[liberationtech] Dubious sources feed national-security reporter Eli Lake a fraudulent story for political purposes — once again

[Shava Nerad]

Blogged
On Aug 21, 2013 5:40 AM, "Eugen Leitl" <eugen at leitl.org> wrote:

>
> How  very  surprising.
>
> http://harpers.org/blog/2013/08/anatomy-of-an-al-qaeda-conference-call/
>
> Anatomy of an Al Qaeda “Conference Call”
>
> Dubious sources feed national-security reporter Eli Lake a fraudulent story
> for political purposes — once again
>
> By Ken Silverstein
>
> Share Single Page
>
> Cartoon by C. Clyde Squires (September 1907)
>
> Two years ago, following the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan,
> a
> number of journalists wrote dramatic accounts of the Al Qaeda leader’s last
> moments. One such story, co-authored by Eli Lake in the Washington Times,
> cited Obama administration officials and an unnamed military source,
> described how bin Laden had “reached for a weapon to try to defend himself”
> during the intense firefight at his compound, and then “was shot by Navy
> SEALs after trying to use a woman reputed to be his wife as a human
> shield.”
>
> It was exciting stuff, but it turned out to have been fictitious propaganda
> concocted by U.S. authorities to destroy bin Laden’s image in the eyes of
> his
> followers. Based on what we know now, the SEALs met virtually no resistance
> at the compound, there was no firefight, bin Laden didn’t use a woman as a
> human shield, and he was unarmed.
>
> The White House blamed the misleading early reports on the “fog of war,”
> but
> as Will Saletan pointed out in Slate, “A fog of war creates confusion, not
> a
> consistent story like the one about the human shield. The reason U.S.
> officials bought and sold this story is that it fit their larger indictment
> of Bin Laden. It reinforced the shameful picture of him hiding in a mansion
> while sending others to fight and die. It made him look like a coward.”
>
> Many reporters uncritically rushed the government’s account into print. For
> Lake, though, it fit a career pattern of credulously planting dubious
> stories
> from sources with strong political agendas.[*]
>
> [*] I should disclose that Lake and I aren’t on friendly terms. We were
> until
> a few years ago, when I received a tip that led to a 2011 story showing
> that
> Lake, who regularly praised the government of the former Soviet republic of
> Georgia, was a close friend of one of the country’s Washington lobbyists,
> and
> that the lobbyist sometimes picked up his bar and restaurant tabs. After
> the
> story was published, Lake and his friends, some of whom had flown to
> Georgia
> on junkets paid for by the same lobbyist, took to Twitter to denounce me.
>
> Which brings us to the news story that Lake and Josh Rogin broke for the
> Daily Beast last week, in which they reported that the “crucial intercept
> that prompted the U.S. government to close embassies in 22 countries was a
> conference call between al Qaeda’s senior leaders and representatives of
> several of the group’s affiliates throughout the region.” The story said
> that
> among the “more than 20 operatives” on the call was Ayman al-Zawahiri, who
> the piece claimed was managing a global organization with affiliates in
> Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Other Al Qaeda participants involved in
> the call reportedly represented affiliates operating in Iraq, the Islamic
> Maghreb, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Sinai Peninsula, and Uzbekistan.
>
> The sources for the story were three U.S. officials “familiar with the
> intelligence.” “This was like a meeting of the Legion of Doom,” one told
> Lake
> and Rogin. “All you need to do is look at that list of places we shut down
> to
> get a sense of who was on the phone call.”
>
> The piece also cited Republican senator John McCain, who drew a predictably
> grim conclusion from the news. “This may punch a sizable hole in the theory
> that Al Qaeda is on the run,” he said. “There was a gross underestimation
> by
> this administration of Al Qaeda’s overall ability to replenish itself.” The
> story was picked up widely, especially on the right. On his show, Rush
> Limbaugh charged that the Obama “regime” had leaked the story for political
> gain. “They leak it,” he explained, “so as to make Obama look big and
> competent and tough and make this administration look like nobody’s gonna
> get
> anything past them.”
>
> Then a number of respected national-security journalists began to question
> the motives of the leakers, and to cast doubt on the story generally. Ken
> Dilanian of the Los Angeles Times suggested that the piece was intended to
> glorify the NSA’s signals-intelligence capabilities. Barton Gellman of the
> Washington Post said there was something “very wrong” with the whole thing.
> New York magazine got in on the act by parodying the notion of an Al Qaeda
> conference call.
>
> Despite this tide of doubt and ridicule, the Daily Beast didn’t correct the
> story, though Lake and Rogin made statements that seemed designed to alter
> its meaning. “We used ‘conference call’ because it was generic enough,”
> Lake
> tweeted. “But it was not a telephone based communications.” In another
> tweet
> he informed Ben Wedeman of CNN, “This may be a generational issue, but you
> can conduct conference calls without a telephone.” (Actually, you can’t, at
> least according to the dictionary. Moreover, the “Legion of Doom” source
> had
> specifically called it a “phone call.”)
>
> In a follow-up story published the day after the original article, Lake
> wrote
> that at the request of its sources, the Daily Beast was “withholding
> details
> about the technology al Qaeda used to conduct the conference call.” The
> suggestion was that the story had omitted information to keep terrorists
> from
> knowing too much about U.S. intelligence operations. But as Dan Murphy of
> the
> Christian Science Monitor noted, “If a conference call of some sort took
> place, then the participants know full well how they did it. And the moment
> they see a news report that says the United States was listening in to the
> call, they’re going to shut that means of communication down.” Others
> wondered why, given the worldwide uproar about National Security Agency
> spying, Al Qaeda would risk gathering all of its top operatives for any
> form
> of simultaneous multiparty communication.
>
> Lake’s past is instructive here. He was an open and ardent promoter of the
> Iraq War and the various myths trotted out to justify it, contributing to
> the
> media drumbeat that helped the Bush Administration sell the war to the
> public
> and to Congress. He reported on Saddam Hussein’s close ties to Al Qaeda and
> his stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, and he championed
> discredited
> con man Ahmed Chalabi, head of the CIA-backed Iraqi National Congress
> (INC),
> who promised that Iraqis would welcome U.S. troops “as liberators” and said
> there would be little chance of sectarian bloodshed after the invasion.
> Bogus
> INC material found its way into at least two of Lake’s pieces, including a
> December 2001 National Review story in which he argued that, with the
> Taliban
> defeated in Afghanistan, the United States should consider military action
> against Iraq, Somalia, and Yemen. “There are very good arguments why all
> three should be the next target,” he wrote. “Iraq after all has been
> developing nuclear and biological weapons in underground wells and
> hospitals,
> according to Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, a defector interviewed by the
> New
> York Times. One of the 9/11 hijackers, Mohammed Atta, met with Iraqi
> intelligence officers in Prague in April.”
>
> Even Dick Cheney later acknowledged that the latter story, which was
> trotted
> around endlessly by war advocates, had never been confirmed. And the New
> York
> Times report to which Lake was alluding, published the day before his piece
> came out, was written by Judith Miller, a serial fabricator whose reckless
> Iraq War reporting effectively ended her career as a respectable
> journalist.
>
> As Jonathan Landay and Trish Wells of Knight Ridder reported a few years
> later in a look back at that period, the INC by its own admission gave
> “exaggerated and fabricated” pre-war intelligence to journalists to promote
> the invasion of Iraq. “Feeding the information to the news media, as well
> as
> to selected administration officials and members of Congress,” Landay and
> Wells wrote, “helped foster an impression that there were multiple sources
> of
> intelligence on Iraq’s illicit weapons programs and links to bin Laden. In
> fact, many of the allegations came from the same half-dozen defectors.”
>
> By 2004, even Chalabi and the Bush Administration had conceded that Saddam
> didn’t have WMD stockpiles. “We are heroes in error,” Chalabi told the
> Daily
> Telegraph. “As far as we’re concerned we’ve been entirely successful. That
> tyrant Saddam is gone.”
>
> Yet for years, Lake continued to doggedly pursue his belief that Iraq had
> WMDs, writing pieces (again using questionable sources) claiming that
> Saddam
> had in fact possessed large quantities of these weapons, but that Russia
> had
> snuck them across the border into Syria on his behalf shortly before the
> U.S.
> invasion. In a 2006 piece for the New York Sun, he reported that David
> Gaubatz, a former special investigator for the Pentagon, said he’d found
> four
> sealed underground bunkers in Iraq “that he is sure contain stocks of
> chemical and biological weapons.” But, Lake reported, when Gaubatz asked
> American weapons inspectors to look into them, he was “rebuffed.”
>
> Military authorities may have rebuffed Gaubatz because he showed signs of
> being unhinged. Two years after Lake’s story appeared, Gaubatz wrote a
> now-scrubbed post about Obama at jihadishere.blogspot.com that read, “We
> are
> now on the verge of allowing a self admitted ‘crack-head’ to have his
> finger
> on every nuclear weapon in America.” In 2009, he published a book entitled
> Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That’s Conspiring to Islamize
> America.
>
> In recent years, Lake has, using similarly tainted sources, continued his
> hunt for Saddam’s WMDs and carried water for those seeking a hard-line
> American approach toward Iran. And now we have the Al Qaeda conference
> call.
>
> Thus far no major media outlet has confirmed Lake and Rogin’s story. U.S.
> officials told Bloomberg News that reports of a conference call were
> incorrect, while CNN reported that it had “learned that the al Qaeda
> leaders
> communicated via some kind of encrypted messaging system, with multiple
> points of entry to allow for various parties to join in,” adding,
> “officials
> continue to insist . . . that there was no traditional conference call.”
>
> The thrust of Lake and Rogin’s initial report — that Al Qaeda leaders got
> together to discuss strategy by phone — was false. The pair then
> effectively
> retracted the key element of their story by relabeling the call a
> “non-telephone communication” while failing to acknowledge the error or
> that
> at least one of their sources — the Legion of Doom quipster  — was either
> ignorant of the facts or a liar. They even went on to claim that they’d
> been
> vindicated by the CNN report, which explicitly refuted their original
> account.
>
> Lara Jakes and Adam Goldman at the Associated Press appear to have reported
> the embassy-closure story more accurately yesterday, also challenging the
> veracity of the Daily Beast article in the process. The AP story said that
> the “vague plot” that led the U.S. government to shut down American
> diplomatic posts may have resulted from comments made by jihadists on
> encrypted Internet message boards and in chat rooms — which is nothing new
> —
> and that it was “highly unlikely” al-Zawahiri was personally part of the
> chatter or that he would “ever go online or pick up the phone to discuss
> terror plots.”
>
> But just as in the case of the raid that killed bin Laden, the bogus story
> was better than the truth. A less sensational story would not have provided
> fodder for John McCain’s preposterous remarks on the renewed strength of Al
> Qaeda (or for the broader political exploitation of the story by the
> right),
> nor would it have provided political cover for the NSA, as Ken Dilanian put
> it.
>
> No matter. The Daily Beast’s sources must be pleased with their handiwork,
> and with the reporters who bought it.
> --
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