What we think
The renewed pressure on the government to publish in full the documentation that lay behind Lord Goldsmith’s advice to Tony Blair on the legality of British troops invading Iraq, alongside their United States allies in March 2003, is not an abstract or an isolated political affair. In the clamour for disclosure, especially in the heated tit-for-tat confrontational environment that marks the run-in to a general election, it is easy to lose sight of what is at stake in trying to establish the precise truth of whether Britain went to war in Iraq legally or under a fake cloak of legality. At stake is the foundation of our civil society: a respect not only for the laws of the United Kingdom, but respect for the relationships we have with other nation states that we conveniently sum up in the term “international law”. This, again, isn’t an abstract idea. The roots of international law have their origins in the Treaty of Westphalia which brought the 30 years war to an end in 1648, and in so doing settled important land issues in Europe and in the developing colonisation process during the following century that saw the rise of the new world nations.
But today the field of international law is intertwined with the work of the United Nations. The founding Charter of the UN set as its goal “to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treatises and other sources of international law can be maintained”. Britain is a signatory to key elements of the UN’s courts and tribunals: the International Court of Justice, the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, the International Criminal Court, the UN Administrative Tribunal. We are part of the International Law Commission and the UN Commission on International Trade Law.
So when we ask to be shown the full legal arguments and advice that the government took before it went to war two years ago, it is not a casual demand. Because if we failed to adhere to the rules of international law, or we even fail to disclose or display whether we have respected such law, what message are we sending out to other nations, the countries run by dictators that flout and ignore international law? Was this not the precise reason the Prime Minister told us an invasion of Iraq was necessary and urgent; that UN rules had been broken by Saddam Hussein and therefore he had to face the consequences? The Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, in the House of Commons last week, offered only the flimsiest reasoning as to why the government would not disclose Lord Goldsmith’s full legal advice. Effectively, Straw’s argument was that it was governmental custom and practice not to disclose such advice. Such advice, said Straw, had to be kept secret and discreet and regardless of convention, the advice from the attorney general on Iraq was – finally – clear and unequivocal.
Straw, a barrister like the Prime Minister, knew what he was saying fell far short of a valid explanation. War is not a routine matter. The decision to go to war, to send troops to their death in defence of a principle or national defence, to put at risk the likelihood of thousands of innocent civilian casualties, isn’t an everyday matter. These were unique circumstances and we now expect a unique response from the government to finally end what has been two years of uncertainty, two years of deceit and cover-ups and two years of obfuscation that the government cannot continue to run and hide from. The historian Lord Acton once noted that “everything secret degenerates, even the administration of justice: nothing is safe that does not show how it can bear discussion and publicity.” The government should heed such wisdom. And if it refuses, it should expect that the demand for disclosure will continue. Because if a government does indeed fear discussion and publicity because something it did might be unsafe, then what else does it fear? In a democracy, a government operating under such fear is a dangerous government. Yet the Blair government is on the verge of being elected for a third consecutive term and its members perhaps believe that such longevity puts them above conventional rules.
It doesn’t. Even if Blair wins the coming election with a third landslide the demand for disclosure of Goldsmith’s advice will continue because the principles of international law will not have altered simply because of another Blair triumph at the ballot box. The attorney general is not an expert in international law. He is primarily a commercial lawyer. Hence over the period from July 2002 to the start of the Iraq invasion in March 2003, Goldsmith would have been offered, and indeed he would have sought out, a barrage of legal opinion on what was necessary to ensure that the conflict was a legal one. Had the authority for war come direct from the UN Security Council in the form of a second explicit resolution (that added to the warnings to Iraq included in resolution 1441) none of this legal uncertainty would be happening. As signatories to the UN charter, Britain has a legal obligation to operate within the framework of international law set by the UN. But we know the administration of George Bush was set on destroying the authority of the UN, set on showing that its own self-referenced laws were enough. The US decided it did not need, or indeed want, a second UN resolution. But it gave its prime ally, the ally that gave its flouting of UN authority at least an air of international respectability, time to secure a second resolution.
The attorney general’s initial advice to Blair – based on advice he took from lawyers whose field was international law – is said to have contained a profusion of caveats. The bottom line? Goldsmith and Blair knew that a second UN resolution was crucial to legality. And when it didn’t come, the government’s choices had suddenly shrunk.
Since war in Iraq became first a possibility, then an inevitability, this newspaper has continuously claimed we have not been told the full truth. We helped expose the sham of the Ministry of Defence’s denial that there was increasing troop build-up; we exposed the claim that peace with Saddam could still be attained, when patently there was no hope of war being averted; we helped expose the evident pressure from the US to find legal opinion in Britain that would back war without a second security council resolution.
Throughout we have remained consistent in believing that the claims of legality for the war in Iraq under international law were unfounded and unsafe. Nothing the government has said or done in defending its right to keep the attorney general’s advice private, has made us shift our position. Today we still insist the nation has a right to know what choices were before its elected government when it took the decision to go to war. It is an arrogant position for the government to insist it is in the “nation’s interest” to keep such information from us. Blair and his administration have shown over the past four years that respect for domestic law, let alone international law, is not going to be part of their legacy. But ironically it may be one of the laws brought in during Blair’s second term that could help end this debacle.
Parliament has the authority to insist – through the office of the Information Commissioner – that it publishes Goldsmith’s advice in full. If the general election is on May 5, there is precious little parliamentary time for this to happen. The expectation must be that this will be a matter unresolved in this parliament. But the question should not be allowed to simply fade away. The very principles of international law remain exposed by our unanswered questions. Whether today, tomorrow or by another government, the truth will eventually come out. Blair can hope to escape the immediate consequences, but not a final verdict.
Copyright © 2005
smg sunday newspapers ltd. no.176088
Sunday
BBC broadcast 'fake' news reports
A Spinwatch investigation has revealed that journalists working for the Services Sound and Vision Corporation (SSVC) have been commissioned to provide news reports to the BBC. The BBC has been using these reports as if they were genuine news. In fact, the SSVC is entirely funded by the Ministry of Defence as a propaganda operation, which according to its own website makes a 'considerable contribution' to the 'morale' of the armed forces.
In the US, Washington has been rocked by the scandal of fake journalists. The Bush administration has been paying actors to produce news, paying journalists to write propaganda, and paying Republican party members to pose as journalists. In the UK this has been reported with our customary shake of the head at the bizarre nature of US politics and media. Implicitly we are relieved that, however bad things are here, at least we are not as bad as they are.
But Spinwatch can reveal that we have our very own fake journalists operating in the UK. The government pays for their wages and they provide news as if they were normal journalists rather than paid propagandists. Normally they work in a little known outfit with the acronym BFBS, which stands for British Forces Broadcasting Service. BFBS exists to 'entertain and inform' British armed forces around the world and is entirely funded by the British Ministry of Defence. BFBS is run by the SSVC. But on this occasion no mention of Ministry of defence funding was made. She was introduced simply as a reporter 'from the British Forces Broadcasting Service' who 'has been embedded with the Scots Guards'. As one wag inside the BBC puts it, this suggests a process of 'double embedding', first working for the MoD and second embedding with a regiment. The report began:
Naturally enough, we are told that the regiment in which the reporter is 'embedded' has resolved these tribal problems by negotiating 'a ceasefire' following which ' the two tribes had had their first nights sleep in several months'.
The British Army view of the Iraqi people can be less than sympathetic. The army crackdown on looting early in the occupation was codenamed 'Operation Ali Baba' after the folk tale 'Ali Baba and the forty thieves'. Issuing orders for Operation Ali Baba the commanding officer gave what the Army now acknowledges was an illegal order to 'work them hard'. This led predictably to torture, only discovered when some brave soul in a photo developing shop reported the resulting record of abuse to the police. The view of the Iraq population as thieves is evidently shared by both torturers and propagandists.
The report included interviews with five separate British soldiers including one with a 'master sniper' brought in to counter resistance attacks on the Iraqi police. But there were no interviews with any Iraqis. The report concludes with a straight forward piece of propaganda for the occupation: 'While the Scots Guards remain the ceasefire is likely to hold strong. There's been little trouble in the area since the peace was brokered and the ceasefire has been extended to December the first. But the Iraqi police and national guard still lack confidence and credibility to keep the peace on their own and should the fighting resume, the governor of Basra has given the go ahead for the Scots Guards to use more force to make route 6 safe again.' Even though the report has itself hinted that the fighting is targetting the occupation, we are left with the extraordinary statement that the army in illegal ocupation of Iraq is actually a 'peacekeeping' force.
According to the editor of Good Morning Scotland the piece 'was a bit a of a one-off because she happened to have been embedded with the Royal Scots. Until a few months ago Martha was a correspondent here at BBC Scotland (had been for several years) and is therefore a journalist we know and trust... It was quite an unsual commission'. Unusual indeed, but not unique. Further inquiries by Spinwatch have revealed that another item from a different BFBS journalist was broadcast on Radio Scotland on Christmas day 2004. Insiders at BBC Scotland are livid about this, indeed several have contacted Spinwatch to pass on their concerns. One reports that colleagues have remarked on the 'complete lack of balance' of the piece and one described it as 'an audio press release for the Army'.*
But were the BBC right to say that the journalist concerned was one 'we know and trust'? Certainly there has been a significant wave of journalists from the mainstream media signing up to work for the government since the election of the Blair government. Alastair Campbell is only the most famous. BBC journalists too have made the transition to propagandist as in the example of Mark Laity who became a spin doctor at NATO from whom no further work was commissioned..
The BBC editor claimed in defence that 'I should stress too that BFBS is not controlled by the MOD. It is funded by them in much the same way the BBC World Service is funded by the Foreign Office. Their journalists are actually employed by the SSVC, the Services Sound and Vision Corporation, which is a charitable organisation with editorial independence from the MoD.' (email to the author, December 2004)
This is not quite accurate. A quick visit to the website of the Services Sound and Vision Corporation (SSVC) which is the parent of the BFBS reveals that 'Our work makes a considerable contribution to the maintenance of the efficiency and morale of the three Services. Our activities are carried out directly for the Ministry of Defence. Any profits are donated towards Forces' welfare.' Whatever might be said about the World Service relationship with the Foreign Office, it has not ever been accused of donating its profits to the welfare of Britain's diplomats. The notion that the SSVC which is wholly funded by the MoD serves any other purpose than propaganda is fanciful.
The BBC editor also noted: 'Nonetheless we did flag up in the cue that she was embedded for the BFBS.' They did indeed, but very few radio listeners are familiar with what the BFBS is. This is true of the whole network of propaganda agencies in the UK is little known, but anyone with an internet connection can find out about the organisations involved. The Foreign Office runs a network of fake news operations and has done for years. In recently times these have been contracted out to private production companies with the helpful effect that the government funding is further camouflaged. They have also been extended markedly to focus more cetnrally on the middle east since 2001. One such is the London Press Service which is described as follows on the government I-uk site: 'an agency offering the latest British headline news, news round-ups, features and pictures for use by journalists overseas.'
This is a rather coy way to describe a government propaganda service. Click on its website for an admission of the defining feature of this whole network of agencies; that the news on the site 'is for free use by journalists'. Look in vain for an indication of who really funds this service. All you will see is a notice at the bottom of the home page : 'The london Press Service is operated and maintained by Intelfax Ltd.' Intelfax is in turn an independent production company but the London Press Service is funded entirely by the Foreign Office.
Or take the example of British Satellite News (BSN) broadcast for free over the Reuters World News Service. According to its website, BSN 'is a free television news and features service, which provides you with coverage of worldwide topical events and stories from a British perspective. Our dedicated team of experienced television journalists specialise in producing topical stories that inform and entertain a global audience. ' Again not much in the way of a clue that this is a fake news site. BSN is run by a company called World Television which does work for the BBC such as the live coverage of the TUC conference and also works for multinationals such as GSK and Nestle. The Foreign Office helpfully tells us that BSN has 'a particular focus on the Arab/Islamic world.' It also mentions that BSN 's fake news 'is currently used by 35 broadcasters in the Middle East and over 440 worldwide.' The secret of all this material is that it is not only free to use but that it is used as if it was genuine news and not British propaganda.
The UK is awash with fake news, of which the examples here are only a taste, it is just that we don't pay much attention to it. The American scandals over fake news are played out against the background of some pretty clear laws forbidding propaganda with a disguised source within the borders of the US. There are no laws forbidding fake news in the UK. Perhaps we needs some.
* Comments to the author from a BBC staffer, who, not unnaturally, prefers to remain anonymous, January 2005.
Transcript follows:
Good Morning Scotland, BBC Radio Scotland, 25 November 2004
Presenter 1: Soldiers from the Black Watch regiment in Iraq have carried out a major raid against suspected insurgents in villages on the banks of the Euphrates. The raid involving 500 troops was one of the largest British operations since the end of the Iraq war last year.
Presenter 2: Meanwhile the Scots Guards have successfully negotiated a ceasefire between two warring tribes just weeks into their tour of duty in Iraq. The soldiers were called in after fighting flared along the main road north out of Basra. Operation Energise aimed to stop the violence which has been affecting transport and communications to and from Basra City. Martha Fairley from the British Forces Broadcasting Service has been embedded with the Scots Guards.
Martha Fairley: Route 6 is the main road north out of Basra. It runs through the badlands of Iraq's marsh Arabs They make a living from crime - carjackings, smuggling and murder are common place. It's also the scene of an age old feud between two warring tribes. The Garamsha and Al Halaf (sp?) kept a low profile during Saddam's regime. But recently the fighting's flared up again and the warriors and tanks of the Scots Guards and Royal Dragoon Guards were brought in as a show of force and as Sergeant Jason Manassi from the Scots Guard has discovered they are also a source of fascination for hoards of local people.
Jason Manassi: There's a lot of people obviously trying to get involved but it's not in a bad way -they are -I really think they don't mean any harm at this stage. However we still need to be on our toes. We're at the moment doing a re-supply. We are showing a bit of force at the moment sending troops up all the time. It is working but I think they are more inquisitive as opposed to hostile at this present moment - which is good, which is good.
We travelled with a convoy of Scots Guards bringing supplies and fuel to the troops stationed along route 6. The Iraqi police have set up vehicle checkpoints along the road to try and control the violence and while they're stopping and checking the vehicles, the British forces are providing them with the support and credibility they need. But even after the arrival of the Scots Guards there's been a murder on this stretch of road. The second checkpoint we stop at is Beruki camp. The Iraqi police service have a station here and the policemen proudly show off their uniforms and weapons as we arrive. But they fear for their safety. Three of their colleagues have been killed by a sniper here in recent months. Scots Guards master sniper Robert Milton set up an operation to find the gunman who's thought to be holed up a mile away
Robert Milton: There's a sniper, enemy sniper within the buildings to our front, just behind and we're here to take him on basically. And it gives them reassurance on the ground that we're here to take out this person if we can find him.
MF: We return to route 6 the following morning a ten day cease fire had just been negotiated by the Scots Guards and the two tribes had had their first nights sleep in several months. Commanding officer Colonel Harry Nicoson says persuading them to come to the negotiating table was relatively easy.
Harry Nicoson: If you've got an armoured battle group and you plonk it in the middle of their village you tend to get their attention quite quickly and that is what happened. They immediately came up and spoke to us, we had two separate meetings brokered the cease fire with both sides and told them that if they didn't stick to it then we would come and sort them out or words to that effect and that's where we've got to at the moment. So we're now waiting for them to take it forward, set up their own meetings, led by Iraqis to now try and find some sort of solution to this problem.
MF: Meanwhile some of the heavy armour has been rolled back as this tentative peace unfolds. For Lance Corporals Stewart Thorpe and Ian McGinty it's been their first chance to get out on operation since they arrived in Iraq last month.
Stewart Thorpe: Basically we're just sat in a static location. The Iraqi police are doing their vehicle checkpoints and we're just showing a presence on the ground. If anything does happen we're there to respond to it.
Ian McGinty: What we've seen so far is the people are quite friendly they come and talk to us there's no problems there but the threat's always out there so we just have to wait and see and bide our time sort of thing and keep safe. You just have to keep your wits about you, make sure the guys are doing their job and that and make sure you're doing your own job as well.
MF: While the Scots Guards remain the ceasefire is likely to hold strong. There's been little trouble in the area since the peace was brokered and the ceasefire has been extended to December the first. But the Iraqi police and national guard still lack confidence and credibility to keep the peace on their own and should the fighting resume, the governor of Basra has given the go ahead for the Scots Guards to use more force to make route 6 safe again.
Martha Fairley reporting from Basra city. It's 8.42
© SpinWatch
In the US, Washington has been rocked by the scandal of fake journalists. The Bush administration has been paying actors to produce news, paying journalists to write propaganda, and paying Republican party members to pose as journalists. In the UK this has been reported with our customary shake of the head at the bizarre nature of US politics and media. Implicitly we are relieved that, however bad things are here, at least we are not as bad as they are.
But Spinwatch can reveal that we have our very own fake journalists operating in the UK. The government pays for their wages and they provide news as if they were normal journalists rather than paid propagandists. Normally they work in a little known outfit with the acronym BFBS, which stands for British Forces Broadcasting Service. BFBS exists to 'entertain and inform' British armed forces around the world and is entirely funded by the British Ministry of Defence. BFBS is run by the SSVC. But on this occasion no mention of Ministry of defence funding was made. She was introduced simply as a reporter 'from the British Forces Broadcasting Service' who 'has been embedded with the Scots Guards'. As one wag inside the BBC puts it, this suggests a process of 'double embedding', first working for the MoD and second embedding with a regiment. The report began:
'Route 6 is the main road North out of Basra. It runs through the badlands of Iraq's marsh Arabs They make a living from crime - carjackings, smuggling and murder are common place. It's also the scene of an age old feud between two warring tribes.' (25 November 2004)
Naturally enough, we are told that the regiment in which the reporter is 'embedded' has resolved these tribal problems by negotiating 'a ceasefire' following which ' the two tribes had had their first nights sleep in several months'.
The British Army view of the Iraqi people can be less than sympathetic. The army crackdown on looting early in the occupation was codenamed 'Operation Ali Baba' after the folk tale 'Ali Baba and the forty thieves'. Issuing orders for Operation Ali Baba the commanding officer gave what the Army now acknowledges was an illegal order to 'work them hard'. This led predictably to torture, only discovered when some brave soul in a photo developing shop reported the resulting record of abuse to the police. The view of the Iraq population as thieves is evidently shared by both torturers and propagandists.
The report included interviews with five separate British soldiers including one with a 'master sniper' brought in to counter resistance attacks on the Iraqi police. But there were no interviews with any Iraqis. The report concludes with a straight forward piece of propaganda for the occupation: 'While the Scots Guards remain the ceasefire is likely to hold strong. There's been little trouble in the area since the peace was brokered and the ceasefire has been extended to December the first. But the Iraqi police and national guard still lack confidence and credibility to keep the peace on their own and should the fighting resume, the governor of Basra has given the go ahead for the Scots Guards to use more force to make route 6 safe again.' Even though the report has itself hinted that the fighting is targetting the occupation, we are left with the extraordinary statement that the army in illegal ocupation of Iraq is actually a 'peacekeeping' force.
According to the editor of Good Morning Scotland the piece 'was a bit a of a one-off because she happened to have been embedded with the Royal Scots. Until a few months ago Martha was a correspondent here at BBC Scotland (had been for several years) and is therefore a journalist we know and trust... It was quite an unsual commission'. Unusual indeed, but not unique. Further inquiries by Spinwatch have revealed that another item from a different BFBS journalist was broadcast on Radio Scotland on Christmas day 2004. Insiders at BBC Scotland are livid about this, indeed several have contacted Spinwatch to pass on their concerns. One reports that colleagues have remarked on the 'complete lack of balance' of the piece and one described it as 'an audio press release for the Army'.*
But were the BBC right to say that the journalist concerned was one 'we know and trust'? Certainly there has been a significant wave of journalists from the mainstream media signing up to work for the government since the election of the Blair government. Alastair Campbell is only the most famous. BBC journalists too have made the transition to propagandist as in the example of Mark Laity who became a spin doctor at NATO from whom no further work was commissioned..
The BBC editor claimed in defence that 'I should stress too that BFBS is not controlled by the MOD. It is funded by them in much the same way the BBC World Service is funded by the Foreign Office. Their journalists are actually employed by the SSVC, the Services Sound and Vision Corporation, which is a charitable organisation with editorial independence from the MoD.' (email to the author, December 2004)
This is not quite accurate. A quick visit to the website of the Services Sound and Vision Corporation (SSVC) which is the parent of the BFBS reveals that 'Our work makes a considerable contribution to the maintenance of the efficiency and morale of the three Services. Our activities are carried out directly for the Ministry of Defence. Any profits are donated towards Forces' welfare.' Whatever might be said about the World Service relationship with the Foreign Office, it has not ever been accused of donating its profits to the welfare of Britain's diplomats. The notion that the SSVC which is wholly funded by the MoD serves any other purpose than propaganda is fanciful.
The BBC editor also noted: 'Nonetheless we did flag up in the cue that she was embedded for the BFBS.' They did indeed, but very few radio listeners are familiar with what the BFBS is. This is true of the whole network of propaganda agencies in the UK is little known, but anyone with an internet connection can find out about the organisations involved. The Foreign Office runs a network of fake news operations and has done for years. In recently times these have been contracted out to private production companies with the helpful effect that the government funding is further camouflaged. They have also been extended markedly to focus more cetnrally on the middle east since 2001. One such is the London Press Service which is described as follows on the government I-uk site: 'an agency offering the latest British headline news, news round-ups, features and pictures for use by journalists overseas.'
This is a rather coy way to describe a government propaganda service. Click on its website for an admission of the defining feature of this whole network of agencies; that the news on the site 'is for free use by journalists'. Look in vain for an indication of who really funds this service. All you will see is a notice at the bottom of the home page : 'The london Press Service is operated and maintained by Intelfax Ltd.' Intelfax is in turn an independent production company but the London Press Service is funded entirely by the Foreign Office.
Or take the example of British Satellite News (BSN) broadcast for free over the Reuters World News Service. According to its website, BSN 'is a free television news and features service, which provides you with coverage of worldwide topical events and stories from a British perspective. Our dedicated team of experienced television journalists specialise in producing topical stories that inform and entertain a global audience. ' Again not much in the way of a clue that this is a fake news site. BSN is run by a company called World Television which does work for the BBC such as the live coverage of the TUC conference and also works for multinationals such as GSK and Nestle. The Foreign Office helpfully tells us that BSN has 'a particular focus on the Arab/Islamic world.' It also mentions that BSN 's fake news 'is currently used by 35 broadcasters in the Middle East and over 440 worldwide.' The secret of all this material is that it is not only free to use but that it is used as if it was genuine news and not British propaganda.
The UK is awash with fake news, of which the examples here are only a taste, it is just that we don't pay much attention to it. The American scandals over fake news are played out against the background of some pretty clear laws forbidding propaganda with a disguised source within the borders of the US. There are no laws forbidding fake news in the UK. Perhaps we needs some.
* Comments to the author from a BBC staffer, who, not unnaturally, prefers to remain anonymous, January 2005.
Transcript follows:
Good Morning Scotland, BBC Radio Scotland, 25 November 2004
Presenter 1: Soldiers from the Black Watch regiment in Iraq have carried out a major raid against suspected insurgents in villages on the banks of the Euphrates. The raid involving 500 troops was one of the largest British operations since the end of the Iraq war last year.
Presenter 2: Meanwhile the Scots Guards have successfully negotiated a ceasefire between two warring tribes just weeks into their tour of duty in Iraq. The soldiers were called in after fighting flared along the main road north out of Basra. Operation Energise aimed to stop the violence which has been affecting transport and communications to and from Basra City. Martha Fairley from the British Forces Broadcasting Service has been embedded with the Scots Guards.
Martha Fairley: Route 6 is the main road north out of Basra. It runs through the badlands of Iraq's marsh Arabs They make a living from crime - carjackings, smuggling and murder are common place. It's also the scene of an age old feud between two warring tribes. The Garamsha and Al Halaf (sp?) kept a low profile during Saddam's regime. But recently the fighting's flared up again and the warriors and tanks of the Scots Guards and Royal Dragoon Guards were brought in as a show of force and as Sergeant Jason Manassi from the Scots Guard has discovered they are also a source of fascination for hoards of local people.
Jason Manassi: There's a lot of people obviously trying to get involved but it's not in a bad way -they are -I really think they don't mean any harm at this stage. However we still need to be on our toes. We're at the moment doing a re-supply. We are showing a bit of force at the moment sending troops up all the time. It is working but I think they are more inquisitive as opposed to hostile at this present moment - which is good, which is good.
We travelled with a convoy of Scots Guards bringing supplies and fuel to the troops stationed along route 6. The Iraqi police have set up vehicle checkpoints along the road to try and control the violence and while they're stopping and checking the vehicles, the British forces are providing them with the support and credibility they need. But even after the arrival of the Scots Guards there's been a murder on this stretch of road. The second checkpoint we stop at is Beruki camp. The Iraqi police service have a station here and the policemen proudly show off their uniforms and weapons as we arrive. But they fear for their safety. Three of their colleagues have been killed by a sniper here in recent months. Scots Guards master sniper Robert Milton set up an operation to find the gunman who's thought to be holed up a mile away
Robert Milton: There's a sniper, enemy sniper within the buildings to our front, just behind and we're here to take him on basically. And it gives them reassurance on the ground that we're here to take out this person if we can find him.
MF: We return to route 6 the following morning a ten day cease fire had just been negotiated by the Scots Guards and the two tribes had had their first nights sleep in several months. Commanding officer Colonel Harry Nicoson says persuading them to come to the negotiating table was relatively easy.
Harry Nicoson: If you've got an armoured battle group and you plonk it in the middle of their village you tend to get their attention quite quickly and that is what happened. They immediately came up and spoke to us, we had two separate meetings brokered the cease fire with both sides and told them that if they didn't stick to it then we would come and sort them out or words to that effect and that's where we've got to at the moment. So we're now waiting for them to take it forward, set up their own meetings, led by Iraqis to now try and find some sort of solution to this problem.
MF: Meanwhile some of the heavy armour has been rolled back as this tentative peace unfolds. For Lance Corporals Stewart Thorpe and Ian McGinty it's been their first chance to get out on operation since they arrived in Iraq last month.
Stewart Thorpe: Basically we're just sat in a static location. The Iraqi police are doing their vehicle checkpoints and we're just showing a presence on the ground. If anything does happen we're there to respond to it.
Ian McGinty: What we've seen so far is the people are quite friendly they come and talk to us there's no problems there but the threat's always out there so we just have to wait and see and bide our time sort of thing and keep safe. You just have to keep your wits about you, make sure the guys are doing their job and that and make sure you're doing your own job as well.
MF: While the Scots Guards remain the ceasefire is likely to hold strong. There's been little trouble in the area since the peace was brokered and the ceasefire has been extended to December the first. But the Iraqi police and national guard still lack confidence and credibility to keep the peace on their own and should the fighting resume, the governor of Basra has given the go ahead for the Scots Guards to use more force to make route 6 safe again.
Martha Fairley reporting from Basra city. It's 8.42
© SpinWatch
A Star Reporter Fights Subpoena, and Criticism
Some applaud Judith Miller for protecting her sources, but question what they call her uncritical coverage of Iraq weapons programs.
From an American Bar Assn. conclave in Florida to the National Press Club in Washington, Judith Miller basks in acclaim.
A veteran national security reporter for the New York Times, she insists over and over that she rejects it, but the mantle is proffered nonetheless — 1st Amendment martyr.
Miller's audiences embrace her for facing down a special prosecutor and federal judges who have demanded that she reveal the identities of her confidential sources or face up to 18 months in prison for contempt.
"I am involved in a fight, a fight for my life right now," Miller, 57, said, "which is to stay out of jail and to continue to be able to function as a reporter. That has been an all-consuming fight."
Miller's path into the pantheon of journalism heroes might be unobstructed were it not for a second vein in her work that just won't go away. That is her reporting on Iraq, particularly in the months leading up to the war, which an array of critics have said uncritically trumpeted the notion that Saddam Hussein's regime possessed stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons.
Alternately acclaimed and derided — sometimes by the same audience, or even the same individual — Miller occupies a peculiar station in American journalism. The phenomenon was in evidence during her two-day visit to UC Berkeley this month.
"I applaud her willingness to go to jail to protect her sources, but this does feel a bit like part of Judy Miller's rehabilitation project," said Sandy Tolan, a Mideast expert and instructor at Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism. "Maybe that's because she keeps saying, 'I'm no martyr, I'm no martyr, I'm no martyr.' "
Fellow journalists have long found Miller fascinating.
When few other female reporters ventured to the patriarchal Middle East, she was on a first-name basis with sheiks and princes. Back home, she waged fierce turf wars with her colleagues at the hyper-competitive Times.
Before many others in the media, she warned about the threat from a shadowy group called Al Qaeda. And she joined several co-workers in winning a 2002 Pulitzer Prize for reporting on global terrorism.
Miller herself became the story last October, when a federal judge held her in contempt for refusing to divulge confidential sources to a special prosecutor.
The case sprang from a July 2003 report by syndicated columnist Robert Novak who identified Valerie Plame as a CIA operative. Some viewed the disclosure as a payback by the leaker because Plame's husband, retired American diplomat Joseph C. Wilson IV, had contradicted President Bush's claim that Iraq had sought to obtain uranium for nuclear weapons.
Miller acknowledges gathering information about the Plame leak, but she never wrote a story about it. Nonetheless, she and Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper received subpoenas from special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald. Appointed in December 2003, he has been investigating the leak and deciding whether anyone should face felony charges for violating the federal law that prohibits revealing the identity of covert agents.
(Novak's status in the case remains a mystery; he has declined to comment on whether he was subpoenaed or testified.)
"So I would be going to jail for a story I didn't write, for reasons which I don't know, for something which may not actually have been a crime," Miller told the audience at Berkeley's Wheeler Auditorium. "It's become kind of Kafkaesque "
Guiding Miller through campus appearances was her friend Lowell Bergman, who invited her to the journalism school where he teaches investigative reporting. Also a reporter for the New York Times, Bergman earned his greatest acclaim as the "60 Minutes" producer who brought the story of tobacco industry whistle-blower Jeffrey Wigand to television. (The story later became fodder for the 1999 movie "The Insider.")
Although Bergman introduced Miller as a stalwart defender of the 1st Amendment, some of his journalism school colleagues insisted that her controversial weapons reporting also be part of the agenda.
Bergman raised the subject in his one-on-one interview with Miller before an audience of about 200 and a camera crew from C-SPAN. But he didn't read any questions from the audience and, in the minds of a small gaggle of students, went too easy on his friend.
"I thought it was a little softball," one student told Bergman afterward. "You could have asked with more oomph."
The students promised they would change the tone the next day when Miller was the guest speaker at Bergman's class.
But Miller became uneasy when she learned the session would be opened to a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, according to journalism school officials. The school's dean, Orville Schell, briefly floated the idea of closing the classroom to all but students and faculty.
"I don't want her to spend an hour with the students and think that she can't be fully open and honest with them about all of the issues," Schell said. "But I also don't want to be a journalism school that says 'OK, journalists are not allowed.' "
In the ensuing 90-minute class, students asked about Miller's career and sources. The question on weapons of mass destruction arose when instructor Tolan singled out an April 2003 story under the Judith Miller byline.
The piece said a U.S. search team had located an Iraqi scientist who said Iraq had destroyed unconventional weapons "only days before the war began" — seemingly an explanation for the failure to find stockpiles of such weapons in Iraq. Miller acknowledged in the story that she was not permitted to interview the scientist and could only view him from a distance. He was wearing a baseball cap.
The New York Times last May acknowledged in an editors' note that it had "never followed up on the veracity of this source or the attempts to verify his claims." Miller, however, seemed unmoved when Tolan suggested that she had based her story on a "tenuous source."
She not only stood by the story but launched a broad defense of her reporting and said that the failure to find chemical, biological or nuclear weapons materials in Iraq had become a fixation.
Why hasn't there been more reporting, she asked, about the intelligence failures that led the U.S. and other governments to miscalculate Iraq's weapons capabilities? And what about the ongoing threat of unconventional weapons from other nations?
"It remains a dangerous world out there," Miller said. "We've kind of stopped focusing on the threat posed by others who are continuing to seek to acquire such weapons and, in the case of Al Qaeda, planning to use them if they can get them."
Last year, in its mea culpa for its reporting on Iraq's weapons, the New York Times said no one reporter or individual was responsible. But the newspaper conceded it had published stories that were "insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged."
Miller sent quite a different message at Berkeley.
When challenged about the 2003 story, she read a letter (previously published in the New York Times) from leaders of the U.S. military teams that she had been embedded with in Iraq. The statement by three Army officers, who had searched fruitlessly for unconventional weapons, said they were "firmly supportive" of Miller's reporting and strongly disagreed with the Times' critique.
By the end of the Berkeley visit, the strain of her double-profile showed. Miller smiled and demurred when a journalism professor called her stand for confidential sources heroic. She snapped back an angry denial when a Los Angeles Times reporter suggested she differed with her editors on the subject of weapons of mass destruction.
Bergman took Miller aside as she protested: "I did not need this. I really did not need this."
A few days later, Miller was off to London on another story. She would not disclose the topic. But she said she hoped to get one more major piece done before the jail sentence, long discussed, might become a reality.
"The thing about journalists is we are not soothsayers," she said. "And we are not omniscient. The answer to insufficient reporting is more reporting."
By James Rainey March 27, 2005
From an American Bar Assn. conclave in Florida to the National Press Club in Washington, Judith Miller basks in acclaim.
A veteran national security reporter for the New York Times, she insists over and over that she rejects it, but the mantle is proffered nonetheless — 1st Amendment martyr.
Miller's audiences embrace her for facing down a special prosecutor and federal judges who have demanded that she reveal the identities of her confidential sources or face up to 18 months in prison for contempt.
"I am involved in a fight, a fight for my life right now," Miller, 57, said, "which is to stay out of jail and to continue to be able to function as a reporter. That has been an all-consuming fight."
Miller's path into the pantheon of journalism heroes might be unobstructed were it not for a second vein in her work that just won't go away. That is her reporting on Iraq, particularly in the months leading up to the war, which an array of critics have said uncritically trumpeted the notion that Saddam Hussein's regime possessed stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons.
Alternately acclaimed and derided — sometimes by the same audience, or even the same individual — Miller occupies a peculiar station in American journalism. The phenomenon was in evidence during her two-day visit to UC Berkeley this month.
"I applaud her willingness to go to jail to protect her sources, but this does feel a bit like part of Judy Miller's rehabilitation project," said Sandy Tolan, a Mideast expert and instructor at Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism. "Maybe that's because she keeps saying, 'I'm no martyr, I'm no martyr, I'm no martyr.' "
Fellow journalists have long found Miller fascinating.
When few other female reporters ventured to the patriarchal Middle East, she was on a first-name basis with sheiks and princes. Back home, she waged fierce turf wars with her colleagues at the hyper-competitive Times.
Before many others in the media, she warned about the threat from a shadowy group called Al Qaeda. And she joined several co-workers in winning a 2002 Pulitzer Prize for reporting on global terrorism.
Miller herself became the story last October, when a federal judge held her in contempt for refusing to divulge confidential sources to a special prosecutor.
The case sprang from a July 2003 report by syndicated columnist Robert Novak who identified Valerie Plame as a CIA operative. Some viewed the disclosure as a payback by the leaker because Plame's husband, retired American diplomat Joseph C. Wilson IV, had contradicted President Bush's claim that Iraq had sought to obtain uranium for nuclear weapons.
Miller acknowledges gathering information about the Plame leak, but she never wrote a story about it. Nonetheless, she and Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper received subpoenas from special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald. Appointed in December 2003, he has been investigating the leak and deciding whether anyone should face felony charges for violating the federal law that prohibits revealing the identity of covert agents.
(Novak's status in the case remains a mystery; he has declined to comment on whether he was subpoenaed or testified.)
"So I would be going to jail for a story I didn't write, for reasons which I don't know, for something which may not actually have been a crime," Miller told the audience at Berkeley's Wheeler Auditorium. "It's become kind of Kafkaesque "
Guiding Miller through campus appearances was her friend Lowell Bergman, who invited her to the journalism school where he teaches investigative reporting. Also a reporter for the New York Times, Bergman earned his greatest acclaim as the "60 Minutes" producer who brought the story of tobacco industry whistle-blower Jeffrey Wigand to television. (The story later became fodder for the 1999 movie "The Insider.")
Although Bergman introduced Miller as a stalwart defender of the 1st Amendment, some of his journalism school colleagues insisted that her controversial weapons reporting also be part of the agenda.
Bergman raised the subject in his one-on-one interview with Miller before an audience of about 200 and a camera crew from C-SPAN. But he didn't read any questions from the audience and, in the minds of a small gaggle of students, went too easy on his friend.
"I thought it was a little softball," one student told Bergman afterward. "You could have asked with more oomph."
The students promised they would change the tone the next day when Miller was the guest speaker at Bergman's class.
But Miller became uneasy when she learned the session would be opened to a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, according to journalism school officials. The school's dean, Orville Schell, briefly floated the idea of closing the classroom to all but students and faculty.
"I don't want her to spend an hour with the students and think that she can't be fully open and honest with them about all of the issues," Schell said. "But I also don't want to be a journalism school that says 'OK, journalists are not allowed.' "
In the ensuing 90-minute class, students asked about Miller's career and sources. The question on weapons of mass destruction arose when instructor Tolan singled out an April 2003 story under the Judith Miller byline.
The piece said a U.S. search team had located an Iraqi scientist who said Iraq had destroyed unconventional weapons "only days before the war began" — seemingly an explanation for the failure to find stockpiles of such weapons in Iraq. Miller acknowledged in the story that she was not permitted to interview the scientist and could only view him from a distance. He was wearing a baseball cap.
The New York Times last May acknowledged in an editors' note that it had "never followed up on the veracity of this source or the attempts to verify his claims." Miller, however, seemed unmoved when Tolan suggested that she had based her story on a "tenuous source."
She not only stood by the story but launched a broad defense of her reporting and said that the failure to find chemical, biological or nuclear weapons materials in Iraq had become a fixation.
Why hasn't there been more reporting, she asked, about the intelligence failures that led the U.S. and other governments to miscalculate Iraq's weapons capabilities? And what about the ongoing threat of unconventional weapons from other nations?
"It remains a dangerous world out there," Miller said. "We've kind of stopped focusing on the threat posed by others who are continuing to seek to acquire such weapons and, in the case of Al Qaeda, planning to use them if they can get them."
Last year, in its mea culpa for its reporting on Iraq's weapons, the New York Times said no one reporter or individual was responsible. But the newspaper conceded it had published stories that were "insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged."
Miller sent quite a different message at Berkeley.
When challenged about the 2003 story, she read a letter (previously published in the New York Times) from leaders of the U.S. military teams that she had been embedded with in Iraq. The statement by three Army officers, who had searched fruitlessly for unconventional weapons, said they were "firmly supportive" of Miller's reporting and strongly disagreed with the Times' critique.
By the end of the Berkeley visit, the strain of her double-profile showed. Miller smiled and demurred when a journalism professor called her stand for confidential sources heroic. She snapped back an angry denial when a Los Angeles Times reporter suggested she differed with her editors on the subject of weapons of mass destruction.
Bergman took Miller aside as she protested: "I did not need this. I really did not need this."
A few days later, Miller was off to London on another story. She would not disclose the topic. But she said she hoped to get one more major piece done before the jail sentence, long discussed, might become a reality.
"The thing about journalists is we are not soothsayers," she said. "And we are not omniscient. The answer to insufficient reporting is more reporting."
By James Rainey March 27, 2005
THE WOUNDED
If the rates of survival are encouraging, for many injured soldiers the conditions of survival are not. ''You live,'' says Lt. Col. Craig Silverton, an orthopedic surgeon who has treated soldiers in Iraq, ''but you have these devastating injuries.'' Modern body armor helps spare the head, heart, lungs and other internal organs, but the areas that remain unprotected -- limbs, neck and face -- are exposed to explosive forces that were often fatal in previous wars. Amputation rates among soldiers, according to recent Congressional estimates, have doubled to 6 percent from the historic norm. Brain injuries are also common.
The Air Force Theater Hospital, located 50 miles north of Baghdad at Balad Air Base, plays a central role in the treatment of combat trauma in Iraq. The hospital, part of the 332nd Expeditionary Medical Group, is a provisional structure of ventilated tents set on a cement foundation, powered by rumbling generators and fortified by sandbags and towering concrete blast walls. Many of the hospital's staff members had not treated combat trauma before arriving in Iraq; they typically spent their careers as medical professionals performing procedures like hip replacement and kidney-stone removal. 
Over four days last November, when these photographs were taken, doctors and staff members at the 332nd saw a flood of injuries and casualties from counterinsurgency operations in Falluja and insurgent strikes elsewhere in the country. That month, the hospital cared for 620 patients and performed 510 operations, a 65 percent increase from the previous two months. ''These young kids are heroes,'' says Col. Joseph Brennan, a head and neck surgeon. ''Somebody's got to pay the price. And these kids are paying the price.''
photos by Lynsey Addario/Corbis
caption top left: A member of the combat hospital's critical care air transport team, which is responsible for critically ill and injured patients during flights out of Iraq, prepares for departure.
top right: In the cargo hold of a C-17 aircraft, soldiers treated at the Air Force Theater Hospital at Balad Air Base, north of Baghdad, await evacuation to a military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany. This photograph was taken on Nov. 13, 2004, during a mortar attack on the base. The red lights indicate ''contingency situations.''
right: A registered nurse wipes blood from the face of a patient.
bottom: Lance Cpl. Kyle Blumenstock, 19, suffered eye injuries and hearing loss from the blast of an improvised explosive device.
New Details on F.B.I. Aid for Saudis After 9/11
Now, newly released government records show previously undisclosed flights from Las Vegas and elsewhere and point to a more active role by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in aiding some of the Saudis in their departure.
The F.B.I. gave personal airport escorts to two prominent Saudi families who fled the United States, and several other Saudis were allowed to leave the country without first being interviewed, the documents show.
The Saudi families, in Los Angeles and Orlando, requested the F.B.I. escorts because they said they were concerned for their safety in the wake of the attacks, and the F.B.I. - which was then beginning the biggest criminal investigation in its history - arranged to have agents escort them to their local airports, the documents show.
But F.B.I. officials reacted angrily, both internally and publicly, to the suggestion that any Saudis had received preferential treatment in leaving the country.
"I say baloney to any inference we red-carpeted any of this entourage," an F.B.I. official said in a 2003 internal note. Another F.B.I. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said this week regarding the airport escorts that "we'd do that for anybody if they felt they were threatened - we wouldn't characterize that as special treatment."
The documents were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Justice Department by Judicial Watch, a conservative legal group, which provided copies to The New York Times.
The material sheds new light on the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, and it provides details about the F.B.I.'s interaction with at least 160 Saudis who were living in or visiting the United States and were allowed to leave the country. Some of the departing Saudis were related to Osama bin Laden.
The Saudis' chartered flights, arranged in the days after the attacks when many flights in the United States were still grounded, have proved frequent fodder for critics of the Bush administration who accuse it of coddling the Saudis. The debate was heightened by the filmmaker Michael Moore, who scrutinized the issue in "Fahrenheit 9/11," but White House officials have adamantly denied any special treatment for the Saudis, calling such charges irresponsible and politically motivated.
The Sept. 11 commission examined the Saudi flights in its final report last year, and it found that no Saudis had been allowed to leave before national airspace was reopened on Sept. 13, 2001; that there was no evidence of "political intervention" by the White House; and that the F.B.I. had done a "satisfactory screening" of the departing Saudis to ensure they did not have information relevant to the attacks.
The documents obtained by Judicial Watch, with major passages heavily deleted, do not appear to contradict directly any of those central findings, but they raise some new questions about the episode.
The F.B.I. records show, for instance, that prominent Saudi citizens left the United States on several flights that had not been previously disclosed in public accounts, including a chartered flight from Providence, R.I., on Sept. 14, 2001, that included at least one member of the Saudi royal family, and three flights from Las Vegas between Sept. 19 and Sept. 24, also carrying members of the Saudi royal family. The government began reopening airspace on Sept. 13, but many flights remained grounded for days afterward.
The three Las Vegas flights, with a total of more than 100 passengers, ferried members of the Saudi royal family and staff members who had been staying at Caesar's Palace and the Four Seasons hotels. The group had tried unsuccessfully to charter flights back to Saudi Arabia between Sept. 13 and Sept. 17 because they said they feared for their safety as a result of the Sept. 11 attacks, the F.B.I. documents say.
Once the group managed to arrange chartered flights out of the country, an unidentified prince in the Las Vegas group "thanked the F.B.I. for their assistance," according to one internal report. The F.B.I. had interviewed many members of the group and searched their planes before allowing them to leave, but it nonetheless went back to the Las Vegas hotels with subpoenas five days after the initial flight had departed to collect further information on the Saudi royal guests, the documents show.
In several other cases, Saudi travelers were not interviewed before departing the country, and F.B.I. officials sought to determine how what seemed to be lapses had occurred, the documents show.
The F.B.I. documents left open the possibility that some departing Saudis had information relevant to the Sept. 11 investigation.
"Although the F.B.I. took all possible steps to prevent any individuals who were involved in or had knowledge of the 9/11/2001 attacks from leaving the U.S. before they could be interviewed," a 2003 memo said, "it is not possible to state conclusively that no such individuals left the U.S. without F.B.I. knowledge."
The documents also show that F.B.I. officials were clearly riled by public speculation stirred by news media accounts of the Saudi flights. They were particularly bothered by a lengthy article in the October 2003 issue of Vanity Fair, which included charges that the bureau considered unfair and led to an internal F.B.I. investigation that the agency named "Vanitybom." Internal F.B.I. correspondence during the review was addressed to "fellow Vanitybom victims."
Critics said the newly released documents left them with more questions than answers.
"From these documents, these look like they were courtesy chats, without the time that would have been needed for thorough debriefings," said Christopher J. Farrell, who is director of investigations for Judicial Watch and a former counterintelligence interrogator for the Army. "It seems as if the F.B.I. was more interested in achieving diplomatic success than investigative success."
Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, called for further investigation.
"This lends credence to the theory that the administration was not coming fully clean about their involvement with the Saudis," he said, "and we still haven't gotten to the bottom of this whole affair."
WASHINGTON, March 26 - The episode has been retold so many times in the last three and a half years that it has become the stuff of political legend: in the frenzied days after Sept. 11, 2001, when some flights were still grounded, dozens of well-connected Saudis, including relatives of Osama bin Laden, managed to leave the United States on specially chartered flights.
Now, newly released government records show previously undisclosed flights from Las Vegas and elsewhere and point to a more active role by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in aiding some of the Saudis in their departure.
The F.B.I. gave personal airport escorts to two prominent Saudi families who fled the United States, and several other Saudis were allowed to leave the country without first being interviewed, the documents show.
The Saudi families, in Los Angeles and Orlando, requested the F.B.I. escorts because they said they were concerned for their safety in the wake of the attacks, and the F.B.I. - which was then beginning the biggest criminal investigation in its history - arranged to have agents escort them to their local airports, the documents show.
But F.B.I. officials reacted angrily, both internally and publicly, to the suggestion that any Saudis had received preferential treatment in leaving the country.
"I say baloney to any inference we red-carpeted any of this entourage," an F.B.I. official said in a 2003 internal note. Another F.B.I. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said this week regarding the airport escorts that "we'd do that for anybody if they felt they were threatened - we wouldn't characterize that as special treatment."
The documents were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Justice Department by Judicial Watch, a conservative legal group, which provided copies to The New York Times.
The material sheds new light on the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, and it provides details about the F.B.I.'s interaction with at least 160 Saudis who were living in or visiting the United States and were allowed to leave the country. Some of the departing Saudis were related to Osama bin Laden.
The Saudis' chartered flights, arranged in the days after the attacks when many flights in the United States were still grounded, have proved frequent fodder for critics of the Bush administration who accuse it of coddling the Saudis. The debate was heightened by the filmmaker Michael Moore, who scrutinized the issue in "Fahrenheit 9/11," but White House officials have adamantly denied any special treatment for the Saudis, calling such charges irresponsible and politically motivated.
The Sept. 11 commission examined the Saudi flights in its final report last year, and it found that no Saudis had been allowed to leave before national airspace was reopened on Sept. 13, 2001; that there was no evidence of "political intervention" by the White House; and that the F.B.I. had done a "satisfactory screening" of the departing Saudis to ensure they did not have information relevant to the attacks.
The documents obtained by Judicial Watch, with major passages heavily deleted, do not appear to contradict directly any of those central findings, but they raise some new questions about the episode.
The F.B.I. records show, for instance, that prominent Saudi citizens left the United States on several flights that had not been previously disclosed in public accounts, including a chartered flight from Providence, R.I., on Sept. 14, 2001, that included at least one member of the Saudi royal family, and three flights from Las Vegas between Sept. 19 and Sept. 24, also carrying members of the Saudi royal family. The government began reopening airspace on Sept. 13, but many flights remained grounded for days afterward.
The three Las Vegas flights, with a total of more than 100 passengers, ferried members of the Saudi royal family and staff members who had been staying at Caesar's Palace and the Four Seasons hotels. The group had tried unsuccessfully to charter flights back to Saudi Arabia between Sept. 13 and Sept. 17 because they said they feared for their safety as a result of the Sept. 11 attacks, the F.B.I. documents say.
Once the group managed to arrange chartered flights out of the country, an unidentified prince in the Las Vegas group "thanked the F.B.I. for their assistance," according to one internal report. The F.B.I. had interviewed many members of the group and searched their planes before allowing them to leave, but it nonetheless went back to the Las Vegas hotels with subpoenas five days after the initial flight had departed to collect further information on the Saudi royal guests, the documents show.
In several other cases, Saudi travelers were not interviewed before departing the country, and F.B.I. officials sought to determine how what seemed to be lapses had occurred, the documents show.
The F.B.I. documents left open the possibility that some departing Saudis had information relevant to the Sept. 11 investigation.
"Although the F.B.I. took all possible steps to prevent any individuals who were involved in or had knowledge of the 9/11/2001 attacks from leaving the U.S. before they could be interviewed," a 2003 memo said, "it is not possible to state conclusively that no such individuals left the U.S. without F.B.I. knowledge."
The documents also show that F.B.I. officials were clearly riled by public speculation stirred by news media accounts of the Saudi flights. They were particularly bothered by a lengthy article in the October 2003 issue of Vanity Fair, which included charges that the bureau considered unfair and led to an internal F.B.I. investigation that the agency named "Vanitybom." Internal F.B.I. correspondence during the review was addressed to "fellow Vanitybom victims."
Critics said the newly released documents left them with more questions than answers.
"From these documents, these look like they were courtesy chats, without the time that would have been needed for thorough debriefings," said Christopher J. Farrell, who is director of investigations for Judicial Watch and a former counterintelligence interrogator for the Army. "It seems as if the F.B.I. was more interested in achieving diplomatic success than investigative success."
Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, called for further investigation.
"This lends credence to the theory that the administration was not coming fully clean about their involvement with the Saudis," he said, "and we still haven't gotten to the bottom of this whole affair."
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
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