WMD Profiteering

JERUSALEM -- There’s a joke circulating among journalists here: How is it that George W. Bush is so sure that Iraq purchased weapons of mass destruction?

Because the president is holding the receipt.

But this is no laughing matter to investigative reporter David Bedein, who believes the same weapons companies who supplied Iraq with WMD before 1990 continued doing so into the next century -- with the help of American companies. Bedein heads the Israel Resource News Agency, a long name for a little outfit. Its single-room office is located in the cavernous Israel government international press building, alongside other foreign press bureaus -- like Knight-Ridder's, which supplies news to the Inquirer and Daily News.

But Bedein's bureau is different. The burly, 54-year-old Philadelphia native and Akiba Academy graduate specializes in what he calls "proactive news investigations," the in-depth, shoe-leather, page-turning kind of journalism that few news organizations currently pay for. So, Bedein is hustling hard to fund his hunch. At the moment, he's got no takers.

There used to be an interest in finding out who profited from WMD, he says while waving a copy of a report, published by the Simon Wiesenthal Center in 1990, that allegedly documents the Germany-U.S.-Iraq pipeline. Bedein's also got a list of American companies -- including Dresser Industries, Hewlett-Packard and Honeywell -- that reportedly took part in some of the deals.

In the late '80s and early '90s, news outlets like NBC, ABC, The Washington Post and The New York Times ran lots of reports on these alleged connections but the media, says Bedein, has since grown silent.

Investigative reporting, he adds, has become a causality of corporate-media politics as there are now just too many toes that could be stepped on. One of Bedein's recent investigations is a compelling, if not convincing, essay that documents how the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) permits, and even encourages, terrorists to operate openly from inside its camps. Since the U.S. is a major contributor to UNRWA, that brings the inference that American tax dollars help arm Palestinian terrorists. But this story, released last August, has yet to break in the major media.

Bedein hoists a carton of his old stories that ran in major media, including op-ed pieces that appeared in the Inquirer. But recent regime changes at that newspaper, he says, have made his views unwelcome there. Those views may become even less acceptable when his book on media coverage of the Palestine Liberation Organization/Palestinian Authority is soon published. (Bedein's research can be found at www.israelbehindthenews.com.)

Meanwhile, Bedein is convinced he's sitting on a bombshell about WMD profiteering -- and he's waiting for the right news organization to light the fuse.

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