You may already have received complaints regarding the November 13 story by Bill Broad and David Sanger, “Relying on Computer, U.S. Seeks to Prove Iran’s Nuclear Aims.” If so, I apologize for adding to them.
David Albright, the former UN weapons inspector now running the Insitute for Science and Security, says the story contains what he characterizes as “a deep and misleading flaw.” After reading the story, Albright’s initial criticism of it in a letter to the editor, and the correspondence between Albright and both Bill Broad and his editor, Matt Purdy, I have to agree: the story really is flawed and should warrant a correction. And given the seriousness of the issue, whether the US has proof Iran is working on a nuclear warhead design, and the newspaper’s previous editorial and reportorial experience with similar stories on similar issues with Iraq, the correction should be a prominent one.
The story is here.
Albright’s original letter to the editor disputing the article is here.
The correspondence between Albright and Broad and Purdy is in an Adobe Acrobat document available here.
The story also includes a passage that seems seriously unfortunate to me. In the 4th graf, Broad and Sanger say, “The briefing for officials of the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency, including its director Mohamed ElBaradei, was a secret part of an American campaign to increase international pressure on Iran. But while the intelligence has sold well among countries like Britain, France and Germany, which reviewed the documents as long as a year ago, it has been a tougher sell with countries outside the inner circle.”
The use of hot-button (at least for me) words such as “intelligence, “sell,” and “inner circle” in connection with the issue of a country with which the US is at odds developing a nuclear warhead for a ballistic missile seems at the least careless in the context, again, of our recent experiences with Iraq and the newspaper’s unfortunate coverage of that experience. And the early reference to ElBaradei, who was extremely and accurately critical of the US contention that Iraq was developing nuclear weapons, seems to me an effort to legitimate the intelligence by associating it with a known critic of previous US claims without establishing whether or not he agrees with the US assessment.
In fact, ElBaradei hasn’t made that judgement. Although he’s mentioned elsewhere in the article in the context of his criticism of the US claims on Iraq, not until the end of the story do we learn the very significant fact that while ElBaradei attended the briefing, he and the IAEA have not been given access to the classified information necessary for the agency to determine whether the US assessment is accurate and to get an Iranian response to the claims. That fact should have been noted at the top of the piece in connection with his presence at the briefing, not 2,800 words into a 3,000-word story.
My reaction to that particular aspect of the story may seem hypercritical. Again, though, given the catastrophic national experience with Iraq and the newspaper’s role in that experience, an excess of caution in writing and editing such stories seems not only warranted, but imperative. I hope you’ll consider looking into the article, and in particular Mr. Albright’s complaint about it, if you’re not already doing so. I don’t mean to say that the story rises to Miller-esque heights; just that the facts, language and nuance in any story on a subject that could conceivably lead to an attack on Iran or another war require extraordinarily scrupulous reporting, editing, and post-publication scrutiny.
In other words, I don’t want to be reading another letter from the executive editor three years from now saying that the newspaper and the nation were sold bogus intelligence by an inner circle of British and US officials prior to the war on Iran, and I don’t want to see another Segal Committee report explaining what the newspaper needs to do to avoid making the same mistakes again.
Regards,
Weldon Berger
BTC News
Addressed to:
Mr. Byron Calame
New York Times Public Editor
public@nytimes.com
==================
Thanks to Atrios for catching the Arms Control Wonk post on Albright’s criticisms about the Sanger-Broad story and the reaction of the reporters and their editor to his complaints.
An open letter to the New York Times public editor
You may already have received complaints regarding the November 13 story by Bill Broad and David Sanger, “Relying on Computer, U.S. Seeks to Prove Iran’s Nuclear Aims.” If so, I apologize for adding to them.
David Albright, the former UN weapons inspector now running the Insitute for Science and Security, says the story contains what he characterizes as “a deep and misleading flaw.” After reading the story, Albright’s initial criticism of it in a letter to the editor, and the correspondence between Albright and both Bill Broad and his editor, Matt Purdy, I have to agree: the story really is flawed and should warrant a correction. And given the seriousness of the issue, whether the US has proof Iran is working on a nuclear warhead design, and the newspaper’s previous editorial and reportorial experience with similar stories on similar issues with Iraq, the correction should be a prominent one.
The story is here.
Albright’s original letter to the editor disputing the article is here.
The correspondence between Albright and Broad and Purdy is in an Adobe Acrobat document available here.
The story also includes a passage that seems seriously unfortunate to me. In the 4th graf, Broad and Sanger say, “The briefing for officials of the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency, including its director Mohamed ElBaradei, was a secret part of an American campaign to increase international pressure on Iran. But while the intelligence has sold well among countries like Britain, France and Germany, which reviewed the documents as long as a year ago, it has been a tougher sell with countries outside the inner circle.”
The use of hot-button (at least for me) words such as “intelligence, “sell,” and “inner circle” in connection with the issue of a country with which the US is at odds developing a nuclear warhead for a ballistic missile seems at the least careless in the context, again, of our recent experiences with Iraq and the newspaper’s unfortunate coverage of that experience. And the early reference to ElBaradei, who was extremely and accurately critical of the US contention that Iraq was developing nuclear weapons, seems to me an effort to legitimate the intelligence by associating it with a known critic of previous US claims without establishing whether or not he agrees with the US assessment.
In fact, ElBaradei hasn’t made that judgement. Although he’s mentioned elsewhere in the article in the context of his criticism of the US claims on Iraq, not until the end of the story do we learn the very significant fact that while ElBaradei attended the briefing, he and the IAEA have not been given access to the classified information necessary for the agency to determine whether the US assessment is accurate and to get an Iranian response to the claims. That fact should have been noted at the top of the piece in connection with his presence at the briefing, not 2,800 words into a 3,000-word story.
My reaction to that particular aspect of the story may seem hypercritical. Again, though, given the catastrophic national experience with Iraq and the newspaper’s role in that experience, an excess of caution in writing and editing such stories seems not only warranted, but imperative. I hope you’ll consider looking into the article, and in particular Mr. Albright’s complaint about it, if you’re not already doing so. I don’t mean to say that the story rises to Miller-esque heights; just that the facts, language and nuance in any story on a subject that could conceivably lead to an attack on Iran or another war require extraordinarily scrupulous reporting, editing, and post-publication scrutiny.
In other words, I don’t want to be reading another letter from the executive editor three years from now saying that the newspaper and the nation were sold bogus intelligence by an inner circle of British and US officials prior to the war on Iran, and I don’t want to see another Segal Committee report explaining what the newspaper needs to do to avoid making the same mistakes again.
Regards,
Weldon Berger
BTC News
Addressed to:
Mr. Byron Calame
New York Times Public Editor
public@nytimes.com
==================
Thanks to Atrios for catching the Arms Control Wonk post on Albright’s criticisms about the Sanger-Broad story and the reaction of the reporters and their editor to his complaints.