to say about Obama's foreign policy (partly because it doesn't much differ from what a Republican president might be doing).

The New York  Times' Richard Oppel has a piece today headlined, "Republican Candidates Aim at Obama Foreign Policy."

So what exactly is the Republican case against Obama's foreign policy? That it's too soft on the Hezbollah menace on our southern border.
Seriously.

Oppel writes:

A small but revealing episode unfolded in the closing minutes of the last Republican presidential debate. After the candidates were asked to name the national security issue they most worry about, which had not yet been discussed, Rick Santorum cited radical Islamists in Central and South America.

Mitt Romney agreed, saying that Hezbollah, a militant Shiite group in Lebanon that is backed by Iran and Syria, was working in Mexico, Venezuela and throughout Latin America, posing an "imminent threat." Earlier in the night, Gov. Rick Perry of Texas warned that Hezbollah, as well as Hamas, the Palestinian militant organization that controls Gaza, also were working in Mexico.

That the candidates would cite the same threat--one denied by the Mexican government, and which seemed to contrast with a State Department report that there are no Hezbollah-related operational cells in this hemisphere--was not a coincidence.

Oppel adds that  "a major thrust of the Republican foreign-policy argument" will include this kind of rhetoric about Obama being "too soft" on the likes of "Iran, Hezbollah and the Palestinians."

If a journalist is looking to inform voters, it might help to give them a sense of whether what these candidates are saying is grounded in reality. PolitiFact judged  Romney's Hezbollah comments "Mostly False," pointing out that the claim appears to come from a paper by former Bush assistant secretary of state Roger Noriega--and that the paper argues that most of the activity in Latin America is related to fundraising--criminal activity that funnels money back to Lebanon.

The Times judges the accuracy of the Republican charges in passing--the candidates' claims "seemed to contrast with a State Department report." ` The piece is far more concerned with the political strategy at work, and how Republicans might be trying to appeal to some Jewish voters with a message about Obama being soft on Islamic terrorists. It's a strategy that will likely be a lot more successful if reporters aren't going to call them out.

In the new issue of Time (12/12/11), Fareed Zakaria writes in the first sentence of his column:

It is difficult to find a country on the planet that is more anti-American than Pakistan. In a Pew survey this year, only 12 percent of Pakistanis expressed a favorable view of the U.S.

It's not that difficult. The same survey of seven countries found one of them, Turkey, with an even lower 10 percent favorable opinion of the U.S., and Jordan just a hair above at 13 percent.

More important is Zakaria's conclusion:

There is a fundamental tension in U.S. policy toward Pakistan. We want a more democratic country, but we also want a government that can deliver cooperation on the ground. In practice, we always choose the latter, which means we cozy up to the military and overlook its destruction of democracy.

To be clear, he thinks siding with the military over democracy is a bad thing.

But he also thinks the United States "always" choose repression over democracy. This is notable, in that as of this summer he was writing that "all American presidents have supported and should support the spread of democracy." As we pointed out then, this does not square with the record.

And in March 2007, Zakaria wrote critically of the Bush record of intervening in Latin American countries, which he saw as a break with a Reaganesque policy of democracy promotion:

American foreign policy toward Latin America had been on the right track for two decades. Ronald Reagan orchestrated an extraordinary turnaround, supporting human rights, democracy and free trade in several countries.

As FAIR noted, this was a remarkable whitewash of the Reagan record.

And then there was the time Zakaria attempted to argue that U.S. policy towards Haiti was one long attempt to promote democracy:

Consider, for example, Haiti, where the United States has attempted to foster democracy on and off for almost a century--with almost no success. Why? Surely Haitians yearn to be free. But there are aspects of its politics, economics and culture that have made it very difficult to establish liberal democracy.

As FAIR pointed out, this period included U.S. military occupation along with support for a coup against Haiti's democratically elected government.

I suppose there's a chance that Zakaria's views towards U.S. power are becoming more critical. But if he's really reaching this conclusion, why talk about the "tension" between supporting democracy and working against democracy? Maybe he's just having trouble remembering which side of the argument he's on.

If you've paid attention to the presidential campaign season, you've no doubt been entertained by the string of embarrassments and gaffes: Rick Perry blows the voting age! Herman Cain can't remember what to say about Libya! Mitt Romney talks about the upside of a murderous dictatorship!

Wait--what?

In the November 22  debate, Romney gave this answer to a question about what to do about Pakistan:

We don't want to just pull up stakes and get out of town after the enormous output we've just made for the region. Look at Indonesia in the '60s. We helped them move toward modernity. We need to help bring Pakistan into the 21st century, or the 20th, for that matter.

That's an astonishing comment--and one that was hardly noticed in the corporate media.

To people who were paying attention, Romney would seem to have been praising the reign of Indonesian dictator Suharto, who took power in the mid-'60s. As Ed Herman wrote in Extra! (9-10/98):

Suharto's overthrow of the Sukarno government in 1965-66 turned Indonesia from Cold War "neutralism" to fervent anti-Communism, and wiped out the Indonesian Communist Party--exterminating a sizable part of its mass base in the process, in widespread massacres that claimed at least 500,000 and perhaps more than a million victims. The U.S. establishment's enthusiasm for the coup-cum-mass murder was ecstatic (see Chomsky and Herman, Washington Connection and Third World Fascism); "almost everyone is pleased by the changes being wrought," New York Times columnist C.L. Sulzberger commented (4/8/66).

Suharto quickly transformed Indonesia into an "investors' paradise," only slightly qualified by the steep bribery charge for entry. Investors flocked in to exploit the timber, mineral and oil resources, as well as the cheap, repressed labor, often in joint ventures with Suharto family members and cronies. Investor enthusiasm for this favorable climate of investment was expressed in political support and even in public advertisements; e.g., the full-page ad in the New York Times (9/24/92) by Chevron and Texaco entitled "Indonesia: A Model for Economic Development."

The Progressive's Matt Rothschild called Romney's answer the "most outrageous comment of the whole debate," noting that the "new leadership" he referred to was a dictator "who killed between 500,000 and 1 million of his own citizens with the help of the CIA. A little follow up from Wolf Blitzer would have been nice there."

One of the only other journalists to catch this was Dan Murphy of the Christian Science Monitor, who spent a decade reporting from Indonesia. As Murphy wrote, the 1960s saw

the systematic destruction of Indonesia's nascent democratic institutions and political parties (which had already been taking a beating under Sukarno); state repression of opponents with torture, targeted killings and long jail terms; and a military-backed dictatorship that persisted until a popular uprising in 1998 pushed Suharto, finally, from power.

The first sentence of Murphy's piece was "I don't generally write about U.S. politics." Indeed. Hundreds of journalists who spend every day writing about U.S. politics apparently did not find it newsworthy that Romney endorsed a bloody dictatorship.

A New York Times piece today (11/29/11) about the U.S. airstrikes that apparently killed 24 Pakistani soldiers opens with Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani speaking publicly about the incident, as does Pakistani military spokesperson Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas.

Readers are then treated to a lesson in how U.S. officials speak to important news outlets about an emerging, controversial story. They don't use their names. Instead, we hear from:

• "A United States official" who comments  on the "growing frustration in Washington about the increasingly harsh language coming out of Islamabad." He "spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing the need not to personally alienate Pakistani officials."That same official then is allowed to mischaracterize the Pakistani complaint:  "You hear what they’re saying, and they’re making it sound like we're just bombing Pakistani military positions for the hell of it."
• "Another American official," who "disputed the Pakistani assertions that the border posts were in areas that had been largely cleared of insurgents."
• "Yet another American official... who asked not to be identified in discussing a case that is under investigation."
• And, finally, a "third American official briefed on the raid."

Elsewhere in the paper, a Times editorial explained its regrets over this incident and others:

It's not clear what led to NATO strikes on two Pakistani border posts this weekend, but there can be no dispute that the loss of lives is tragic. At least 24 Pakistani troops were killed. We regret those deaths, as we do those of all American, NATO and Afghan troops and Pakistani and Afghan civilians killed by extremists.

So any deaths in the wars in Afghanistan or Pakistan are regrettable--except for civilians killed by U.S./NATO forces.

Back in March, we wondered when U.S. corporate news outlets would find U.S./NATO killing of Afghan kids newsworthy. Back then, it was nine children killed in a March 1 airstrike. This resulted in two network news stories on the evening or morning newscasts, and two brief references on the PBS NewsHour.

On November 25, the New York Times reported--on page 12--that six children were killed in one attack in southern Afghanistan on November 23. This news was, as best I can tell, not reported on ABC, CBS, NBC or the PBS NewsHour.

There were, on the other hand, several pieces about U.S. soldiers eating Thanksgiving dinners.

Salon columnist Glenn Greenwald was one of the few commentators to write about the latest killings. As he observed:

We're trained simply to accept these incidents as though they carry no meaning: We're just supposed to chalk them up to regrettable accidents (oops), agree that they don’t compel a cessation to the war, and then get back to the glorious fighting. Every time that happens, this just becomes more normalized, less worthy of notice. It's just like background noise: Two families of children wiped out by an American missile (yawn: at least we don't target them on purpose like those evil Terrorists: we just keep killing them year after year after year without meaning to). It's acceptable to make arguments that American wars should end because they're costing too much money or American lives or otherwise harming American strategic interests, but piles of corpses of innocent children are something only the shrill, shallow and unSerious--pacifists!--point to as though they have any meaning in terms of what should be done.

Sam Husseini asked a tough question of a member of the Saudi royal family at a National Press Club event--which got him into some trouble with folks at the Press Club. (Good news--his suspension has been lifted.)

Part of what motivated Husseini to question Turki al-Faisal was the fact that a representative of such a repressive regime would have the nerve to give a talk about Arab democracy. Elite journalists, on the other hand, don't spend much time worrying about this. Washington Post columnist David Ignatius filed his Sunday column (11/27/11) from Riyadh, where he was speaking about, what else, Arab democracy with another member of the Saudi ruling family, Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal.

Ignatius' point was that "elders who have been through countless springs and winters" can see things with "consequent clarity." He went on:

There are some wise, older voices left, and they deserve a hearing. So listen for a moment to Prince Saud al-Faisal, the 71-year-old Saudi foreign minister. He's had that post since 1975 and is the world’s longest-serving foreign minister.

I met Saud at his palace here a week ago, and it was a poignant visit: The prince has Parkinson's disease, and his hands and voice tremble slightly. Though his body is frail, his Princeton-educated intellect remains sharp: This was the most interesting of our many conversations over the years.

What was so interesting about Saud's words? It's not clear.  He says that Arab "governing bodies" assume "that they can go on neglecting the will of the people," which he apparently thinks is unwise--though he also seems to think that Saudi Arabia's family-based dictatorship is not doing this.

Husseini asked about the Saudi regime's efforts to inhibit pro-democracy Arab Spring movements in Egypt and Bahrain. Ignatius, on other hand, dwelled on the positive:

I think Saud captured the most positive factor I have seen in my travels this year. The Arab people are writing their own narrative for once. They are not victims of domestic dictators or foreign powers.

Ignatius also reports back that "Saud has the regal ways of a Bedouin prince, tall and thin, with an ascetic face that masks the spark in his eyes." Now that's journalism!

Sam Husseini's encounter with Prince Turki bin Faisal Al Saud makes me wonder once again--why do we call a person like Al Saud a "prince"?

Al Saud was the longtime chief of Saudi Arabia's intelligence agency, and later served as ambassador to the United States and Britain. His grandfather, Abdul Aziz Al Saud, declared himself a king in 1926--which seems like kind of a late date to be latching on to the legitimacy implied by a once-upon-a-time title.

Saddam Hussein came to power in Iraq in 1968. If he had decided to call himself "King Saddam," would U.S. media have gone along with it? Would they have talked about Prince Uday and Prince Qusay? As long as Hussein was allied with Washington, they probably would have.

Or imagine that the British military decided to overthrow the elected government and install Charles Windsor as the head of a military regime. Would news reports continue to use his current ceremonial title of "prince," or would they acknowledge that an unelected ruler in the 21st century is generally referred to as a "dictator"?

Except, of course, in the Middle East.

When former FAIR staffer Sam Husseini found out that Saudi Prince Turki al-Faisal al-Sa'ud would be speaking at the National Press Club, he thought it might be a good chance to ask a tough question. The National Press Club apparently didn't like that idea.

Husseini writes:

Before the end of the day, I'd received a letter informing me that I was suspended from the National Press Club "due to your conduct at a news conference." The letter, signed by the executive director of the Club, William McCarren, accused me of violating rules prohibiting "boisterous and unseemly conduct or language."

Want to know what the National Press Club thinks is unseemly conduct? Watch for yourself:

For the record, the National Press Club has been taken other actions distinctly at odds with a free and aggressive press. In 2001, Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman wrote about how the Press Club seemed to want to protect Henry Kissinger from critical questions. The moderator explained that if questions about war crimes were asked, it "would take so much time to explain all of the context."

In 2005, Mokhiber attempted to go to a U.S. News & World Report event at the Press Club celebrating "America's Best Leaders." The sponsor? Oil giant BP.

Mokhiber was blocked from entering the event--which, for the record, was being held in the First Amendment Lounge. Why? Probably because Mokihber had attended another U.S. News event at the Press Club earlier that month that was sponsored by tobacco giant Altria. That time Mokhiber asked a question:

Senator Hagel said transparency is critical. What's the deal exactly between U.S. News & World Report and Altria? What are the details of the sponsorship? Members of the social responsibility community refuse to invest in tobacco companies. Did you find it a little odd that a panel on corporate responsibility is being sponsored by a tobacco company?

You can see why the Press Club might not want to have these people in the room. They ask the wrong kinds of questions.

Joby Warrick's Washington Post article (11/14/11) on the new International Atomic Energy Agency report on Iran goes wrong from the first sentence:

When the Cold War abruptly ended in 1991, Vyacheslav Danilenko was a Soviet weapons scientist in need of a new line of work.

Well, no. Danilenko is allegedly a nuclear weapons scientist--but neither the IAEA or Warrick present any actual evidence that he was any such thing.

Rather, the documents disclosed so far suggest that Danilenko is what he says he is: an expert on the use of explosions to make tiny, industrial-grade diamonds known as nanodiamonds. His area of specialization goes back half a century, to the early 1960s, when the scientist was in his mid-20s (Inter Press Service, 11/9/11).

Warrick's story is a step forward from his earlier article (11/7/11) on the IAEA report, which refers to Danilenko as a "former Soviet nuclear scientist" without mentioning the field he's actually been publishing in for decades at all. Still, Warrick works hard to give the impression that the scientist's career-long interest in nanodiamonds is some kind of fly-by-night cover story:

Danilenko struggled to become a businessman, traveling through Europe and even to the United States to promote an idea for using explosives to create synthetic diamonds.... The scientist's synthetic-diamonds business provided a plausible explanation for his extensive contacts with senior Iranian scientists over half a decade.... Danilenko's work in Iran initially centered on his diamond-making scheme. But over the course of a six-year relationship, UN investigators later concluded, he provided expertise that would help Iran achieve something of far greater value.

OK--so what's the evidence that Danilenko was helping the Iranians make bombs, not diamonds?

The IAEA's report cites "strong indications" that the unnamed "foreign expert" [apparently Danilenko] assisted Iran in developing a high-precision detonator as well as a sophisticated instrument for analyzing the shape of the explosive pulse.

Right--because creating industrial diamonds requires high-precision detonation, which you would presumably want to monitor and analyze. The evidence that this is actually a cover for nuclear weapons research boils down to a lack of proof that it is not a cover for nuclear weapons research. Or as weapons analyst David Albright puts it--who is a major source for the Post story, both directly and through his Institute for Science and International Security think tank--"It remains for Danilenko to explain his assistance to Iran."

There's such a degree of spin in the Post's case for Iranian nuclear research that it really makes you want to check to be sure your wallet is still in your pocket. After relaying Danilenko's assertions that he had nothing to do with a nuclear program, Warrick adds, "In private conversations, however, the scientist allowed that he 'could not exclude that his information was used for other purposes,' the ISIS report said." Of course, no scientist can guarantee that their information was not repurposed, so the admission has zero evidentiary value--but it does function as an effective tension-raiser, like mood music in a horror movie.

The Post story concludes: "'Synthetic diamond production is unlikely to have been a priority' for Iran, ISIS said. 'Although it has obvious value as a cover story.'" Actually, Iran has a serious, long-standing nanotechnology program (Moon of Alabama, 11/7/11)--and one of the chief uses for nanodiamonds is in oil drilling, an activity that provides the bulk of Iran's exports earnings, so it's not actually all that remarkable that the country would be interested in producing them.

Of course, the Post should be skeptical of Iranian claims--but where is the same skepticism of assertions that an official enemy state is secretly researching weapons of mass destruction--particularly given the very recent history of such claims being manufactured and distorted for political ends? It's worth recalling that Albright, the Post's main witness for the idea that Danilenko is not what he says he is, was taken in by the last major WMD propaganda campaign, telling CNN (10/5/02; Extra!, 7-8/03): "In terms of the chemical and biological weapons, Iraq has those now. How many, how could they deliver them? I mean, these are the big questions."

We need the news media to be asking bigger questions this time around about the Iranian nuclear allegations.