Call me conspiratorial, but here’s a story about the Israeli presence in our discourse that makes me want to take a bath. Wednesday’s New York Times ran a story about a collection of Saddam Hussein’s confidential documents that show him to have a conspiratorial turn of mind regarding Israel’s machinations in the Middle East.
But deep in that very story, the reporter, Michael Gordon, says that he relied on an Israeli expert who has access to the archive.
And–surprise—the article is highly favorable to Israel. It paints Saddam Hussein as an anti-semite who routinely misread other leaders and mistakenly saw an American-Israeli conspiracy in several actions of western governments in the 1980s and 90s, and particularly during the Iran-Iraq war.
I know: those Arab conspiracy theorists! But why is the New York Times turning to an Israeli expert? And doing so with so little transparency.
Near the top, the article says that the “voluminous” archive, seized by the Americans when they invaded Iraq in 2003, landed at the National Defense University, that some “outside researchers” examined a “small portion” of the documents, and that 20 documents were made public Tuesday in conjunction with a conference of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
It is not till the tenth paragraph that reporter Michael Gordon states his reliance on an Israeli expert to interpret the documents. Gordon writes that Saddam grievously miscalculated Iranian intentions in 1980, “according to Amatzia Baram, an Israeli expert on Iraq who has studied the documents.” (The article later identifies Hal Brands, an assistant professor at Duke, as another expert who has seen them.)
Here are those 20 documents that the Wilson Center released, on line. I’m guessing it’s a few hundred pages. A lot for a busy reporter to go through.
It is not clear from the article how much of the archive Gordon has gone through himself. It’s not clear how many nuggets Baram found for him. Call me conspiratorial, but I’d like to know.
Just who sent Michael Gordon to Saddam Hussein’s description of New York as a “Jewish city” that brainwashes UN officials? Who sent him to Saddam’s boast from 1982, during the Iran-Iraq war, “Once Iraq emerges victorious, there will not be any Israel… Technically, they are right in all of their attempts to harm Iraq”?
Who is Amatzia Baram? He gave a couple of interviews in the AIPAC newsletter Near East Report in 2002, making the case for ousting Saddam. Look at The Israel Lobby by Walt and Mearsheimer (pp. 259-260); Baram recanted in 2007, saying “If I knew then what I know today, I would not have recommend going to war, because Saddam was far less dangerous than I thought.”
And who is Michael Gordon? A guy with a famous episode of piping bad information about Saddam. In 2002 he paved the way to the Iraq war with an article saying that Saddam was getting nukes– the famous “aluminum tubes… mushroom cloud” piece in 2002, based on brilliant inside sources that proved to be hogwash.
Read Michael Massing’s devastating piece on Gordon’s reporting in the New York Review of Books.
Administration “hard-liners,” Gordon and [Judith] Miller added, worried that “the first sign of a ‘smoking gun’… may be a mushroom cloud.” The piece concluded with a section on Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons, relying heavily on the information supplied by Ahmed al-Shemri. “All of Iraq is one large storage facility,” he was quoted as saying…
Gordon and Miller argue that the information about the aluminum tubes was not a leak. “The administration wasn’t really ready to make its case publicly at the time,” Gordon told me. “Somebody mentioned to me this tubes thing. It took a lot to check it out.” Perhaps so, but administration officials were clearly delighted with the story.
It was/is a conspiracy Phil.
And you are an anti semite, anti Israel, self hating Jew- take your pick- for noticing it. LOL
Aluminum Tubes! Aluminum!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1-IrT_IDu0
Man, I miss Chapelle
OK, Phil, you’re conspiratorial. So there. But you’ve uncovered the big one (big and quite old).
It’s not this, tho interesting: NYT quotes an Israeli to interpret a selected few documents (from a trove of many more documents) captured by Americans in Iraq and made public (to all the public, I suppose). [1] Who selected which dox to make public? [2] who selected what to tell NYT? (Answer: the Israeli).
It’s this: NYT turns to Israeli to interpret dox which (he says) tell false story of USA/Israeli conspiracy. NYT is telling the USA: “Hey, we trust Israelis, and so should you!” On matters dealing with Israel (and perhaps critical of Israel), we turn to an Israeli to tell us what to think, to do our reading and our thinking for us. We think this is proper procedure, impartial, whatever, AND SO SHOULD YOU.
Me to NYT: I think you’re off your rocker and the USA should think so too. why not ask an Iraqi (or a Palestinian) (or Juan Cole) to look over ALL the recently released documents and read them and make a precis and tell the USA what they say. even if he gives the same answer, he’d be more believable.
NYT: We know you want to make BIG of not being believable, to flaunt your flouting of proper journalistic practices, to prove your bone fides to AIPAC. OK. You’ve done it well. Be proud of yourselves.
Because Israel is a reliable source, right? They’re our best buds!
“Iraq, rich in oil on the one hand and internally torn on the other, is guaranteed as a candidate for Israel’s targets. Its dissolution is even more important for us than that of Syria. Iraq is stronger than Syria. In the short run it is Iraqi power which constitutes the greatest threat to Israel. An Iraqi-Iranian war will tear Iraq apart and cause its downfall at home even before it is able to organize a struggle on a wide front against us. Every kind of inter-Arab confrontation will assist us in the short run and will shorten the way to the more important aim of breaking up Iraq into denominations as in Syria and in Lebanon. In Iraq, a division into provinces along ethnic/religious lines as in Syria during Ottoman times is possible. So, three (or more) states will exist around the three major cities: Basra, Baghdad and Mosul, and Shi’ite areas in the south will separate from the Sunni and Kurdish north. It is possible that the present Iranian-Iraqi confrontation will deepen this polarization”
This is from a 1982 essay titled “A Strategy for Israel” written by an Israeli named Oded Yinon.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/7c/Ralph_Peters_solution_to_Mideast.jpg
That is a map drawn in a 2006 book by Ralph Peters, a retired US Army Lieutenant Colonel. Sometimes this comes up at a NATO-approved map or sources say NATO has a similar map. “Anders Breivik” also talks of partitioning the ME in “his” manifesto. Then there is ‘a clean break’ and PNAC calling for the same thing in the 90s. Wolfowitz and Perle had been saying something similar for 20 years.
They make up information. They lie. The media reports it as fact. Blaming Muslims for Oslo because some amateur ‘terror expert’ said so, Bin Laden’s secret underground Bond villain-esque cave, aluminum tubes, mushrooms clouds, suitcase nukes, the list is endless.
There really is a conspiracy. The evidence is in plain sight! The neocons and the media are responsible for the war in Iraq and we cannot trust a thing they say. All those things reported about Saddam and his sons, they could be all lies! His daughters in exile say they are. Why should anybody believe Michael Gordon, Judith Miller, William Safire, etc?
This just irritates me. When are we going to hold these people accountable for destroying not only a country but our economy and the world’s economy along with it? (the high price of war) Neocons like Doug Feith and Richard Perle should be in prison for WAR CRIMES.
Gordon is a lying sack of $hit that is as guilty of lying us into war as Judy Miller. He’s been redoing the same ever since.