An Examination of ‘Caliphate’

title: An Examination of ‘Caliphate’
author: Caliphate
contenttype: podcast
publication: Caliphate
published: 2020-12-18T09:05:34-05:00
sourceurl: https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/pdst.fm/e/pfx.vpixl.com/6qj4J/nyt.simplecastaudio.com/4bcf9c0c-53cf-4055-9873-1c15d39d0d33/episodes/24d0ba43-04af-4518-825d-a9507b0f8a31/audio/128/default.mp3?aid=rss_feed&awCollectionId=4bcf9c0c-53cf-4055-9873-1c15d39d0d33&awEpisodeId=24d0ba43-04af-4518-825d-a9507b0f8a31&feed=uUplVtAS

word_count: 4924

Dean, to start, can you explain at the highest level what we're here to talk about today? Yeah, certainly, Michael. Thank you. Well, first off, we're here to talk about a story that I believe we got wrong. And I think it's going to be important to explain why we got it wrong, and just to talk about it. In 2018, we published Caliphate, which was an audio series about a Canadian man who claimed to have spent several months in Syria as a low-level member of ISIS. He said he did some awful acts like doling out lashings to people as punishment and killing two men, stabbing one of them in the heart. He called himself Abu Husseinfa. His real name was Shiro's Chaudhry. This was a big story for us, a major story. Then a few months ago, the Canadian government arrested him, charging him with a terrorism hoax. They essentially accused him of pretending to be a terrorist when he was not, which when that happened, it raised the possibility that we had been duped. So I set up a group of New York Times journalists who were tough-minded, who would tell me honestly if we got it wrong. And then separately, we set up a group of very good reporters led by a guy named Mark Mazzetti who's a Pulitzer Prize-winning intelligence reporter, who would examine the story of this guy and tell us who was he, who is he, how did he come to duped the New York Times, not just the New York Times, by the way. He also adduped a lot of experts and others who thought that in fact they had stumbled on a really important story, a big story, a member of ISIS who was willing to talk about his life with the group. And what did they find? Essentially, the reporting team couldn't find any independent evidence to back up this story of being an ISIS executioner in Syria. All of this made me feel we couldn't no longer stand behind the story that we've thrown so much energy behind. And Michael, that's who we're here to talk about today. Did you keep using this word duped, which is a strong word? And I just want to understand what you think happened and were we duped, were we tricked? Why that word? In fact, duped might not be the best word because duped implied that we didn't do anything wrong. I think this guy we now believe was a con artist who made up most, it's not all of what he told us. And Dean, you are the executive editor of The New York Times. You are the senior most figure in the newsroom. Why are we having this conversation with you? Well, here's my view. Look, there was a well-known reporter involved in it, Rukhmeeni Kalamachi. But this failing isn't about any one reporter. I think this was an institutional failing. And frankly, I speak for the institution. And my view is if The New York Times gets any journalism wrong, the executive editor should talk about it, answer for it, and should have as his job to convince people that were being transparent, open about it. And we don't like making mistakes and we own up to our mistakes and we hope not to make them again. That's my job and that's why I'm speaking for it. And Dean, why is it that you've asked a separate group of reporters not Rukhmeeni, not the people who made Caliphate to do this basically post-fact-checking? This is standard. You always want to bring in a fresh, clear-eyed, open-minded reporter who can go in with no bias, no desire for the story to land one way or the other. And look at it with fresh eyes. And that's the reason you do it. And in this case, we chose somebody who had a deep, deep experience writing about terrorism and intelligence. So let's talk about why back in 2018, the times believed that this story was ready for publication. I've been a reporter at The New York Times for 15 years. I can say with some level of authority that we never just publish anything. There's a lot of fact-checking, source confirmation, source accumulation. And what did we have then that made us confident in moving forward? Yeah. I think the listener who heard this series would have found a very compelling portrait of a guy who said he was a member of ISIS. First off, his story was compelling. He was convincing. He didn't just convince the times. He convinced deraticalization experts who also said that they believed him. We had two sources in the intelligence community and the American government saying he was an ISIS member who went to Syria. He was on a no-fly list. And that's not too easy to get on. We had images of fighters inside Syria that he claimed to have taken. And we had a couple of people who claimed to be members of ISIS inside the caliphate who said that they believed him to be a member of ISIS. There was evidence that looked pretty compelling. I think what we've learned since is that that evidence that I just described, there was other evidence that people didn't get to hear that I think raised questions about some of that evidence. And he does that mean that evidence was known and not presented to the listener or we have subsequently learned information that now casts out. Most of what we're talking about is evidence that we've subsequently learned that cast out on. As I said earlier, Mark Mazzetti, who's an expert intelligence reporter in the Washington Bureau, he and a couple of his colleagues went out and did the reporting so we could try and answer this very question. And I think when you hear their account, it's a pretty compelling account, frankly, of the evidence that Chaudhry repeatedly misled people, provided false information in a way that to be honest should have cast ample doubt on the story. So when you say you believe that we got this wrong, that's what you're talking about. Not that there's definitive evidence disproving everything that Chaudhry said, but that we didn't present the story with enough focus on all the evidence that might have called his story into question. That's right. That's exactly right. So we are now going to turn to Mark Mazzetti to understand what he learned in his reporting. So thank you for your time. We're going to talk to you again in a little bit. Thank you. Mark, this story starts for you when Canadian officials arrest Chaudhry and they charge him with a terrorism hoax. And at that point, you get assigned by Dean to run this down, figure out what happened. Where did you start? Well, I ended up working with a group of reporters on this story, namely Ian Austin and Graham Bowley in Canada, as well as Maliki Brown, who did an investigation of photos and videos that Chaudhry posted on social media or provide a video. And we also had a social media or provided to the Caliphate team as it was preparing the podcast. We also had help from Salman Masoud, a reporter in Pakistan. Now listeners of Caliphate will remember that Chaudhry had family members in Pakistan. He said he stayed with before and after he claimed to have joined ISIS. He also attended a university there. And so Salman spoke to Chaudhry's family members and got his academic record from the whole university. He tried to pull together a timeline of Chaudhry's whereabouts during the time he claimed to be in Syria around 2014 to 2015. So you basically assembled a global team of times reporters were going to track down the various elements of this. Yeah, different people have different visibility and different aspects of the story. So we wanted to be able to get that expertise in place if we were going to do this investigation. What we first wanted to do was get a handle on what was behind this hoax charge against Chaudhry. So we spoke to a number of Canadian officials who had direct knowledge about the cakes. What we learned is that an investigation into Chaudhry actually began in 2016, shortly after he made a series of posts on social media claiming that he'd been a nicest fighter in Syria. These would have been the same posts that initially drew the attention of the times. Yes, they were captured by a researcher who then was in contact with the times. Okay. After the times and other news outlets published Chaudhry's claims, Canada came under a lot of pressure to explain why this self proclaimed terrorist and murder was back home in Canada living freely. Now we know they were actually in the middle of an investigation that ultimately somewhere along the way turned into a investigation into a hoax. And then of course a few months ago they arrested him. So I don't be clear because I think this timeline does feel important Mark. By the time Caliphate is published by the times Canadian officials are well into an investigation that will eventually they say show that he is not what he says he is. That's right. And it began as a plastic terrorism investigation, try to get evidence that Chaudhry was a returned fighter, someone who had been in Syria to charge him with terrorism or support to terrorist. Somewhere along the way as the evidence emerges to the prosecutors and intelligence and law enforcement officials, it goes into this hoax investigation. Got it. So it sounds like at first these investigators take him at his word. I am a terrorist. I've been an ISIS. I went to Syria and they start digging in and they're just not finding evidence that that's true. They certainly started the investigation on the premise that Chaudhry is telling the truth. So they then go investigate what is true and what is not true. They examined his travel records, his social media postings. They interviewed him extensively and contacted other governments for information about his travel. They contacted the Turkish and Iraqi governments because Turkey and Iraq are the two primary entry points for ISIS fighters to go into Syria. Chaudhry himself claimed he flew to Istanbul and then was brought to the Syrian border where he slipped into Syria. During this investigation, Canadian officials said they found no evidence to support any of his claims that he traveled to Syria. So presumably they've looked for travel records to Istanbul and sounds like they didn't find them. That's right. We did speak to one Canadian official who was not involved in the criminal investigation, who described a 2017 intelligence report that said Chaudhry had gone to Syria to join ISIS. But in the report, it said that Chaudhry basically did very little of consequence in the country and left pretty shortly after he arrived. But I should point out that isn't the current assessment of the Canadian government which is that he didn't go to Syria period. We also spoke to a number of American officials who also had visible in the case. Now the Americans and Canadians have this deep intelligence sharing partnership. What they said to us is while there had been an FBI investigation into Chaudhry, they now support the assertion by the Canadian government that he was an imposter. And help us understand that Mark listeners of Caliphate will remember well that two United States officials believed that Chaudhry had been in ISIS, had been in Syria. But you're saying that working in partnership with Canadian officials, US officials no longer believe that. Well, it's unclear to us what different American officials might have known or thought they knew at the time or who was looking at what information or what they know now versus what they knew then. We do know that the two officials whose information was mentioned in Caliphate in 2018 and said that Chaudhry had been in Syria, they have moved on to other jobs. And going back to them, they said they couldn't recall the Chaudhry case. The American officials we spoke to support the Canadian conclusion that Chaudhry was never a terrorist threat. They warned that they can't say with 100% certainty that he never entered Syria, but even if he did they said it would have been for only a brief period of time. The Canadians who conducted a four-year investigation into Chaudhry said they concluded that he was not a terrorist. They said their investigation had determined he was an imposter before Caliphate aired. Before Caliphate aired. That's right. And Mark, what about the no-fly list that Chaudhry was on according to American officials? So remember that several American officials in 2018 said that Chaudhry was on a no-fly list. And we didn't find anything during our investigation indicating that wasn't true. It also makes a fair amount of sense. We know that the Canadian government was actively investigating Chaudhry starting in late 2016. So it's not surprising that given the amount of information sharing that goes on between Canada and the United States. That he would be on a no-fly list while the Canadian government is investigating. Okay, so let's talk about the de-radicalization experts who deal with Chaudhry, who talked to him and found him to be compelling. What did they tell you? What did you find out? They disagree on whether Chaudhry was telling the truth. The expert who began dealing with Chaudhry before Caliphate aired a former radical himself and a police informant broke with him at the time of the podcast because he found him unwilling to accept help to change his radical beliefs. That expert now believes that Chaudhry's story is false. The other expert, an academic researcher who studies radicals and who remains in touch with Chaudhry, believes his story because of the emotional intensity with which Chaudhry tells him. But Mark, to this idea, the Chaudhry's story was so compelling and how he could have, in the words of Dean, duped so many people, including people who know the organization well. I'm curious, is the kind of information that he told the people, the story that he crafted? Is this the kind of information available to anyone online, these inside accounts of life, inside ISIS, or would he have had to have a unique set of experiences to be able to tell the story the way he did? So based on our reporting, he didn't fool the police in Canada for very long. Officials said they believe Chaudhry had studied the vast amount of videos and other information about ISIS that's available online. ISIS has this formidable online propaganda and recruitment operation. And this had apparently given Chaudhry an intimate knowledge of ISIS and might explain how he was able to tell such a compelling story. The people who know him say he spends a whole lot of his time at home on the internet. So that suggests he was a fan of ISIS. He was drawn to the group, just never actually joined the group, went to Syria and worked with them. I mean, there are a lot of examples of people radicalizing online, watching propaganda videos, watching jihadist postings, and gaining this deep knowledge of terrorist organizations without carrying out any terrorist acts themselves. But do officials believe that he was a supporter of ISIS or do they believe that he was kind of a con artist for the sake of being a con artist? It's a good question. I don't have a really clear answer on that. I mean, he clearly purported to be a supporter, not only of ISIS, but of radical groups that he thought were carrying out a cause and a mission. And that is what he told several people as to his true beliefs, still a little bit of a mystery to me. Okay. And what about the two men who said that they are ISIS officials and who said that they recognized Chaudhry from photographs that the Caliphate team provided of Chaudhry? Before Caliphate aired, Chaudhry told the times that he had an amir or a commander inside Syria. It turns out that amir had already been the subject of an article in a Swedish publication. So the writer of that article actually helps the times interview this self described amir, who said he recognized with some uncertainty, Chaudhry's face from a photograph the times provided. But the amir rejected the notion that Chaudhry had served under him. Instead, he said Chaudhry likely served in a military role, which contradicted another of Chaudhry's central assertions that he deliberately chose to avoid being a battlefield soldier. Later, the amir said to short voice message of another supposed ISIS official who claimed he remembered Chaudhry. But the times never had an interview with that second person. Caliphate also said the second person seemed to have inside information about Chaudhry, information that would have had a legitimacy to his account, specifically that he's Canadian. But it turns out he may actually been told some of that in advance. In other words, it's not entirely clear that he volunteered the information about Chaudhry being Canadian, unprompted. It's possible that was communicated to him by the amir or someone else, which would make the power of him, ideing Chaudhry less meaningful. That's right. So there's only so much stock we can put in the statements from the amir and the person on the voice message. Mark, finally, there's the question of social media. It was Chaudhry's posts on Instagram, purporting to depict his time in ISIS that first drew the attention of the times and others. So what have we learned about those images? He posted several photos of silhouetted fighters holding or shooting weapons on the battlefield and elsewhere around Syria. And in his comments, he also portrayed himself as a member of ISIS. Essentially, we found that Chaudhry took several photos from elsewhere on the internet and presented them as his own, or used them to create this image or persona of a ISIS fighter. One photo that he posted on Facebook and Instagram, which he described as his, quote, humble of ode, had in fact been taken by a professional news photographer distributed by a global photo agency. And we've determined that photos he showed the times before caliphate aired. Photos he said he took himself were actually taken in another part of Syria than he claimed. Beyond that, those photos had already been posted on the internet by someone else. At a time when Chaudhry ultimately admitted he was not in Syria. So the images ended up undermining his story, not bolstering. So those photos were indeed taken in Syria, but they were not taken in the location he claimed they were and they were not taken we think by him. They had previously been online. It seems like he essentially stole them. Yes, certainly repurposed them. Okay, Mark, at the time that Chaudhry claimed to have been in Syria and was posting these photos, what does your reporting find about what he was actually doing during that time if he wasn't in fact in Syria? Look, like the American government, we can't rule out the possibility that he went to Syria. But we put together a timeline of his whereabouts and found there was a pretty narrow window of time where he could have gone at all. And all the evidence that he presented to support the notion he went to Syria was either ripped from somewhere else, was inconclusive, or in the end just didn't hold up. We found a lot of misrepresentations by him and nothing that independently corroborated his claims of being an ISIS executioner inside Syria. So taken as a whole, we don't know of any definitive evidence that Chaudhry was not in ISIS and that is incredibly difficult to show, of course. But we also don't know of any evidence that he was and the number of holes in his story, the inconsistencies, the hard to explain timelines, the borrowed images, all of this has led officials to believe that this was a hoax. That's right. That's what they found and it's what we found in our investigation. And Mark, what did your reporting show about what is going on in Chaudhry's life right now? Another trial is coming up in Canada, what is his status and what is he telling you with anything? After he was charged, he was immediately released and he lives with his family in Burlington, which is just outside of Toronto. He spends a lot of his time working in his father's Shwarma restaurant. My colleague Ian Austin went to the restaurant twice and saw Chaudhry working there. Ian spoke to him briefly on the phone, but Chaudhry declined to comment. He, Chaudhry told the Caliphate team that he had rolled, had enrolled as a student in a local university, but Canadian officials say that's not true. And do we know how he plans to plead to these charges from the Canadian government? We spoke to his lawyer and his lawyer told us he'll plead not guilty. And what, if anything, does that tell us? It's a bit hard to say in order to convict him, prosecutors are going to have to show not only that he lied, but that he intended to so fear of terrorist activity among Canadians. So legal experts, we spoke to you said that second part of the charge could be difficult. In order to be charged with this terrorist hoax, they have to prove his intent. And that is, as we know, sometimes a hard thing to prove. To say that's a high bar that the Canadian government may not reach. Right. So according to the legal experts, you know, that could be his defense. And he's can't prove that Chaudhry intended to so fear among Canadians through social media posts, interviews, and other media appearances. So in this case, a not guilty play. That is not Chaudhry saying this is not a hoax. It would be him saying this charge is just too severe. We should not read a not guilty play as him saying I have been telling the truth. That's right. A not guilty plea would not necessarily mean Chaudhry is saying I'm not a hoax. It could mean that he and his lawyer are arguing that it was never his intent to so confusion, to so fear. And therefore he's not guilty of this charge. Mark, thank you. We appreciate it. Thanks Michael. Dean, Mark has reported on the specifics of the Chaudhry case. You are uniquely positioned to understand a different question. How the times as an organization handled this story from the start. So put simply how did and how could this all happen the way that it did? You know, I think this is one of those cases where we all had confirmation bias. And just explain that word. You get a really good story. And you have some evidence that even supports your really good story. It's not made up. I don't think there was any fraud here or deceit on our part. But a really good piece of journalism. Not only choose on the stuff that supports the story. It choose on the stuff that refutes the story. And in the end, good journalism comes from some sort of internal debate over whether or not the stuff that supports the story is more powerful than the stuff that refutes the story. I think this is one of those cases where I think we just didn't listen hard enough to the stuff that challenged the story. And to the signs that maybe our story wasn't as strong as we thought it was. But can I just dwell for a moment on the reporting that did seem to confirm the story? It's important to make sense of that. For example, to have two people inside the US government who are well placed confirming to the times. Back in 2018 that Chaudhry had been in ISIS, that he had been in Syria, that's a pretty important level of sourcing too. Not just one, but two independently, we think, confirming something that gives you reassurance. Now, you know, terrorism reporting is some of the hardest reporting there is. You can't call up the public affairs officer for ISIS. I'd say, did you do this? You can't Google or file a Freedom of Information Act request for their membership lists. Not only can't we do it, the government can't do it. The government pulls together the portrait that it has of ISIS through a little bit of gut, through a little bit of first hand intelligence, through a little bit of second hand intelligence, through a little bit of third hand intelligence. That is just how that kind of reporting has to work. So it doesn't surprise me that there were some in the government who through all of the methods I described had a view that was very different from what the Canadian government had. But our job was to just in a tough way evaluate the evidence that existed, as well as the evidence that refuted the evidence we used in the piece. And again, the reason I keep saying this was not, you know, deceit or fraud by the institution is because I think, you know, our sin was not paying enough attention to that powerful evidence, that question the evidence we had. You're always going to get merciness and a little bit of confusion when you write about the subject devices. You're just, you're always going to get it. It's never clean. But frankly, that's a reason to be five times as cautious. Dean, you have said that the times wasn't listening to the counter evidence here. Yeah. I guess, loudly enough. Yeah. From the growing body of evidence that you have seen, what information was available at the time of publication that should have been taken more seriously, that would have outweighed the confirmations and the evidence that the story was worth publishing. I mean, his whole account was based on his having been in Syria and his having committed these crimes while he was in Syria and his mark described the harder you looked at it, the harder you looked at the documentation he provided, the harder you looked at his timeline, the harder reporting you did, the harder you looked at the evidence, the Canadians accumulated. The clearer it was that it was not likely he was in Syria committing the terrible crimes he claimed. What should we have done differently now looking back in your mind? I thought about this a lot and I suspect I'm going to think about this a lot more. When the New York Times does deep, big, ambitious journalism in any format, we put it to a tremendous amount of scrutiny at the upper levels of the newsroom. I mean, if you look at something like our coverage of Donald Trump's finances, I read so many versions of those stories that frankly I could almost do Donald Trump's taxes. We did not do that in this case and I think that I or somebody else should have provided that same kind of scrutiny because it was a big, ambitious piece of journalism and I did not provide that kind of scrutiny. Nor did my top deputies with deep experience and examining investigative reporting and major takeout. Sounds like you regret that. Yo, I completely regret that. Yes, completely. I didn't personally pay enough attention to this one. Deena, at the end of the day, what does a case like this, a story like this? What does it do to people's faith in the Times? Is that something you're worried about? Of course it is. It's something I'm worried about. I mean, here's how I think you go about fixing things when you make a mistake. I have a contract with my readers, my audience, with everybody who touches the New York Times and consumes the New York Times. And the contract goes like this, if I get it wrong, I will admit it. I will own it. I will be transparent about it. I will explain how it happened. And I'll do it on every medium where we got it wrong. We're doing it this way for the people who listened to the Caliphate. We produced a very long, thoughtful column in the printed New York Times on the website by Ben Smith, our media columnist, who raised questions. I think the way you deal with this stuff is you say to your readers and your listeners, we got it wrong. Here's why we got it wrong. And we're going to do everything in our power not to get it wrong again. And I honestly believe reporting is the most important thing we do. And if you believe you get something wrong, the answer is more reporting. More reporting is always the answer to every question when people raise questions about your journalism. And sometimes we will learn things that make us uncomfortable. But that's the only way to do this. Well Dean, thank you very much. We appreciate it. Thank you Michael.