During the first Gulf war, New York Times reporter Sydney Schanberg, whose award-winning reporting from Cambodia won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 (and whose story about his aide Dith Pran was the subject of the movie "The Killing Fields"), warned journalists not to forget "our unquestioning chorus of agreeability when Lyndon Johnson bamboozled us with his fabrication of the Gulf of Tonkin incident." It's a reminder that needs to be heard, especially in light of the recent spate of truth-impaired reporters and gullible editors at the New York Times and the current charges of government fabrications.

Schanberg was referring to reports that ran in 1964 in both the New York Times and the Washington Post, as well as in other media, that North Vietnam had attacked American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin. There were no such attacks. We know now that the reports were trumped up by the Pentagon and used by President Johnson to convince a reluctant Congress to formally launch the disastrous Vietnam War. And unquestioning media passed along the government's message. As media critics Jeff Cohen and Norm Solomon have written, "By reporting official claims as absolute truths, American journalism opened the floodgates for the bloody Vietnam War. A pattern took hold: continuous government lies passed on by pliant mass media . . . leading to over 50,000 American deaths and millions of Vietnamese casualties." We must be a nation of slow learners because here we are again.

It's now clear that Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and others at the Pentagon, along with President Bush, were looking for the equivalent of a Gulf of Tonkin incident to sell their invasion of Iraq to the American people and to the world. Whatever the real reasons for the invasion -- and a case could be made that there were legitimate humanitarian concerns in the mix, along with a little oil lust -- those phantom weapons of mass destruction (WMD) were the most convincing. Soon Colin Powell and Tony Blair were both reading from the same, if wrong, page.

The media have devoted much ink to the allegations that these WMD, the raison d'être for the Iraq invasion, don't exist. But there are at least two other underreported aspects of the WMD debate: the credibility given to Ahmed Chalabi by the Pentagon and the corroboration of his credibility by the New York Times. Chalabi, an Iraqi exile since 1958, was educated in America but lived primarily in London. He owned a bank in Jordan but fled in 1992 after charges of embezzlement, which he denies. He was sentenced in absentia to 22 years in prison. As head of the Iraqi National Congress (INC) he was eager to overthrow Saddam Hussein and some say succeed him as president. He's now taken up residency in Odai Hussein's former hunting club in Baghdad where he is reported to be trying to build the INC.

According to a May 31 article in the Detroit Free Press, Pentagon officials passed over their own intelligence reports and relied instead on information about WMD and Al-Qaida from Chalabi, despite his obvious zeal for overthrowing Saddam and despite warnings from the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the State Department that the information was unreliable at best.

Chalabi also found a receptive audience at the New York Times, where two Pulitzer Prize-winning senior staff squabbled recently over who had the rights to run an interview with him. In a leaked internal New York Times e-mail, reported by the Washington Post, reporter Judith Miller wrote to Baghdad bureau chief John Burns that she had cultivated a long-term relationship with Chalabi. "I've been covering Chalabi for about 10 years and have done most of the stories about him for our paper, including the long takeout that we recently did on him. He has provided most of the front page exclusives on WMD to our paper."

The Detroit Free Press reports that Chalabi "fed the same information about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and links to [Al-Qaida] to both places so Pentagon officials would confirm what the newspaper was hearing and the nation's most powerful newspaper would confirm what the Pentagon was hearing."

Yet Miller's reliance on the toadying Chalabi for front-page exclusives at the scandal-plagued Times and her alleged triangulation with the Pentagon has gone largely unreported and unchallenged. Talk about a "chorus of agreeability." Meanwhile, those elusive WMD are looking about as credible as the attacks in the Gulf of Tonkin. Searchers in Iraq -- even our own Marines -- say they're not sanguine about finding any. Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell, the Sunday morning spin team, insist they will, but that it will take time. (Isn't that what the U.N. inspectors were asking for?) And President Bush, perhaps a little out of the loop, insisted on Polish TV that we already had found them.

Some days it feels as if we're tumbling in a drum filled with petrol-soaked rags of deception and the spinning will never stop. But Sydney Schanberg has suggested that maybe we like it that way. "We Americans are the ultimate innocents," he said. "We are forever desperate to believe that this time the government is telling us the truth."

With the Federal Communications Commission's recent ruling to allow corporate conglomerates to gobble up what's left of the independent press, it's likely that we'll find a "pliant mass media" ever more willing to help us with that belief.

Susan Lenfestey is a Minneapolis writer. She can be reached at soolen@aol.com

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