The neverending war over the war

Over at salon.com Glenn Greenwald decided to lay it on Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic over his reporting on pre-invasion Iraq. According to Greenwald, Goldberg's "falsehood-filled 2002 New Yorker article" was thoroughly debunked and riddled with journalistic errors. And for Greenwald, Goldberg's real crime is that "Jeff Goldberg stands foursquare behind his made-up reporting."

I'm a big fan of actually, you know, examining the facts pertinent to the dispute. So lets look at Goldberg's actual falsehood filled article. Here is Goldberg on the possible link between Saddam and Al Qaeda

When I got to Sulaimaniya, I visited a prison run by the intelligence service of the Patriotic Union. The prison is attached to the intelligence-service headquarters. It appears to be well kept and humane; the communal cells hold twenty or so men each, and they have kerosene heat, and even satellite television. For two days, the intelligence agency permitted me to speak with any prisoner who agreed to be interviewed. I was wary; the Kurds have an obvious interest in lining up on the American side in the war against terror. But the officials did not, as far as I know, compel anyone to speak to me, and I did not get the sense that allegations made by prisoners were shaped by their captors. The stories, which I later checked with experts on the region, seemed at least worth the attention of America and other countries in the West.

The allegations include charges that Ansar al-Islam has received funds directly from Al Qaeda; that the intelligence service of Saddam Hussein has joint control, with Al Qaeda operatives, over Ansar al-Islam; that Saddam Hussein hosted a senior leader of Al Qaeda in Baghdad in 1992; that a number of Al Qaeda members fleeing Afghanistan have been secretly brought into territory controlled by Ansar al-Islam; and that Iraqi intelligence agents smuggled conventional weapons, and possibly even chemical and biological weapons, into Afghanistan. If these charges are true, it would mean that the relationship between Saddam’s regime and Al Qaeda is far closer than previously thought.

The report seemed responsible enough to me. Goldberg explained how he got the information, that the Kurds might have ulterior motives in their testimony and that the charges are ultimately difficult to verify. He did not say that anything was definitive, but gave the reader information needed to judge the case.

And here is the article that Greenwald cites to show that Goldberg's article is propoganda. (note that Shebab was the person Goldberg interviewed)

Shahab is a liar. He may well be a smuggler, and probably a murderer too, but substantial chunks of his story simply are not true.

Firstly there are inconsistencies between what Shahab told the New Yorker and what he told me. He told Goldberg he had met bin Laden in a tent, not a cave, and said he himself delivered the liquid-filled fridge motors to the Taliban and then killed the smugglers who had helped him.

Then there are practical problems with what he had told me. A Soviet-made 82 mm mortar weights 60kg with its bipod and baseplate. Even a lightweight Iraqi 60mm weights nearly half of that. An RPG, unloaded, weighs 7kgs. Four hundred of the former and 300 of the latter would be a load of more than 20tonnes. Could six men load and unload that weight (twice) in five hours? Not according to a friend of mine who is a logistics specialist with an elite British infantry regiment. It also takes longer than six hours to drive from the Iranian border to Kandahar. Shahab's mistake is understandable though. He has never been to Kandahar. When I asked him to describe the city he said it was 'dirty' which is certainly true and entirely composed of mud houses, which certainly isn't true. I spent several weeks in Kandahar during 1998 and 1999 (i.e when Shahab said he was there) and unless there was a lot of very quick demolition and reconstruction work going on Shahab is either blind or lying.

Kandahar may not be Canary Wharf but it isn't just a pile of mud huts. Uthman's house in the city, Shahab told me, was made of mud too. Which indicates a remarkably ascetic lifestyle for a successful major league smuggler. Not least because much of rest of the local population live in relatively substantial concrete houses. There are (or were following the US bomnbing) several government buildings of three or more stories and a large mosque.

So why was he lying? Possibly because, as the deputy chief of investigations admitted, his sudden loquacity might well get him a few years off his sentence. And where did he get the material for the lies from? Well, televisions were introduced into the cells in August last year.

At the end of our interview I told Shahab that I didn't think he had ever been to Kandahar or met bin Laden. He didn't deny it. Instead he just asked a series of questions about who I was. Why was I in Afghanistan? Was I a spy? An American? Who? I showed him my British passport and press card.

He laughed. 'You are a difficult man,' he said.

Which I think is convining evidence that Shebab's allegations are probably not true. But the lesson here ought not to be that Goldberg was trying to deliberately deceive the reader, but that hearsay and testimony in the Middle East ought to be taken with a grain of salt.

Unfortunately, that is not the moral that Greenwald seems to have learned. Instead, he has a shifting burden of proof, where inconvenient facts are put under a microscope while others are accepted uncritically. Indeed, Greenwald repeatedly trots out the untestable claim that US lead sanctions "resulted in the death of hundreds and thousands of Iraqi children."