[Peace-discuss] What's wrong with the Dems and MSM [1 of 2]

[C. G. Estabrook]

[What's wrong with the Dems and MSM (main-stream media) is on view all in
one nasty little package, a piece by the awful Jeffrey Goldberg in the
current New Yorker.  It's part 2 of this post.  For starters, here's what
Counterpunch said about Goldberg just before the invasion of Iraq. --CGE]


Who's the hack? I nominate The New Yorker's Jeffrey Goldberg. He's the new
Remington, though without the artistic talent. Back in 1898, William
Randolph Hearst was trying to fan war fever between the United States and
Spain. He dispatched a reporter and the artist Frederic Remington to Cuba
to send back blood-roiling depictions of Spanish beastliness to Cuban
insurgents. Remington wired to say he could find nothing sensational to
draw and could he come home. Famously, Hearst wired him, "Please remain.
You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war." Remington duly did so.

I wouldn't set The New Yorker's editor, David Remnick, in the shoes of a
Kong-sized monster like Hearst. Remnick is a third-tier talent who has
always got ahead by singing the correct career-enhancing tunes, as witness
his awful reporting from Russia in the 1990s. Art Spiegelman recently quit
The New Yorker, remarking that these dangerous times require courage and
the ability to be provocative, but alas, "Remnick does not feel up to the
challenge."

That's putting it far too politely. Remnick's watch has been lackluster
and cowardly. He is also the current sponsor (Marty Peretz of The New
Republic was an earlier one) of Goldberg, whose first major chunk of
agitprop for The New Yorker was published on March 25 of last year. Titled
"The Great Terror," it was billed as containing disclosures of "Saddam
Hussein's possible ties to al Qaeda."

This was at a moment when the FBI and CIA had just shot down the war
party's claim of a meeting between Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence
agent in Prague before the 9/11 attacks. Goldberg saved the day for the
Bush crowd. At the core of his rambling, 16,000-word piece was an
interview in the Kurdish-held Iraqi town of Sulaimaniya with Mohammed
Mansour Shahab, who offered the eager Goldberg a wealth of detail about
his activities as a link between Osama bin Laden and the Iraqis, shuttling
arms and other equipment.

The piece was gratefully seized upon by the Administration as proof of The
Link. The coup de grâce to Goldberg's credibility fell on February 9 of
this year in the London Observer, administered by Jason Burke, its chief
reporter. Burke visited the same prison in Sulaimaniya, talked to Shahab
and established beyond doubt that Goldberg's great source is a clumsy
liar, not even knowing the physical appearance of Kandahar, whither he had
claimed to have journeyed to deal with bin Laden; and confecting his
fantasies in the hope of a shorter prison sentence.

Another experienced European journalist, whom I reached on the Continent
at the end of this week and who visited the prison last year agrees with
Bourke's findings. "I talked to prisoners without someone present. The
director of the prison seemed surprised at my request. With a prison
authority present the interview would be worthless. As soon as we talked
to this particular one a colleague said after 30 seconds, 'this is
worthless. The guy was just a story teller.'"

The European journalist, who doesn't want to be identified, said to me
charitably that Golbberg's credulity about Shab "could have been a matter
of misjudgment but my even stronger criticism is that if you talked, as we
did and as I gather Goldberg did, to anybody in the PUK [the Kurdish group
controlling this area of northern Iraq] about this particular Islamic
group all of them would tell you they are backed by Iran, as common sense
would tell, you. Look where they are located. It's 200 meters across one
river to Iran. That's what I find upsetting. Misjudging a source can
happen to all of us, but Goldberg did talk to generals in the PUK. I think
it's outrageous that New Yorker ran that story."

Finally, I hear that a New York Times reporter also concluded after
talking to the prisoners that there was one who was obviously lying and
who would say anything anyone would like to hear about Al Ansar and
Saddam, Saddam and Al Qaeda. I have not been able to talk to this
reporter, though it would not have been surprising for the Times to have
tried to check up on Goldberg's "scoop".

An American with a lot of experience in interviewing in prisons adds,
"It's tricky interviewing prisoners in the first place -- their
vulnerability, etc -- and responsible journalists make some sort of
minimal credibility assessment before they report someone's statements.
but the prisoner said exactly what Jeffrey Goldberg wanted to hear, so
Goldberg didn't feel that he needed to mention that the prisoner was
nuts."

On February 10, amid widespread cynicism about the Administration's
rationales for war, Remnick published another Goldberg special, "The
Unknown: The C.I.A. and the Pentagon take another look at Al Qaeda and
Iraq." This 6,000-word screed had no pretensions to being anything other
than a servile rendition of Donald Rumsfeld's theory of intelligence:
"Build a hypothesis, and then see if the data supported the hypothesis,
rather than the reverse." In other words, decide what you want to hear,
then torture the data until the data confess.

This last piece of Goldberg's was a truly disgraceful piece of
brown-nosing (of Rumsfeld, Tenet et al.), devoid of even the pretensions
of independent journalism. "Reporter at Large"? Remnick should retire the
rubric, at least for Goldberg, and advertise his work as "White House
Handout." I should note that Goldberg once served in Israel's armed
forces, which may or may not be a guide to his political agenda. 
 
	<http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn02282003.html>