NUCLEAR POTATO
15 July 2003

The blow-up over the now famous "sixteen words" from the President's State of the Union address, which were based on forged documents, continues. So far, response has been mostly the passing of the potato from one member of the inner-circle to another, and the persistent use of unattractive vocabulary such as the "bowels" of the Pentagon. The White House has repeatedly declared an end or resolution to the scandal, but Democrats, the press, and the public still have many questions. What is still unsettled is who exactly applied pressure to CIA director Tenet to approve the flawed intelligence, and who knew that the pressure was being applied. For many observers, it is this question which will determine the gravity of the deception.

It reportedly took the IAEA only hours to recognize the poorly forged documents from Niger for what they were. In fact, this was widely reported when the documents were delivered to the IAEA in February, but the story disappeared amid a climate of "inevitability". The claims based on the Niger forgeries were reiterated and embellished later on, based only on undisclosed "intelligence". On 17 March, the eve of the beginning of an invasion of Iraq and an attempt at "decapitation" of the regime, several members of the administration suggested that they had specific knowledge of the precise location of WMD within Iraq. The State of the Union scandal is beginning to push toward these other claims, and has the press seriously questioning the Bush administration's credibility for the first time.

Pre-war claims have so far met with no confirmation, and are increasingly problematic. What is unique about this particular case is that the press must examine their own archives, to scrutinize not only administration claims, but also their own collective treatment of the stories. In many cases, the same questions now being raised were raised at the time of initial reporting, but were dropped by the media when the administration issued categorical denials and polls seemed to indicate popular support for controversial planning.

So far, it appears the press is still willing to give the President the benefit of the doubt regarding a willful intent to deceive, focusing instead on those around him, and crowding around to witness what form "accountability" will take. But some commentators have raised the important question about the examination of intelligence: the forgeries were reportedly evidenced by their carrying the signatures of officials who hadn't held the cited offices in five to ten years. This should have been immediately clear to White House officials, and certainly to foreign-policy experts, but according to White House claims, went unnoticed for months.

Still a burning question, however: how and why did the major journalistic institutions of the American media ignore this story which they themselves had already reported, even as the gravity of the issue expanded? This is as much a media story as a political story, a case in which for reasons most likely related to public appearance, major media institutions stood aside and refused to question or investigate claims they already had good evidentiary cause to doubt. It is this component of the story, the involvement of the media in its own traditional role, that will determine how far it goes and how much the public eventually learns.