Yet more on Paul Moran

I may very well regret this, but in the inter­est of fair­ness and/or throw­ing gaso­line on a dying fire, I’m reprint­ing Shel­don Rampton’s email to me — with his full per­mis­sion — in which he responds to Eric Camp­bell, the Aus­tralian Broad­cast­ing Corp. reporter who defended Paul Moran’s work in Iraqi Kur­dis­tan. (And whose crit­i­cism led me to apol­o­gize.) Ramp­ton is the co-author of “Weapons of Mass Decep­tion,” which was the orig­i­nal prod to this whole Paul Moran imbroglio.

As the co-author with John Stauber of “Weapons of Mass Decep­tion,” I read with inter­est your recent apol­ogy about Paul Moran, the Aus­tralian TV cam­era­man who was killed in Iraq and who also worked for the Ren­don Group. How­ever, I think you have apol­o­gized exces­sively and pre­ma­turely. In “Weapons of Mass Decep­tion,” John and I describe Moran’s work for Ren­don very briefly, but there is more to the story than we tell there. We decided not go go into fur­ther detail, partly because a more exten­sive telling didn’t seem to fit within the flow of that chap­ter. How­ever, the facts in total are actu­ally MORE dis­turb­ing than you would imag­ine from the brief men­tion that appears in our book. More­over, I would chal­lenge some of the state­ments that Eric Camp­bell made in his com­ments to you.
To begin with, Camp­bell refers to an “unend­ing rep­e­ti­tion of false claims” about Moran. How­ever, Colin James, the reporter who first wrote about Moran’s rela­tion­ship with the Ren­don Group, con­tin­ues to stand by his story. James works for the “Ade­laide Adver­tiser,” and he learned about Moran’s work for Ren­don when he attended his funeral. Accord­ing to “The Bul­letin,” an Aus­tralian news mag­a­zine, James sat down with “two close friends and two of Moran’s broth­ers” the day after the funeral:

They drank cof­fee and rem­i­nisced about their friend the altar boy, the sea scout, the livewire. The jour­nal­ist was inquir­ing of the cameraman’s work in north­ern Iraq when one of the friends men­tioned that Moran worked for a “shad­owy” com­pany. Shad­owy com­pany, won­dered the jour­nal­ist. What­ever could you mean? The friend men­tioned a name: the Ren­don Group. He talked of Moran’s involve­ment in help­ing an Iraqi defec­tor escape and Moran’s work with the INC. Moran, he said, had helped mobilise a pop­u­lar upris­ing against Sad­dam Hussein’s regime and trained dis­si­dents in the use of hid­den cam­eras. There were the renowned “Paul Moran chan­nels” � he seemed able to con­tact impor­tant peo­ple with lit­tle bother � and the “James Bond lifestyle”. In short, Moran had spent a decade, on and off, try­ing to desta­bilise Sad­dam Hussein’s regime for a com­pany hired by both the CIA and Pen­ta­gon.
Per­haps Moran’s death wasn’t so ran­dom, after all. Per­haps this nice guy had a secret. Well, that’s how the jour­nal­ist reported it, any­way. Colin James, an Ade­laide Adver­tiser reporter with a 1994 Walk­ley Award, stands by his story. No one demurred while one friend spun tales about Moran, he says. James’ main fear dur­ing the inter­view was that his eyes might turn into saucers. He rushed back to the office and punched “Ren­don Group” into an inter­net search engine. And his eyes grew wider.

The URL for the above story is as fol­lows: http://​bul​letin​.ninemsn​.com​.au/​b​u​l​l​e​t​i​n​/​E​d​D​e​s​k​.​n​s​f​/0/
B1B47ED7DABBEDBCCA256D480013C030?Open­Doc­u­ment It should be noted that Colin James did not intend his story to be any sort of attack or crit­i­cism of Moran’s work. To the con­trary, it was head­lined “Moran’s secret cru­sade against the tyranny of Sad­dam,” and it is full of lauda­tory com­ments about Moran by his griev­ing friends. You can read James’ story at the fol­low­ing URL:
http://​www​.thead​ver​tiser​.news​.com​.au/​p​r​i​n​t​p​a​ge/ 0,5942,6239116,00.html
Clearly, James’ account dif­fers from Eric Campbell’s claim that Moran merely “did occa­sional audio visual pro­duc­tion work [for] Ren­don and other PR com­pa­nies.” More­over, James’ account is cor­rob­o­rated and ampli­fied in a TV seg­ment for the Aus­tralian news pro­gram Date­line. You can read a tran­script of the pro­gram and view the video at the fol­low­ing URL:
http://​www​.sbs​.com​.au/​d​a​t​e​l​i​ne/
trans.php3?dte=2003 – 07-23&title= Paul+Moran+Story
The Date­line pro­gram inter­viewed Zaab Sethna, a long­time spokesman for the Iraqi National Con­gress. Accord­ing to Sethna, he and Moran began work­ing together more than a decade ago, prior to Oper­a­tion Desert Storm:

When I first met Paul we were work­ing for the gov­ern­ment of Kuwait. That ended after Kuwait was lib­er­ated by the Amer­i­cans and then the Ren­don group came back us to. We weren’t employ­ees we were on con­tract. The Ren­don group came back to us and said, “We now have a con­tract to bureau­cracy, to kind of do anti-Saddam pro­pa­ganda on behalf of the Iraqi oppo­si­tion.”
So, there was some radio, some tele­vi­sion, there was like a trav­el­ling human rights exhi­bi­tion around the world to show Saddam’s human rights vio­la­tions. There was send­ing out press releases, kind of stan­dard pub­lic rela­tions. What we did�nt know, what the Ren­don group didn’t tell us, was in fact it was the CIA that had hired them to do this work so we hired on…

More­over, Moran’s rela­tion­ship with the INC and the Ren­don Group led to one of the high-profile inter­na­tional news sto­ries that pur­ported to doc­u­ment a covert Iraqi pro­gram to develop weapons of mass destruc­tion. As Sethna explains in the Date­line piece, Moran was cho­sen by the INC as one of only two reporters (the other was Judith Miller of the New York Times) invited to inter­view Adnan Ihsan Saeed al Haideri, an Iraqi defec­tor who claimed that he had been used by Sad­dam to build spe­cialised bunkers and other facil­i­ties for chem­i­cal, bio­log­i­cal and nuclear weapons research. After Miller and Moran did their sep­a­rate sto­ries on al Haideri, he dis­ap­peared into a U.S. wit­ness pro­tec­tion pro­gram. You can see some of the sto­ries about Iraq that were based on al Haideri’s alle­ga­tions at the fol­low­ing URLs: http://​www​.cbsnews​.com/​s​t​o​r​i​e​s​/​2​0​0​2​/​0​1​/​1​8​/​e​v​e​n​i​n​g​n​e​ws/ main324937.shtml
http://​usinfo​.state​.gov/​t​o​p​i​c​a​l​/​p​o​l​/​t​e​r​r​o​r​/​0​1​1​2​2​1​0​7​.​htm
http://​observer​.guardian​.co​.uk/​w​o​r​l​d​v​i​e​w​/​s​t​o​ry/ 0,11581,669024,00.html
As this exam­ple illus­trates, it is inac­cu­rate for Camp­bell to char­ac­ter­ize Paul Moran as merely a cam­era­man. The Aus­tralian Broad­cast­ing Cor­po­ra­tion also treated him as a reporter and allowed him to break a story that was of major impor­tance in mak­ing the case for war with Iraq. To have this story reported by some­one who has worked closely with both the Ren­don Group and the Iraqi National Con­gress is a clear case of con­flict of inter­est. Eric Camp­bell is merely blow­ing smoke when he tries to use the dis­tinc­tion between a “con­tract worker” and an “employee” as his basis for claim­ing that no such con­flict existed. It is also strik­ing that no one has been able to sub­stan­ti­ate al Haideri’s detailed descrip­tions (includ­ing loca­tions) of an exten­sive weapons pro­gram that included under­ground stor­age facil­i­ties. As Scott Rit­ter has pointed out, it would have been impos­si­ble for Sad­dam Hus­sein to destroy such facil­i­ties quickly with­out leav­ing a trace in the days pre­ced­ing the war. There is a good chance that al Haideri’s claims about weapons facil­i­ties were the basis for Don­ald Rumsfeld’s claim on March 30 that “We know where they are.” But if we knew where they are, why haven’t we found them by now?
I think that it is also rather disin­ge­nous for Camp­bell to com­plain that it is now “too late to repair the dam­age” of allegedly “false claims” about Moran that have cir­cu­lated on the Inter­net. Fol­low­ing the pub­li­ca­tion of Colin James’s story in the Ade­laide Adver­tiser, Moran’s fam­ily and friends were asked repeat­edly to clar­ify the facts about his life and work, and they repeat­edly declined to do so, usu­ally cit­ing their grief as the rea­son for remain­ing silent. The Aus­tralian Broad­cast­ing Cor­po­ra­tion has also been very “eco­nom­i­cal with the truth” in its com­ments on the mat­ter. For exam­ple, here is the URL to a tran­script from ABC’s “Media Watch,” which com­ments on the Ade­laide Adver­tiser:
http://​www​.abc​.net​.au/​m​e​d​i​a​w​a​t​c​h​/​t​r​a​n​s​c​r​i​p​t​s​/​s​8​3​2​0​3​2​.​htm
The ABC response con­sists of call­ing Colin James’s story “a super­fi­cial piece” and then declin­ing to com­ment fur­ther on grounds that it wasn’t “a story most of the Aus­tralian media followed” — a clas­sic “non-denial denial” that fails to iden­tify a sin­gle error of fact in James’s story while insin­u­at­ing that some­thing was wrong with it. And how can Moran’s peo­ple have it both ways? If the Colin James story wasn’t fol­lowed by most of the media, how can it have caused the intense grief and suf­fer­ing of which they com­plain? And if they can’t be both­ered to pub­licly cor­rect any errors in the story, why should we take them at face value now when they com­plain that errors have gone uncor­rected? And what errors specif­i­cally are they talk­ing about? The only error that Camp­bell men­tions in his com­plaint to you is that Moran worked on con­tract for Ren­don rather than being an “employee.” That’s arguably an error on your part (not ours), but it’s a pretty nit-picky com­plaint, given the extent of Moran’s rela­tion­ship with the Ren­don Group.
As for the com­plaint that Moran is being vil­lainized, John and I never char­ac­ter­ized him as a vil­lain, and nei­ther did you. I think Camp­bell brought up that claim for the pur­pose of emo­tional intim­i­da­tion. I have no doubt that Camp­bell liked Paul Moran and resents read­ing crit­i­cism of his work. I also have no rea­son to doubt that Moran believed in the cause of the Kurds, and he prob­a­bly also believed in the work he did for the INC. Peo­ple who work on pub­lic rela­tions cam­paigns often inter­nal­ize the beliefs of their clients. “Sin­cer­ity of belief,” how­ever, is not a valid defense against the spe­cific charge of con­flict of inter­est, and by any rea­son­able inter­pre­ta­tion, Moran crossed that line. To say that this is the case does not mean that Moran was a vil­lain, and it is not intended to con­vey any dis­re­spect for the dead. Out of respect for the LIVING, how­ever, I think the pub­lic is enti­tled to know the full story of how we were sold the war on Iraq.

Shel­don Ramp­ton Edi­tor, PR Watch (www​.prwatch​.org)
Author of books includ­ing:
Friends In Deed: The Story of US-Nicaragua Sis­ter Cities
Toxic Sludge Is Good For You
Mad Cow USA
Trust Us, We’re Experts
Weapons of Mass Deception

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p>There is obvi­ously more to this story than a first — or sec­ond or third — glance shows. I’ll be work­ing on this one over the next few days.

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