Washington Times national security columnist and Washington Free Beacon senior editor Bill Gertz gets so many things wrong so often, it’s almost funny. Almost.
Take, for example, his apparent scoop last week that a Russian nuclear-powered attack submarine armed with long-range cruise missiles operated undetected in the Gulf of Mexico for several weeks. Two days after Gertz broke the story, Pentagon spokeswoman Wendy Snyder stated: “I don’t know what that information was based on, but it was not correct.” Perhaps the Pentagon is wrong, but that sounds like a categorical denial to me.
Things don’t get much better when it comes to Gertz’s reporting on nuclear-weapons related issues. What bothers me is not that he has an agenda (as InkSpotsGulliver once described it, seemingly every other sentence in his stories is littered with “loaded, leading pre-judgment”), that he parrots Rep. Michael Turner’s (R-OH) press releases as if they represent some kind of mainstream consensus, or that his reporting is often unbalanced and devoid of essential context. After all, Gertz works for a publication (the Washington Free Beacon) that is “dedicated to uncovering the stories that the professional left hopes will never see the light of day.”
No, what bothers me is his flagrant distortion of basic, elementary facts, and the way in which he uses these distortions to assault policy choices and views with which he disagrees. In 2012 alone I’ve identified nearly a half dozen articles in which Gertz takes extreme liberties with the truth in his reporting on nuclear weapons and missile defense (see below). I wouldn’t be surprised if there are more.
1. Headline: “Arms Control Mania”
Date: August 10, 2012
Lead: “A senior State Department arms negotiator said Thursday that Russian opposition to holding a new round of arms control talks does not mean a second strategic arms pact is out of reach.”
Fiction reported as fact:
“The current nuclear arsenal contains some 5,000 weapons and is being cut under the 2010 U.S.-Russia New START treaty to 1,550 warheads.”
Reality: The US nuclear arsenal of approximately 5,000 deployed and non-deployed (or reserve) warheads is not being cut under the New START treaty to 1,550 warheads. Gertz makes an apples-to-oranges comparison, which suggests that New START limits the total size of the stockpile – and therefore requires very deep reductions – when in fact the treaty only limits the number of deployed US warheads to 1,550 (subject to the treaty’s counting rules). As the United States draws down to meet New START’s 2018 implementation deadline, it will still maintain many hundreds of warheads in the active and inactive reserve.
2. Headline: “Nuclear Piffle”
Date: June 5, 2012
Lead: “A study funded by the anti-nuclear activist group Ploughshares Fund says the U.S.
government is spending too much on nuclear weapons.”
Fiction reported as fact:
“A study funded by the anti-nuclear activist group Ploughshares Fund says the U.S. government is spending too much on nuclear weapons.”
Reality: The Stimson Center study that is the subject of Gertz’s article does not take a position on whether the United States spends too much or too little on nuclear weapons. What the study does is provide an estimate of how much America spends on nuclear weapons (as defined in the study). As report authors Russell Rumbaugh and Nathan Cohn write, “At the very least, this study should clarify that official estimates relying on a narrow definition of the nuclear enterprise, or even of strategic nuclear offensive forces, understate the actual costs the United States spends on nuclear weapons without settling once and for all what is the single right cost of the nuclear enterprise.” Gertz purposefully misconstrues the content of the report in an effort to dent its credibility.
3. Headline: “Nuking the Nuke Ban”
Date: March 30, 2012
Lead: “An interagency intelligence assessment of the controversial Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) concludes that verifying the pact’s ban on nuclear tests remains difficult and that verification problems remain unresolved since the Senate first rejected the treaty in 1999.”
Fiction reported as fact:
“Former Energy Secretary Hazel R. O’Leary and Daryl G. Kimball, executive director of the liberal Arms Control Association, called for CTBT ratification in an op-ed in September. They argued that testing is essential to building nuclear arms.
Others, however, note that testing is no longer necessary for a viable nuclear device, as shown by early U.S. development of nuclear arms.”
Reality: O’Leary and Kimball do not state “that testing is essential to building nuclear arms.” What they actually wrote in their September2011 Los Angeles Times op-ed is that “Countries with nuclear weapons, such as China, India and Pakistan, cannot create advanced nukes without further nuclear test explosions. Without nuclear tests, Iran could not confidently build warheads for delivery by ballistic missiles.” Gertz distorts O’Leary and Kimball’s statement in an effort to undermine their case for the treaty.
4. Headline: “Nuking our Nukes”
Date: February 14, 2012
Lead: “President Obama has ordered the Pentagon to consider cutting U.S. strategic nuclear forces to as low as 300 deployed warheads—below the number believed to be in China’s arsenal and far fewer than current Russian strategic warhead stocks.”
Fiction reported as fact:
“President Obama has ordered the Pentagon to consider cutting U.S. strategic nuclear forces to as low as 300 deployed warheads—below the number believed to be in China’s arsenal and far fewer than current Russian strategic warhead stocks.
Reality: The best public estimate of the size of China’s nuclear arsenal puts it at 240 warheads, none of which are deployed. An apples-to-apples comparison would note that a US arsenal of 300 deployed warheads would also likely include warheads held in reserve, meaning that the total size of such an arsenal would still be larger than China’s force. Furthermore, the White House disputes the claim that it ordered the Pentagon to consider cutting US strategic nuclear forces to as low as 300 deployed warheads.
Headline: “Obama to share secrets”
Date: January 5, 2012
Lead: “President Obama signaled Congress this week that he is prepared to share U.S. missile defense secrets with Russia.”
Fiction reported as fact:
“Section 1227 of the [Fiscal Year 2012] defense law prohibits spending any funds that would be used to give Russian officials access to sensitive missile-defense technology, as part of a cooperation agreement without first sending Congress a report identifying the specific secrets, how they would be used and steps to protect the data from compromise.
The president also must certify to Congress that Russia will not share the secrets with other states and that it will not help Russia “to develop countermeasures” to U.S. defenses.
The certification also must show whether Russia is providing equal access to its missile defense technologies, which are mainly nuclear-tipped anti-missile interceptors.
Mr. Obama said in the signing statement that he would treat the legal restrictions as “non-binding.”
“While my administration intends to keep the Congress fully informed of the status of U.S. efforts to cooperate with the Russian Federation on ballistic missile defense, my administration will also interpret and implement section 1244 in a manner that does not interfere with the president’s constitutional authority to conduct foreign affairs and avoids the undue disclosure of sensitive diplomatic communications,” Mr. Obama said, incorrectly identifying the section of the law containing the restrictions.
Reality: Bear with me on this one. First, there is no Section 1227 in the final version of the FY 2012 National Defense Authorization Act. Both the Senate and House versions of the bill contained a Section 1227, but they had nothing to do with missile defense. Second, the specific prohibition and certification Gertz cites were included in Section 1228 of the House version (the provision is even more onerous than Gertz describes), but the House language did not prevail in conference. Thus, the President’s signing statement does correctly identify the section of the law (Section 1244), but the section does not include the specific restrictions Gertz alleges; it is a significantly watered down version of the original House language. Gertz appears to have simply assumed that the language in the House bill made it into the final bill. In doing so he gives the impression that the conditions placed by Congress on missile defense cooperation with Russia are for more restrictive than they actually are.
