THE AP'S JAYSON BLAIR?

The AP's Charles J. Hanley says that Colin Powell's Feb. 5 presentation to the UNSC--the US's most detailed outline of the case for war with Iraq prior to invasion--has fallen apart. When I saw the byline, something in my mind tickled a bit. No, I didn't recognize the name--I just thought "Google this guy." That's what I always think nowadays when I see some "blockbuster" report that someone is hailing as a "devastating" indictment of the case for war. Search and ye shall find: Charles J. Hanley is one biased reporter and not to be trusted on the Iraq war in particular. Silflay Hraka had the goods on him back in March. After running a series of quotes from Hanley's stories leading up to the war--stories in which Hanley predicted a burgeoning humanitarian crisis and used the harvest cycle of all things to agitate against the war--Bigwig observes:

In the last three days, according to his story locations, Charles J. Hanley, AP Special Correspondent, has been in Washington, Amman, Umm Qasr, Basra, and Juweideh, Jordan. It's the ability to travel through a war zone at will that separates the AP Special Correspondent from your run of the mill regular AP correspondents, you see. He reports with the speed of ten, because his heart is pure. If you see a meek and mild mannered reporter jump into a phone booth, and a man in blue tights emerge, with the letters APSC flowing across his broad, rippling chest, odds are it's Charles J. Hanley, AP Special Correspondent, off to a distant land to report on another humanitarian crisis story.

It is that purity that gives him his innate objectivity, the objectivity that allows him to compare human shields and American soldiers with the phrase "Unlike those camouflaged troops, the group is traveling light". The objective journalism of the AP Special Correspondent finds that human shields are not only braver than American combat troops, but also less materialistic.

Fascinating, no, that Hanley managed to travel from Washington to and through a war zone in three days, and that he had time to work on, write, and file several stories at the same time? Is Charles J. Hanley a superjournalist, or just the AP's Jayson Blair?

As for the substance of Hanley's present case against the Feb. 5 presentation, I've only skimmed it but a couple of things jump out. First, Hanley implies that he watched Powell's presentation from Baghdad. Not terribly newsworthy in itself, Hanley quotes a couple of people who were unimpressed by the presentation, and they are newsworthy. He quotes Saddam's science advisor, Lt. Gen. Amer al-Saadi describing the presentation as "stunts" designed to persuade the uninformed, and then a Danish member of the European parliament, Ulla Sanbaek, as having watched the presentation and said "War can be avoided. Colin Powell came up with absolutely nothing." As for al-Saadi, he's one of Saddam's henchmen--what would you expect him to say? Sandbaek, though, requires a little research.

Back to Google. In February it seems that Sandbaek was in Baghdad on a trip to visit NGOs and UN workers according to this story about the trip. Sandbaek had some interesting things to say about the war to come:

Ms Sandbaek, who will be joining the unofficial visit next week, said the group would be visiting NGOs and UN workers. She said the MEPs wanted to take the message that "there are people in Europe who are opposed to war and want to do everything possible to avoid it." If there is a war then it will be important afterwards for the Middle East that this view has been expressed, she added.(my emphasis)

So...would someone willing to do everything possible to avoid the war have been impressed by Powell's pro-war presentation? Not likely, but Hanley doesn't provide any background for his readers to assess her credibility or stance. He simply asserts that she was unimpressed. Remember, he is insinuating that he watched the presentation with her--he likely knew why she was there or could have found out had "reporting" been his motive. Instead, he just uses her to imply that knowledgeable people didn't like Powell's presentation.

The second thing that jumps out at me is Hanley's assertion that:

In postwar interviews, with Saddam no longer in power, no Iraqi scientist is known to have confirmed any revived weapons program.

Revived seems to be Hanley's key word here, else what should we make of the scientist who turned over a buried centrifuge along with plans to rebuild Iraq's nuclear weapons program? Technically, it is true that that program hadn't been "revived" prior to the war, but it's equally true that Saddam, according to that scientist, had every intent to revive that program once the heat was off. Hanley fails to mention the scientist, the centrifuge, the plans--all of it.

For the rest, Hanley pits one intelligence service against another in the dodgy world of interpreting and analyzing conflicting data as evidence that Powell's report is itself suspect. Hanley either doesn't know or just doesn't acknowledge that such disputes are common in intelligence circles. Either way, he jumps to unjustified conclusions to make his case against Powell.

For more on the anti-American spin that Charles J. Hanley puts on reality, check out Orrin Judd's review of Hanley's book, The Bridge at No Gun Ri : A Hidden Chapter from the Korean War. Judd catches Hanley's political bias on display there, too.