Spooks swallowing their own tails

One of the serious maladies of the Israeli media is
its tendency to cite news items from the foreign
media regarding sensitive security issues, without
checking them. It's enough for some foreign
newspaper to mention the Mossad or the reactor in
Dimona for the item to be the top story on Israeli
news broadcasts. This happens even when the
information is clearly false: Does anyone really
believe that the Mossad's secret plan to attack
nuclear sites in Iran reached a German news
weekly, as publicized last weekend? And if the
information is correct, where are Attorney General
Elyakim Rubinstein and all the investigators of
leaks? After all, people are reprimanded and
deposed and prosecuted for much less.

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Over the years, the intelligence communities in
the West have disseminated a collection of
guesses, fairy tales and exaggerations about
Saddam Hussein and his regime that they called
"intelligence information." The decision-makers
and the media relied on them as proven facts.
And then the Americans occupied Iraq, and
didn't find anything - neither weapons of mass
destruction, nor Saddam's famous bunker. This
is not a case of an error in assessment, as in
the Yom Kippur War, but information that was
exaggerated and, in part, even false, and made
the rounds among the various intelligence
services.

The Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense
Committee is now investigating the astonishing
and serious intelligence failure in Iraq, and
is also reviewing whether the Israel Defense
Forces' Military Intelligence and the Mossad
were fed with planted news items that were
disseminated in the international media and
reabsorbed here as intelligence information
(directly and via foreign services).

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Intelligence organizations treat the media as a
tool in the game against rival intelligence
services, rather than as a representative of
the public's right to know. A headline
published in London or in Hamburg that will
embarrass Iranian President Mohammad Khatami or
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak is more
important than the reliability of the report.
It's important to remember this when one
encounters bombastic headlines about the
frightening threats around us, or about the
successful response that Israel is developing
to combat them.

Haaretz