When I’m on the job and speaking with people, it often comes up:
Where were the news media when it came to ferreting out the truth during the build-up to the Iraq war?
Sometimes anger accompanies the question. Other times, bafflement.
My answers are never very pretty or very good. They range from group-think and/or intimidation to information that was hard to get and/or suppressed.
I’ll bet some audience members will want to ask the same question, or a variation thereof, when Bob Woodward appears Tuesday evening at Bellarmine University. The timing of Woodward’s speech — the fourth anniversary of the day President Bush declared war on Iraq — and the nature of his latest work — three books about the Bush administration and the Iraq war — make that a given.
Already Woodward, the Washington Post super-reporter who cracked Watergate, is on the record with his answer in an interview found in the current Velocity magazine, available online at www.velocityweekly.com, and then click on the word Life.
Editor David Daley asked Woodward, “Why was the press so late to come to the facts on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction?”
Although it’s also a given that Woodward is smarter and more plugged-in than I am, his answer wasn’t much different in its themes than the one I muster.
Woodward said, “First, it was hard. Second, the intelligence agencies across the board — not only in this country, but France, Germany, Great Britain — all reached what we know now is the erroneous conclusion. And reporters couldn’t get into Iraq to conduct independent investigations without getting arrested or worse during Saddam’s reign.
“At the same time, I — particularly speaking about myself — was not aggressive enough in reporting and pursuing the doubts. I wrote a story for the Post saying, ‘There’s no smoking gun on WMD.’ I should have realized that meant there’s no proof, there’s no iron-clad evidence — which is of course what it means — and then I should have gone deeper. I found people, and reported in one of my books, who said the evidence is much skimpier than they were saying, but I could find no one who really had knowledge who didn’t believe or hadn’t reached the conclusion that Saddam had WMD. I get into the hair shirt. I should have been much more aggressive. Whether you could have ever established that there weren’t WMD, I don’t know — but that’s not the issue.”
Woodward should not stand alone when it comes to wearing the hair shirt.
There’s plenty of abdication territory for a bunch of us to occupy, and the press and the politicians should take up some space there, but so should the people.
I think back to the days, post 9/11 and pre-Iraq invasion, and I recall the e-mails and phone calls I received from upset citizens who thought the news media were being too aggressive, too critical, too skeptical in their reporting of the U.S. government and its moves toward war. I’ll never forget the phone call from the outraged reader who said, “I’m not sure this First Amendment is all it’s cracked up to be.”
I remember watching, on television, the March 6, 2003, “press conference” President Bush held just 13 days before the war would begin, and how sick I felt watching it. It was if everyone on the screen was a character, slowly going through the motions in a bad play whose ending was foretold and inevitable.
I remember writing about that bizarre gathering, about the weird nature of everything going on in our country at the time. The column I wrote that appeared March 16, 2003, is like a time capsule of those pre-war days:
The House was beating its chest over French fries and French toast, and the Senate was debating partial birth abortion, rather than talking about the war. Cops cuffed a guy who wore an anti-war T-shirt in a mall. Dan Rather was catching hell for an interview he did with Saddam. And at that pre-war press conference, the White House press corps sat like “zombies” — in the words of a marquee reporter in the room — as the President read from a prepared list of names. Another reporter in the room told me, “In a way, we were just devices.”
Four years and thousands upon thousands of deaths later, I believe we all were just devices.
That’s what happens when people and institutions in a democracy surrender their own judgments to group-think, or intimidation, or suppression of what’s rightfully ours — and that’s public discussion, debate, discourse, dissent and the right to know what is being done in our name, with our loved ones, and with our dollars.
A vibrant, working democracy depends on all of us doing our part:
Citizens, who exercise their constitutional rights of speech and assembly and who demand accountability and answers from their elected officials and their institutions.
Congress, which must perform its constitutional duty of oversight.
And the news media, which honor their constitutional guarantees by digging for and following the truth wherever it leads, no matter the thousand cuts from a lashing public or the hammering of a partisan power machine.
One thing is certain on the eve of this war anniversary: There is no monopoly on the hair shirt.
Bob Woodward lecture
The Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and best-selling author will deliver the 2007 Wilson W. and Anne D. Wyatt Lecture, “State of Denial,” at 7 p.m. Tuesday in Knights Hall on the Bellarmine University campus. Seating begins at 6 p.m. The speech is open and free to the public.
The Wyatt lecture series was founded in 1990 to feature speakers of national and international renown in the areas of politics and government.
After his lecture, Woodward will be available for book signings, and copies of State of Denial will be on sale.
