New York Times Maintains Unblemished Record of Wrongness on Iraq WMD Story

On Sunday David Sanger of the New York Times wrote an article about Shahram Amiri, the Iranian nuclear scientist who defected to the U.S. and then recently defected back. This is the beginning:

Would [Amiri] end up like Vitaly Yurchenko, the one-time K.G.B. officer who defected to Washington exactly a quarter-century ago, revealed some of the deepest secrets of a collapsing empire, and then bolted from his C.I.A. handlers...?...

[R]emarkably, Mr. Yurchenko is still around. And as his interrogation by Iranian intelligence began on Friday, Mr. Amiri could only hope for the same fate.

Because there’s an alternate ending to such dramas that Mr. Amiri no doubt doesn’t want to think about. It is the case of Hussein Kamel, a son-in-law of Saddam Hussein. Mr Kamel escaped from Iraq to Jordan in 1995, and gave the West an insider’s view of Mr. Hussein’s then-active research projects on chemical, biological and other weaponry, not unlike the view of Iran’s nuclear program that American officials say they got from Mr. Amiri. Mr. Kamel, too, went back home, promised by his father-in-law’s lieutenants that all was forgiven. He was shot a few days later.

From afar, it appears that the Iranians are still uncertain which model should best apply to the bizarre case of Shahram Amiri.

Of course, like everything ever published by the New York Times about Iraq and WMD, this is completely wrong.

1. Hussein Kamel did not "give the West an insider's view of Mr. Hussein's then-active research projects on chemical, biological and other weaponry."

That's because there were no "then-active research projects." As Kamel said, Iraq had no actual non-conventional weapons left—they'd all been either turned over to the UN for destruction or destroyed by Iraq itself. And all of Iraq's WMD programs had ceased to function soon after the Gulf War in 1991. You can read the CIA's report regarding their CW program here, and their BW program here. You can also read what Kamel told the UN and IAEA here, and what he told the CIA here.

As you'll see, what actually happened was that Kamel gave the UN, IAEA and CIA an insider's view of Iraq's pre-Gulf War chemical, biological and nuclear weapons projects. This was significant because Iraq had never come completely clean about what they'd developed during the eighties. Moreover, from 1991-95 Iraq had been hiding large quantities of documentation about their pre-91 projects in hopes they could eventually use it to restart the programs—and they surrendered it all when Kamel defected. So Kamel's defection demonstrated that Iraq was lying about the past, but not that it was lying about the present.

2. To the New York Times' credit, while they're completely wrong, they're actually less wrong about this than many other publications. For instance, back in 2003 Slate wrote this:

[Saddam] certainly had such weapons as late as 1995 (his son-in-law told us where they were, whereupon the U.N. inspectors of the day went and destroyed them)...

In the buildup to war this was a particularly popular lie about what had happened, told by such people as Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and Tony Blair.

3. It's especially funny for the New York Times to compare Shahram Amiri with Hussein Kamel, because—beginning with the Clinton administration—the U.S. government relentlessly lied about what Kamel had told us. So if they're similar situations, Amiri will have told us Iran has no nuclear weapons program, and then we'll lie relentlessly about him saying that. Ha ha!

BONUS: Back in 2006, David Sanger co-wrote an article for the New York Times with this sentence:

The possibility that Saddam Hussein might develop “weapons of mass destruction” and pass them to terrorists was the prime reason Mr. Bush gave in 2003 for ordering the invasion of Iraq.

After I pointed that out, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting complained about it, and the Times ran a correction:

An article that appeared on NYTimes.com for part of the day on Sept. 5 incorrectly described President Bush's statements about Iraq's chemical and biological weapons programs at the time of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Mr. Bush said it was Iraq's possession of those weapons that was the main justification for the invasion, not the possibility that the weapons could be developed.

However, I've just noticed that at some point in the past four years, they un-corrected it, removing the correction from their website and posting the story with the false sentence exactly as it first appeared.

You have to admit they're good.

—Jonathan Schwarz