AH, FAIRNESS. Just when you thought the New York Times might have abandoned that quaint principle of journalism, faith is restored. Mine was, anyway, after reading this passage from Douglas Jehl’s April 19 story. “Bush administration officials have long expressed concern that Syria is developing chemical weapons and about its support for organizations the United States considers terrorist, including Hezbollah and the Palestinian groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad.”
“The United States considers terrorist.”
Of course, pretty much everyone considers these groups terrorist. They target civilians for death. That’s why they exist. And of course they hate us. Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, on the eve of the war in Iraq, proclaimed “‘Death to America’ was, is and will stay our slogan.”
Terrorists? Those guys? Who’s to say? It’s all relative.
If only Jehl gave the same benefit of the doubt to the Iraqi-Americans working with the Bush administration to rebuild their country. In a front-page, above-the-fold article last Sunday, Jehl described the Iraq Reconstruction and Development Council (IRDC)–a group of 150 Iraqi exiles working with the Pentagon:
“Technically,” he writes, they work for a “defense contractor,” where they toil away in “heavily guarded offices.” They work “outside Washington” and their “telephone numbers and e-mail addresses betray no hint of a Pentagon link.” Most of them “espouse liberal, secular ideas that are at odds even with those of many other Iraqi exiles as well as powerful forces inside Iraq.” Some “exile leaders,” he continues, “say the creation of the team was too narrow and overly influenced by the views of [Paul] Wolfowitz and fellow conservatives.” Is it any wonder then, as Jehl tells us in a report first posted on the website Saturday, “the Pentagon has kept the Iraqi exile operation under close wraps”?
Except that’s wrong. Really wrong. In fact, the New York Times itself has written several times about the IRDC and its leaders.
On April 26, 2003, Jehl and Jane Perlez wrote a front-page article about the group.
On April 17, 2003, Times reporter Lisa Napoli profiled Sam Kareem, who “left his home near Detroit for an indefinite stay in Washington to work with the Defense Department in planning a transitional postwar government for Iraq.”
On April 5, 2003, Elizabeth Bumiller reported that the head of the group, Emad Dhia, attended a meeting with President Bush. Journalists were in the room. Dhia said “that he was working with Jay Garner, a retired Army general who will be leading the Pentagon’s office for Iraq reconstruction and relief.”
On February 24, 2003, Times reporter Eric Schmitt reported, in his lead, that “the Pentagon will begin recruiting Iraqi-Americans to serve in the military reserves and hiring them as translators and other temporary civilian employees.” Schmitt quoted Wolfowitz’s remarks at the official unveiling of the operation, a public meeting in suburban Detroit. “We’re establishing a program through which Iraqi-Americans could be hired as temporary civilian employees or, in some cases, independent contractors of the U.S. government.”
After complaints came in from the Pentagon about Jehl’s latest piece, the Times agreed to change at least part of the story. But the “corrected” version isn’t much better; it reads: “Dr. Wolfowitz announced plans to form the exile team at the Feb. 23 rally. Still, the Pentagon has been guarded in answering inquiries about the team, although officials say their motivation is to provide security.”
Which still isn’t right. The Pentagon was hardly “guarded” when Emad Dhia, head of the IRDC, talked to me for a 30-minute interview in early April (Beyond Baghdad). He wasn’t guarded any of the previous half-dozen times I had interviewed him, either. In the aforementioned article, he spoke at length about the project:
Operating on a parallel track in suburban Washington, D.C., is the Iraqi Reconstruction and Development Council (IRDC), run by Emad Dhia, an Iraqi American from Detroit. That group consists of 100 Iraqi exiles who have spent the past two months working 16-hour days, seven days a week. They will shortly join Garner’s staff in Iraq to facilitate the transition.
The first order of business, says Dhia, is staffing the various ministries. “Many of the positions in the ministries will soon be empty,” he says. “They were held by Saddam sympathizers and Baath party members, who will be removed, of course.” The IRDC experts will work with the remaining ministry officials to identify Iraqis capable of assuming high-level positions in the ministries. “We have to make sure the government is not paralyzed and that the services are provided to the people,” says Dhia. “In a lot of the ministries there are good public servants.”
At the same time, others from the IRDC will begin work with the provinces and towns to reestablish a governmental presence on the local level. “Many of the problems will be local problems,” says Dhia, pointing to the work of his staff with experience in health care. “We need people to run the clinics, to get medicine, to take care of patients.”
Okay, maybe New York Times reporters don’t read The Weekly Standard each week. And certainly the Standard was more pro-liberation (pro-Pentagon to the critics) than the Times. So did we get an exclusive? Did the Pentagon throw open the doors only for reporters they figured would be sympathetic? Hardly.
This supposedly “under close wraps” program that the Pentagon was “guarded” about was featured on network television on the April 1 edition of “Sixty Minutes II.” A few days before that, on March 28, 2003, key members of the group (in fairness, they were only identified as Iraqi-Americans, not as IRDC big-wigs, per se) were made available at a press conference at The National Press Club.
Jehl quotes two Iraqi-Americans critical of the Pentagon program. There may be others. Some of the Iraqi-Americans I’ve interviewed over the past several months have expressed frustrations with the project. But those who complain are in a small minority. And much of their criticism concerns the fact that the program isn’t larger–they believe they can make valuable contributions but haven’t yet been asked to join the effort.
There have, as Jehl notes, been security concerns. Some members of the IRDC, who had been working on the project for weeks before bombs first dropped, requested that their names be kept private for fear of reprisals from the regime. Others were simply concerned that their activities would be misreported or misrepresented in the press, or said that they didn’t want to take the focus away from Iraqis in Iraq, who had not yet been liberated.
One of the Iraqi-Americans in that second group is Joanne Dickow, who according to Jehl, was co-opted by Wolfowitz for “his campaign” to turn Arab-American public opinion against the Iraqi regime:
The seeds for the exiles’ team were planted at a reception that Mr. Wolfowitz attended in Washington last fall, Pentagon and the exiles say. There, Joanne Dickow, an Iraqi-American aide to Spencer Abraham, the Energy Secretary and former senator from Michigan, heard Mr. Wolfowitz talk about his hope of enlisting Arab-Americans in his campaign to rally sentiment against the Iraqi rulers. The aide encouraged Mr. Wolfowitz to make contact with Iraqi-Americans in the Detroit area, home of the nation’s largest Iraqi community.
Wrong again. Dickow, who was never contacted by the Times, calls that account a fabrication. And it’s certainly not the story she has told me on any of the occasions when I interviewed her. In fact, Dickow was first impressed with Wolfowitz after he was heckled and booed at a Jewish solidarity rally on the national mall last spring. Wolfowitz was jeered when he reminded the crowd that Palestinians, too, have lost loved ones in the fighting in the Middle East–a moment that Dickow found moving. At a reception several months later, she told him that she remembered the occasion and thanked him for his appearance. But Dickow says Wolfowitz himself proposed a program to reach out to Iraqi-Americans.
Jehl could have asked Wolfowitz about his conversations with Dickow when he interviewed him last Friday. He didn’t. Perhaps because the facts would have confused his storyline.
In that interview, Jehl was told directly that his suggestions about the IRDC as a big Pentagon secret were incorrect. The Pentagon has posted a transcript of the interview. The Defense Department tape picked up comments made by Wolfowitz and his adviser, Kevin Kellems. At one point, Jehl asked a question–not transcribed by the Pentagon–that elicited this response:
KELLEMS: I don’t like the secretive part, because we haven’t been secretive in any way, shape or form. So you can drop that second part of it. I mean, for example, I don’t know if you’ve looked at our website, but . . .
WOLFOWITZ: There are four different interviews that . . .
KELLEMS: We did 60 Minutes II, Foreign Press Center briefing, LBC, Al Arabiya, BBC. That’s a small fraction. There were dozens, if not hundreds, of interviews done.
That’s hardly “guarded” and it’s certainly not “under close wraps.”
Stephen F. Hayes is staff writer at The Weekly Standard.
