Elbow room. Reporting on SecDef Rumsfeld's testimony to Congress yesterday (and on the prospect of George Tenet's speech scheduled at Georgetown today), Douglas Jehl and Eric Schmitt ("Rumsfeld and Tenet Defending Assessments of Iraqi Weapons") want to make sure they give Big Don Vader all the space he needs so he can really stretch out and do that voodoo he do. In the ten grafs the piece devotes to that testimony, seven are offered for the Don's convenience in telling us his latest version of the known knowns, the known unknowns, and the unknown knowns, or whatever. You've heard it all before, no need for me to summarize it here.

Apparently Rummy "faced sharp questions from Democrats" about manipulation of pre-war intelligence, but apparently the questioning wasn't of so much consequence. After all, this is as much attention as Jehl and Schmitt think it warrants:

"The debacle cannot all be blamed on the intelligence community," said Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts. "Key policy makers made crystal clear the results they wanted from the intelligence community."

Mr. Rumsfeld told Mr. Kennedy that his assertions were baseless. "You've twice or thrice mentioned manipulation," Mr. Rumsfeld said. "I haven't heard of it, I haven't seen any of it, except in the comments you've made."

Ouch! Guess Rumsfeld got the better of that one, huh?

Of course, when you look at the transcript provided by the WaPo, you see that quite a distance separates what Kennedy's quoted as saying, which comes early in his prepared remarks, from what Rumsfeld says later in his exchange with Kennedy, after he's spent a bit of time trying to tap-dance away from what looks like some aggressive questioning. Which is not to suggest that Jehl and Schmitt are engaged in misrepresenting the confrontation, exactly, but they do seem to have decided to spice it up just a bit for the home audience.

And if, in the process, they rip the substance out of it and out of Kennedy's position? Well, we all know about collateral damage. The actual point Kennedy makes in his remarks, little attested in the latest flap over the Iraq intelligence and completely glossed over here, is that "many in the intelligence community were right," that in the atmosphere of certainty required by the Rumsfeld-Cheney cabal (my phrasing, not Kennedy's) "warnings from the intelligence community [of the unreliability of the most affirmative intelligence] ...were not noted or [were] glossed over." What Kennedy grills Rumsfeld about, in fact, isn't simply "manipulation" of intelligence but the possibility that dissent within the intelligence community was suppressed, specifically that Rumsfeld failed in his responsibility to report that dissent to Congress.

Since I wasn't reading the transcript for the drama, what caught my eye was this Rumsfeldian jaw-dropper:

I never have gone around the intelligence community. The intelligence community doesn't always agree, and you have hundreds of people and they have footnotes and they have different opinions, and you develop a consensus.

Sometimes I really don't know if I inhabit the same planet that Times reporters do. Because in my world, Don Rumsfeld is the guy who created his own personal intelligence analysis shop in the runup to war for the sole and exact purpose of going around the (established) intelligence community and subverting its consensus! But that mustn't have happened on planet Jehl/Schmitt, because if it did how the hell does this flat-out contradiction not rate even a mention? Or do Jehl and Schmitt just think that context is for suckers?

Update (2/06): Looks like Sidney Blumenthal would agree with the point Kennedy was making. Why is Blumenthal's piece appearing in a UK paper and not here?
posted by michael  7:36:22 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

Department of Huh? I need to add some kind of WTF count to the blog. There's not a week that goes by that A1 doesn't flat mystify me with at least one story whose very existence, never mind its being allocated front-page real estate, is impossible to account for. (My impression—completely unsupported by research and so probably unfair—is that these WTF moments have become much more frequent during the Bill Keller regime.) Today in the Times, the letters W, T, and F are brought to you by Amy Harmon ("Geeks Put Clueless on Notice: Learn or Log Off"), who brings us the shattering news that technically adept computer users (who sometimes go by the term "computer geeks") get impatient with less technically adept users, who are often intimidated by the complexity of personal computer software.

No, I'm not kidding, that's the story. The whole thing. It's full of gems of social observation like this:

For years, many self-described computer geeks seemed eager to usher outsiders onto their electronic frontier. Everyone, it seemed, had a friend or family member in the geek elite who could be summoned—often frequently—in times of computer crisis.

But as those same friends and family members are called upon again and again to save the computer incompetents from themselves, the geeks' patience is growing thin. As it does, a new kind of digital divide is opening up between populations of computer users who must coexist in the same digital world.  ...

Many of the computationally confused say they suffer from genuine intimidation and even panic over how to handle the mysterious machines they have come to rely on for so much of daily life

A new kind of digital divide? Mysterious machines? Harmon fakes up a news peg for the story by calling on the recent MyDoom outbreak, but this piece of cheese was moldy back in 1988. Aside from the typing (or the getting of the previously typed thing from the file cabinet), all the work Harmon put into this story was the effort of phoning around for illustrative quotes from random computer users—friends of yours, Amy?

We're supposed to believe that Harmon's noticed a trend, I guess, because of this:

Some in the technocamp imagine requiring a license to operate a computer, just like the one required to drive a car. Others are calling for a punishment that fits a careless crime. People who click on virus attachments, for instance, could be cut off by their Internet service providers until they proved that their machines had been disinfected.

Ah, the "some are saying" maneuver, a favorite of I-can't-be-bothered journalists everywhere. Really, Amy? Who, exactly, is suggesting that people be licensed to drive computers, or cut off by their ISPs after they succumb to virus attacks? Because I sure as hell haven't seen such proposals being floated, and it's not like you actually source anybody for them. Are you discussing something real at all, or just making shit up?

It's not just the intellectual laziness on display here that bothers me. What's really sad is the implication that the Times editors are themselves so clueless about technology issues (not to mention standards of argument) that they actually thought there was something—anything—of substance in this piece.

posted by michael  5:54:36 PM  
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