One of Saddam Hussein's lawyers was killed today after he was abducted from his home by men wearing police

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One of Saddam Hussein's lawyers was killed today after he was abducted from his home by men wearing police uniforms in Baghdad. Khamis al-Obeidi, who represented Saddam and his half-brother Barzan Ibrahim, was abducted from his house at 7am local time, said Saddam's top lawyer Khalil al-Dulaimi. Chief prosecutor Jaafar al-Moussawi said al-Obeidi had been killed, although he did not provide more details. Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims."Other reporters have highlighted how, in the aftermath of 9/11, the media was less probing, at a time when the White House spokesman Ari Fleischer was warning all Americans "need to watch what they say". In some cases, information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged.

The New York Times has been one of the few to examine its own performance.In a "mea culpa" it wrote: "We have found a number of instances of coverage that were not as rigorous as they should have been. My question is, why did you really want to go to war?"The President would only say he did not accept the premise of her question.Critics have long highlighted the failure of much of the media to thoroughly challenge the claims of the US and British governments in the run-up to the invasion. Every reason given, publicly at least, has turned out not to be true. But people do worry about their jobs."Until 2003, Thomas sat at the front of presidential press conferences, though for three years Mr Bush failed to call on her.

In March, he asked her for a question and she said: "Your decision to invade Iraq has caused the deaths of thousands of Americans and Iraqis, wounds of Americans and Iraqis for a lifetime. Every reporter, rather than challenging it and saying [the 9/11 hijackers] were not Iraqis they were Saudis ... "It all comes down to the 9/11 terrorist attacks that led to fear among reporters of being considered 'unpatriotic' or 'unAmerican'."Thomas, who has covered every president since John F Kennedy, said she believed the press corps had recently recovered some of its spine and, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, had been asking more searching questions. The press rolled over and printed it when they knew we were going to war and it could have been challenged."She added: "Reporters have a duty to follow the truth wherever it leads them, regardless of politics. But she said when it really mattered - when, in her opinion, the media could have perhaps prevented the invasion of Iraq - the press failed to do its public service.She said: "When this war was obviously coming on, for two years we heard 'Saddam Hussein and 9/11'. "I ask myself every day why the media have become so complacent, complicit and gullible," she writes in Watchdogs of Democracy?, a book published this week.