The Great WMD Hunt
By Seth Ackerman
By the time the war against Iraq began, much of the media had been conditioned to believe, almost as an article of faith, that Saddam Hussein's Iraq was bulging with chemical and biological weapons, despite years of United Nations inspections. Reporters dispensed with the formality of applying modifiers like "alleged" or "suspected" to Iraq's supposed unconventional weapon stocks. Instead, they asked "what precise threat Iraq and its weapons of mass destruction pose to America" (NBC Nightly News, 1/27/03). They wrote matter-of-factly of Washington's plans for a confrontation "over Iraq's banned weapons programs" (Washington Post, 1/27/03). And they referred to debates over whether Saddam Hussein was "making a good-faith effort to disarm Iraq's weapons of mass destruction" (Time, 2/3/03).
All of this came despite repeated reminders from the chief U.N. weapons inspector that it was his job to determine if Iraq was hiding weapons, and that it should not simply be assumed that Iraq was doing so.
So with much of southern Iraq in the hands of coalition forces by the weekend after the opening of hostilities, reporters naturally started asking where the weapons were: "Bush administration officials were peppered yesterday with questions about why allied forces in Iraq have not found any of the chemical or biological weapons that were President Bush's central justification for forcibly disarming Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's government," the Washington Post reported (3/23/03).
Miraculously, the answer seemed to come that Sunday night (3/23/03), when military officials told the media of a "chemical facility" found in the southern town of Najaf. "Bob, as you know, there's a lot of talk right now about a chemical cache that has been found at a chemical facility," MSNBC anchor Forrest Sawyer told White House correspondent Bob Kur. "I underscore, we do not know what the chemicals are, but it sure has gotten spread around fast."
It sure had. Over on Fox News Channel (3/23/03), the headline banners were already rolling: "HUGE CHEMICAL WEAPONS FACTORY FOUND IN SO IRAQ.... REPORTS: 30 IRAQIS SURRENDER AT CHEM WEAPONS PLANT.... COAL TROOPS HOLDING IRAQI IN CHARGE OF CHEM WEAPONS." The Jerusalem Post, whose embedded reporter helped break the story along with a Fox correspondent, announced in a front-page headline (3/24/03), "U.S. Troops Capture First Chemical Plant."
The next day (10/24/03), a Fox correspondent in Qatar quietly issued an update to the story: The "chemical weapons facility discovered by coalition forces did not appear to be an active chemical weapons facility." Further testing was required. In fact, U.S. officials had admitted that morning that the site contained no chemicals at all and had been abandoned long ago (Dow Jones wire, 3/24/03).
