As far back as January, we learned that in the months before the invasion of Iraq, Knight Ridder, alone among the American news media, reported in depth that multiple sources in the intelligence community had thrown up red flags concerning the flawed rationales (weapons of mass destruction, Iraqi ties to al Qaeda) for the war.
Now, as the race for the presidency turns for home, Iraq has become campaign issue number one. And, sure enough, Knight Ridder’s Washington bureau continues to show the way in examining that issue — and continues to receive little credit from press bigfoots, because KR doesn’t own a paper in either Washington or New York.
Lets see if we can correct that.
Yesterday, KR’s Nancy A. Youssef, reporting from Baghdad, wrote that operations by U.S. troops and Iraqi police are killing twice as many Iraqis — most of them civilians — as attacks by insurgents. Youssef pried the stats out of the Iraqi Health Ministry, which reports to interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, whom the United States appointed in June.
Youseff tells us that the ministry began separating casualties caused by military and police forces from those caused by insurgents on June 10. From that date until Sept. 10, some 1,295 Iraqis were killed in clashes with multinational forces and police, versus 516 civilians killed in terrorist attacks, the ministry said.
Earlier this month KR’s military correspondent in Washington, Joseph Galloway, smelled his own rat in an entirely different set of numbers: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s estimate of 1,500 and 2,500 “enemy killed” in Iraq. Galloway has the advantage of having been around forever, and unlike younger reporters, he vividly remembers the ludicrous body-count claims the Pentagon foisted on Vietnam war reporters, right up until the ignominious end, so he did some checking of his own.
“Take the new Iraq numbers,” Galloway wrote dryly. “If, as Gen. John Abizaid, the head of the U.S. Central Command, has said, the total insurgent strength in Iraq is now only 5,000, and if Rumsfeld’s high-end number is correct and 2,500 of the enemy were killed in August, then just one more month and the enemy will all be dead and we can go home.” That’s the kind of reporting that has been sorely lacking from certain more prominent news institutions that likely spend more on expense accounts alone than Knight Ridder allocates to tracking down the news in any given month.
For that, we offer KR’s reporters, in Washington and in Iraq, multiple tips of the hat.
–Steve Lovelady
Steve Lovelady was editor of CJR Daily.