Heroes in Error
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THE GHURAIRY TALE was one of 108 stories the INC placed in the American and British media between October 2001 and May 2002. We know this to be true because, in a particularly audacious boast, the INC submitted a list of these stories to Congress to convince lawmakers that it should continue to receive funding. The revelation of this memo provoked soul-searching within the media. The New York Times has since admitted faults with its prewar reporting. But though the Times’ rather tepid mea culpa alluded to the Ghurairy story, it stated only that the story had “never been independently verified.” In June 2004 Frontline’s website was amended to add a small footnote to the “Gunning for Saddam” transcripts, indicating that the general’s claims have “not been substantiated.” And since I started speaking to the principals in this story, the website has again been amended to acknowledge the gist of the allegations made in this story.
Hedges, who has been publicly critical of the war, recently told me that if he had arranged the interview with Ghurairy himself, he would have more thoroughly investigated the general. He remembers asking himself during the interview, “Is this man who he says he is? Even though this was Lowell’s show, I asked myself the question.” Ultimately Hedges was convinced by the general’s range of knowledge and Bergman’s considerable reputation. “There has to be a level of trust between reporters. We cover each other’s sources when it’s a good story because otherwise everyone would get hold of it,” Hedges says. He adds that he wasn’t aware how close reporters such as Bergman and the Times’ Judy Miller were to Chalabi or that Chalabi was often “the only source of their stories.” He assumed that they were working with members of the intelligence community more credible than Chalabi. “I was on the periphery of all this. This was Bergman’s show.”
Like other journalists working in the Middle East, Hedges says he first encountered Chalabi in northern Iraq in the mid-’90s, and was offered “exclusives” by him over the years, which he evaluated on a case-by-case basis. Soon after the Ghurairy interview, for example, Chalabi again reached out to Hedges, going so far as to personally ferry him from his London hotel to INC headquarters in a bulletproof vehicle. This time the story Chalabi was trying to push was that U.N. inspectors were spying for various governments—a story Hedges says he rejected outright. Similarly, Hedges says he “never trusted” the tale of 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta meeting with Iraqi intelligence agents in Prague. Chalabi has proved himself to be deeply untrustworthy, says Hedges. “He’s a sleazy guy who I was not comfortable working around, but there was nothing right after 9/11 to indicate he was an outright liar.”
Bergman, who set up the Ghurairy interview, now says, “You’ve got to remember that back then there really was only one show in town, and that was Chalabi’s. If you were doing a story on Saddam’s Iraq, you would speak to the Iraqi government, the White House, and the INC.” He says he tried to verify the general’s bona fides with former CIA director James Woolsey, who had taken an interest in the defector’s story. In an interview done with Woolsey for “Gunning for Saddam,” Bergman noted that the CIA had “shown almost no interest in” the general’s story. But he now recalls that Woolsey told him that the FBI had met with the general in Ankara. (Woolsey was not available for comment for this article.) Bergman says he was aware that Chalabi was perceived as a bad actor by the CIA and that INC stories took a very definite angle. “Chalabi was dangerous goods in the sense you know he’s advocating war. But that label is up-front. I think Chalabi is given too much credit for influencing the march to war.”
THREE MONTHS AFTER U.S. and British forces invaded Iraq in 2003, a Washington Post opinion poll showed 69 percent of Americans believed Saddam Hussein had a role in the September 11 attacks. Though various government inquiries have said that much of the information provided by the INC was worthless, some Republican pundits continue to cite the Ghurairy story to justify the war in publications such as the Weekly Standard and the National Review. And on its website, the White House continues to list “shutting down the Salman Pak training camp where members of many terrorist camps trained” in its “Progress Report on the Global War on Terrorism,” first released September 10, 2003.
In May 2004, Iraqi police raided Chalabi’s home and offices in Baghdad, charging the INC with embezzlement, theft, and kidnapping; Chalabi was publicly accused by U.S. officials of spying for Iran. Authorized by the White House, the raid seemed to mark a break between Chalabi and the U.S. government, perhaps as retribution for the INC’s disinformation campaign. But ultimately Chalabi has proved himself to be a far better navigator of postwar Iraqi politics than his former American supporters. Chalabi became a stern critic of the U.S. occupation and quickly made sufficient inroads with the Shiite clergy to be elected to the National Assembly. He has served as deputy prime minister and acting oil minister, and by late fall was again being wooed by the Bush administration, this time as the most secular member of Iraq’s Shiite-led government. On a November 2005 trip to Washington, he met with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and gave a speech at the American Enterprise Institute. Afterward, a reporter asked him about the mis-information he had provided. Displaying his usual insouciance, he referred to the findings of a recent Senate committee, the Robb-Silberman report, which he claimed exonerated him of all wrongdoing. In fact, the report stated that at least two INC defectors were fraudulent, although Ghurairy was not listed among them.
Chalabi was more revealing when I spoke with him in Baghdad in 2004: “As far as we’re concerned, we’ve been entirely successful. That tyrant Saddam is gone, and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important. The Bush administration is looking for a scapegoat. We’re ready to fall on our swords if he wants. We are heroes in error.”
Jack Fairweather was Baghdad bureau chief for the Daily Telegraph for two years and currently contributes to Harper's Magazine and the New Internationalist. During the U.S. invasion of IRaq in 2003, he was embedded with the British military.
