More Whitewash: the wmd mirage

Abstract

Having witnessed one New York Times (NYT) reporter, Judith Miller, cool her heels in prison for refusing to disclose her sources to special prosecutor Patrick J Fitzgerald in a case ultimately related to the erstwhile US quest for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD), it feels ironic to review The WMD Mirage, a volume edited and introduced by another NYT journalist, Craig R Whitney, on precisely that quest. While Whitney does not deserve to be compared with Miller (what with the latter's notoriously unethical reporting of the Iraq war), assiduous newsreaders and political analysts are liable to find his present journalistic outreach to have little intention of contracting the circle of misinformation and propaganda of which Miller has been not an insignificant source. On the surface Whitney's volume most of whose contents are disparately available on the internet is a mature (though meandering and lifeless) exercise at straightening out a complex bureaucratic maze for the common reader; in effect, it is a marketable repackaging of the US political establishment's position on the hunt for Iraq's WMD and on 'Operation Iraqi Freedom'. A collection of excerpts (sometimes whole texts) from key UN documents, US government reports, and speeches by US President Bush and the-then Secretary of State Colin Powell (all originally published from 2002 to 2004), the volume reproduces the US government's narrative on the WMD business.