Carl Prine (born November 3, 1966) is a military investigative reporter who worked for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review from 2000 to 2016 and was involved in a number of investigations into the security of various US facilities. While working with a reporter from 60 Minutes , he helped in the production of a television special that investigated the failings of security at US chemical plants, which received national attention from the media and the government. Subsequently, he re-enlisted in the military for a tour in Iraq.
In his early years of reporting before joining the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review in 2000, Prine worked with The Daily Reporter. After leaving the Reporter, he was involved in covering numerous battlefield situations, such as "wars in Sierra Leone, Liberia and five other nations." [1] Later, he served as a correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor in Sierra Leone. [2]
Beginning in 2002 and through 2003, Prine started an investigation into the security of chemical plants against terrorism and sabotage. His preliminary results were published in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review in a segment called "Think Like A Terrorist". There was some backlash against the report, but the government was moved to draw up a bill requiring chemical plants to lessen the amount of dangerous chemicals they kept. The bill, however, was "lobbied into oblivion" by the American Chemistry Council. [3]
Not long afterward, Prine began working with 60 Minutes reporter Steve Kroft and continued his investigation of chemical plants to obtain further evidence. The standard procedure they employed was to walk into restricted areas in chemical plants and leave a business card on the hazardous materials storage tanks. [4] However, on September 22, 2003, during an investigation of a chemical plant on Neville Island, after walking into the facility unabated and inspecting the boron trifluoride tanks, they confronted the security manager of the plant upon exiting and he immediately called the police. They were convicted for the offense of trespassing by the District Court, but the verdict was overturned upon appeal at the Allegheny County Courthouse. [5] [6] [7] The team still obtained enough footage from their investigation and a 60 Minutes special aired on November 16, 2003, which discussed Prine's findings that "in many of 60 plants he visited across the country, he was able to walk through wide-open gates to areas where toxic or explosive chemicals were stored." [8] The Neville Island chemical plant responded to the report by saying that it was "misleading" and based on "worst-case data". [9] Not long after the airing, the chemical plant was dropped from the list of members of the American Chemistry Council. [10]
Prine joined the United States Marine Corps before becoming a journalist. In 2005, he joined the Pennsylvania Army National Guard and deployed to Iraq with the 1st Battalion of the 110th Infantry Regiment. During the tour, his unit was assigned to an area in between Ramadi and Fallujah. [11]
After returning from his tour in Iraq with the Army National Guard, Prine started a new investigation into "the vulnerability of the nation's 150,000 miles of railroad tracks and, specifically, the thousands of tanks cars rumbling over them every day." During his investigation, Prine found that a list of hundreds of vulnerabilities of the railroad had been compiled by the Federal Railroad Administration, but that none of the information on the list seemed to have been fixed by major railroad companies or the government itself since the list's creation. After the release of his report on the security of the US railroad system, Prine was accused by multiple railroad companies of trying to give terrorists information on how to attack the United States. The owner of the Railroad Development Corporation, Henry Posner III, stated that Prine was "profiting from the promotion of hysteria." [3]
Prine's reporting on football is extensive and he was cited in a 2008 report by the United States House Committee on the Judiciary for his information on the extremely high injury rates in the NFL compared to other professional sports. [12]
In 2011, Prine took over Military.com's Line of Departure blog. In July 2012, he left Line of Departure, citing a persistent migraine resulting from injuries during his military service in Iraq. [13]
In 2011, Carl Prine authored an investigative series in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review on the inadequacy of care for wounded US soldiers returning from Afghanistan and Iraq. [14] This series of articles, based on nine months of investigation, shed light on care delayed by red tape, shoddy facilities, and bureaucratic maneuvering to evade scrutiny and responsibility for the shortcomings of medical care for wounded troops.
The Iran–Iraq War, also known as the First Gulf War, was an armed conflict between Iran and Iraq that lasted from September 1980 to August 1988. Active hostilities began with the Iraqi invasion of Iran and lasted for nearly eight years, until the acceptance of United Nations Security Council Resolution 598 by both sides. Iraq's primary rationale for the attack against Iran cited the need to prevent Ruhollah Khomeini—who had spearheaded the Iranian Revolution in 1979—from exporting the new Iranian ideology to Iraq. There were also fears among the Iraqi leadership of Saddam Hussein that Iran, a theocratic state with a population predominantly composed of Shia Muslims, would exploit sectarian tensions in Iraq by rallying Iraq's Shia majority against the Baʽathist government, which was officially secular and dominated by Sunni Muslims. Iraq also wished to replace Iran as the power player in the Persian Gulf, which was not seen as an achievable objective prior to the Islamic Revolution because of Pahlavi Iran's economic and military superiority as well as its close relationships with the United States and Israel.
Iraq actively researched and later employed weapons of mass destruction (WMD) from 1962 to 1991, when it destroyed its chemical weapons stockpile and halted its biological and nuclear weapon programs as required by the United Nations Security Council. The fifth president of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, was internationally condemned for his use of chemical weapons against Iranian and Kurdish civilians during the Iran–Iraq War in the 1980s. Saddam pursued an extensive biological weapons program and a nuclear weapons program, though no nuclear bomb was built. After the Gulf War, the United Nations located and destroyed large quantities of Iraqi chemical weapons and related equipment and materials; Iraq ceased its chemical, biological and nuclear programs.
The Gulf War was an armed conflict between Iraq and a 42-country coalition led by the United States. The coalition's efforts against Iraq were carried out in two key phases: Operation Desert Shield, which marked the military buildup from August 1990 to January 1991; and Operation Desert Storm, which began with the aerial bombing campaign against Iraq on 17 January 1991 and came to a close with the American-led liberation of Kuwait on 28 February 1991.
This is a timeline of the events surrounding the United States-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.
The 2003 invasion of Iraq was the first stage of the Iraq War. The invasion began on 20 March 2003 and lasted just over one month, including 26 days of major combat operations, in which a United States-led combined force of troops from the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and Poland invaded the Republic of Iraq. Twenty-two days after the first day of the invasion, the capital city of Baghdad was captured by coalition forces on 9 April after the six-day-long Battle of Baghdad. This early stage of the war formally ended on 1 May when U.S. President George W. Bush declared the "end of major combat operations" in his Mission Accomplished speech, after which the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) was established as the first of several successive transitional governments leading up to the first Iraqi parliamentary election in January 2005. U.S. military forces later remained in Iraq until the withdrawal in 2011.
The 2003 invasion of Iraq had unprecedented US media coverage, especially cable news networks. US media was largely uncritical of the war, with many viewers falsely believing that Saddam Hussein and Iraq were involved with the 9/11 attacks. British media was more cautious in its coverage. The Qatari Al-Jazeera network was heavily critical of the war.
Carl Milton Levin was an American attorney and politician who served as a United States senator from Michigan from 1979 to 2015. A member of the Democratic Party, he was the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee from 2001 to 2003 and again from 2007 to 2015.
The Iraq Survey Group (ISG) was a fact-finding mission sent by the multinational force in Iraq to find the weapons of mass destruction alleged to be possessed by Iraq that had been the main ostensible reason for the invasion in 2003. Its final report, Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor to the Director of Central Intelligence on Iraq WMD, was submitted to Congress and the president in 2004. It consisted of a 1,400-member international team organized by the Pentagon and Central Intelligence Agency to hunt for the alleged stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, including chemical and biological agents, and any supporting research programs and infrastructure that could be used to develop WMD. The report acknowledged that only small stockpiles of chemical WMDs were found, the numbers being inadequate to pose a militarily significant threat.
Judith Miller is an American journalist and commentator who is known for writing about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program both before and after the 2003 invasion, but her writings were later discovered to have been based on fabricated intelligence. She worked in the Washington bureau of The New York Times before joining Fox News in 2008.
Richard Mellon Scaife was an American billionaire, a principal heir to the Mellon banking, oil, and aluminum fortune, and the owner and publisher of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. In 2005, Scaife was number 238 on the Forbes 400, with a personal fortune of $1.2 billion. By 2013, Scaife had dropped to number 371 on the listing, with a personal fortune of $1.4 billion.
Camp Bucca was a forward operating base that housed a theater internment facility maintained by the United States military in the vicinity of Umm Qasr, Iraq. After being taken over by the U.S. military in April 2003, it was renamed after Ronald Bucca, a New York City fire marshal who died in the 11 September 2001 attacks. The site where Camp Bucca was built had earlier housed the tallest structure in Iraq, a 492-meter-high TV mast.
The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, also known as "the Trib", is the second-largest daily newspaper serving the Greater Pittsburgh metropolitan area of Western Pennsylvania. It transitioned to an all-digital format on December 1, 2016, but remains the second-largest daily in Pennsylvania, with nearly one million unique page views monthly. Founded on August 22, 1811, as the Greensburg Gazette and consolidated with several papers into the Greensburg Tribune-Review in 1889, the paper circulated only in the eastern suburban counties of Westmoreland and parts of Indiana and Fayette until May 1992, when it began serving all of the Greater Pittsburgh metropolitan area after a strike at the two Pittsburgh dailies, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and The Pittsburgh Press, deprived the city of a newspaper for several months.
Farzad Bazoft was an Iranian journalist who settled in the United Kingdom in the mid-1970s. He worked as a freelance reporter for The Observer. He was arrested by Iraqi authorities and executed in 1990 after being convicted of spying for Israel while working in Iraq.
The following lists events in the year 2003 in Iraq.
Cyril Harrison Wecht was an American forensic pathologist. He was president of both the American Academy of Forensic Sciences and the American College of Legal Medicine, and headed the board of trustees of the American Board of Legal Medicine. Wecht served as County Commissioner and Allegheny County Coroner and Medical Examiner, serving the Pittsburgh metropolitan area. He was perhaps best known for his criticism of the Warren Commission's findings concerning the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
Walter Haskell Pincus is an American national security journalist. He reported for The Washington Post until the end of 2015. He has won several prizes including a Polk Award in 1977, a television Emmy in 1981, and shared a 2002 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting with five other Washington Post reporters, and the 2010 Arthur Ross Media Award from the American Academy for Diplomacy. Since 2003, he has taught at Stanford University's Stanford in Washington program.
The Iraq War, sometimes called the Second Gulf War, was a protracted armed conflict in Iraq from 2003 to 2011. It began with the invasion of Iraq by the United States-led coalition that overthrew the Ba'athist government of Saddam Hussein. The conflict continued for much of the next decade as an insurgency emerged to oppose the coalition forces and the post-invasion Iraqi government. US troops were officially withdrawn in 2011.
The 1991 Iraqi uprisings were ethnic and religious uprisings against Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq that were led by Shia Arabs and Kurds. The uprisings lasted from March to April 1991 after a ceasefire following the end of the Gulf War. The mostly uncoordinated insurgency was fueled by the perception that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had become vulnerable to regime change. This perception of weakness was largely the result of the outcome of the Iran–Iraq War and the Gulf War, both of which occurred within a single decade and devastated the population and economy of Iraq.
In violation of the Geneva Protocol of 1925, the Iraqi Army initiated two failed and one successful (1978–1991) offensive chemical weapons (CW) programs. President Saddam Hussein (1937–2006) pursued the most extensive chemical program during the Iran–Iraq War (1980–1988), when he waged chemical warfare against his foe. He also used chemicals in 1988 in the Al-Anfal Campaign against his civilian Kurdish population and during a popular uprising in the south in 1991.
The legality of the Iraq War is a contested topic that spans both domestic and international law. Political leaders in the US and the UK who supported the invasion of Iraq have claimed that the war was legal. However, legal experts and other world leaders have argued that the war lacked justification and violated the United Nations charter.
