Newsweek's Annoying Truths, Redux

Newsweek's recent story about toilet-flushed Korans, which supposedly sparked violent riots across Eurasia, was not the first time that this publication has been a real annoyance to the White House's politically correct markup of reality.

Two years ago Christopher Dickey and Evan Thomas published "How Saddam Happened" (Sept. 23, 2002, available online at U. of Missouri-Columbia's useful Freedom of Information Center). In it they detail how the U.S. under Reagan--and Rumsfeld--supplied Saddam with weapons and other military equipment to use against Iran, including biological and chemical weapons.

"Over the protest of some Pentagon skeptics, the Reagan administration began allowing the Iraqis to buy a wide variety of “dual use” equipment and materials from American suppliers. According to confidential Commerce Department export-control documents obtained by NEWSWEEK, the shopping list included a computerized database for Saddam’s Interior Ministry (presumably to help keep track of political opponents); helicopters to transport Iraqi officials; television cameras for “video surveillance applications”; chemical-analysis equipment for the Iraq Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC), and, most unsettling, numerous shipments of “bacteria/fungi/protozoa” to the IAEC. According to former officials, the bacteria cultures could be used to make biological weapons, including anthrax. The State Department also approved the shipment of 1.5 million atropine injectors, for use against the effects of chemical weapons, but the Pentagon blocked the sale. The helicopters, some American officials later surmised, were used to spray poison gas on the Kurds."

The article's revelations certainly put a different spin on the absolute conviction with which the Bush Administration war-marketers--Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rice, Powell, etc.--were asserting that Iraq had biological and chemical WMD. They knew because they had given them to him!

Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV) made the same connection when he read the article, and furthermore, he had access to documents backing up the claim. As he tells in his 2004 book Losing America: Confronting a Reckless and Arrogant Presidency (p. 149-52):

"I had personally seen documents from the Centers for Disease Control, which spoke of the CDC shipping deadly toxins to Iraq, including vials of West Nile fever virus and dengue fever. Also, correspondence from the American Type Culture Collection laid out the dates of toxic shipments, who received them, and what they included. Records detailed dozens and dozens of dangerous pathogens shipped to various ministries within the government of Iraq. We had in fact transmitted germ warfare to Iraq, a veritable Betty Crocker cookbook of ingredients of use only in concocting biological and chemical weapons. No wonder such certainty existed about Iraq's chemical and biological weapons program. The Reagan/Bush administration had seen to it."

When Senator Byrd confronted Donald Rumsfeld with this Newsweek article at an Armed Services Committee hearing, Rumsfeld claimed ignorance of the article, no knowledge about its claims, and further doubted its truth. "I have never heard anything like what you've read. I have no knowledge of it whatsover, and I doubt it," Byrd quotes him as saying, then goes on:

"I pressed on. "You doubt what?" Rumsfeld responded, "The question you posed as to whether the United States of America assisted Iraq with elements that you listed in your reading of Newsweek, and that we could conceivably now be reaping what we've sown." I then asked him if he was surprised by the allegation in Newsweek and if he was surprised by what I said. Rumsfeld answered with typical Rumsfeldian circumlocution, saying, "I guess I'm at an age and circumstance of life where I am no longer surprised about what I hear in the newspapers." I pressed him again. "How about this story? This story? How about this story specifically?" Rumsfeld ducked again with, "As I say, I have not read it, I listened carefully to what you said and I doubt it.""

So, yet again Newsweek is playing an inconvenient gadfly to the White House's perverse and denial-based version of reality. Indeed, it may be as Norman Mailer has surmised, an already wrankled White House partly or fully engineered the recent Newsweek reporting flub--by providing a shaky anonymous source that would turn out in the end needing retraction--in order to sting, and then attempt to discredit, the magazine.

As Mailer admits, this idea may seem to stretch over into paranoia land--but as the above reminder of Newsweek's journalistic cojones in the recent past, to the annoyance of vindictive Administration hawks like Rumsfeld, perhaps Mailer's "aging novelist" suspicions are not so far-fetched as they might seem.