NY Review of Books has a comprehensive critique of the shameful job of reporting and analyzing WMD intelligence the mainstream press did in the runup to the Iraq war, with considerable focus on the Times and its reporter Judith Miller, by far the worst of the bunch—certainly the most arrantly, and arrogantly, uninterested in the real requirements of her job. Try this on for size:

Miller said that as an investigative reporter in the intelligence area, "my job isn't to assess the government's information and be an independent intelligence analyst myself. My job is to tell readers of The New York Times what the government thought about Iraq's arsenal." Many journalists would disagree with this; instead, they would consider offering an independent evaluation of official claims one of their chief responsibilities.

Necessary reading. Thanks to Atrios for the link.


posted by michael  4:00:09 PM  
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A few begged questions. Hmmm ... I praised Times reporting in my last post, and now I'm starting to get all itchy ...

By way of scratching that itch, here are three begged questions in each of the articles I commended, in ascending order of beggedness:

• Jeffrey Gettleman ("Assassinations Tear Into Iraq's Educated Class") can find only a single American official willing to comment for the record, Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, identified as "a spokesman for the occupation forces." He says about what you'd expect a military flack to say, "the guerillas are waging war on Iraq's fledgling institutions and progress itself," and that old standby, "foreign terrorists may be behind the attacks." I profess myself unconvinced that foreign terrorists are likely to have either the ground-level intelligence or the compelling motivation to target the Iraqi professional class for destruction. I'd like to have seen Gettleman challenge Kimmitt a little on this boilerplate, either that or exclude it from the story altogether. More important, given that Kimmitt acknowledges that the assassination program "works against everything we're trying to do here," why does Gettleman let it pass when he later reports Kimmitt saying that the American military isn't involved in investigating the crimes? Is this really something that should be left exclusively to the Iraqi police, such as they are?
• Douglas Jehl ("Agency Alert About Iraqi Not Heeded, Officials Say") says that an Iraqi military defector's bogus claims about mobile weapons labs "were mistakenly included" in the October 2002 NIE, and quotes his sources describing it "as a mistake" that the defector "was among four sources cited" by Colin Powell in his U.N. Security Council presentation last February. Jehl's language makes it seem that he accepts the "mistake" claim, but how are he and his sources in a position to affirm this? I find it difficult to believe that the "fabrication notification" issued by the DIA on the defector was simply, innocently overlooked by parties (I'm glancing in your undisclosed direction, Dick Cheney) that were promoting both the INC and the most affirmative possible treatment of Iraq WMD intelligence.
• David E. Sanger ("Administration's Message on Iraq Now Strikes Discordant Notes") critiques the fact that Bush's intelligence panel includes only one member with actual technical knowledge of intelligence-gathering, and finds the panel's makeup "in sharp contract to the last major investigative panel that the administration appointed," the panel on the Columbia disaster, which included "specialists on composites and propulsion, organizational dynamics and safety, along with experts who spend their lives thinking about the future of the space program." Good enough. But if Sanger is going to gesture toward the politics of composing the intelligence whitewash panel, why does he not address the career of its Republican co-chair, Laurence Silberman? Actually this isn't a begged question so much as a completely ignored question, not just by Sanger but by the entire mainstream media. In case you're unaware of it, Silberman is a radical right-wing pit bull who masquerades for fun and profit as a Federal judge, and David Neiwert of the invaluable Orcinus is precisely on target when he says that the appointment of Silberman to the intelligence "investigation" is even more egregious than Bush's attempt at appointing Henry Kissinger to head the 9/11 commission. The bloggers have got Silberman down cold; why can't the Times with all its resources do the job?

posted by michael  2:55:44 PM  
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Printed to fit? Give the Times some love: today's A section offers the strongest work I've seen assembled at one time in the paper in a long while, certainly since I started this blog. Let's go to the highlights:

• A sobering report on A1 by Jeffrey Gettleman that discusses an apparent program of assassinations in Iraq targeting the educated, professional elite—the backbone, in other words, necessary to the development of any genuine civil society in the country. "Hundreds of intellectuals and mid-level administrators ... have been assassinated since May in a widening campaign against Iraq's professional class."
• An A6 piece by Douglas Jehl ("Agency Alert About Iraqi Not Heeded, Officials Say") that offers details about the gulling of U.S. intelligence by an Iraqi defector, whose false claims about mobile biological weapons labs made it into the National Intelligence Estimate and ultimately into Colin Powell's big pre-war presentation to the U.N. Security Council. "A classified 'fabrication notification' about the defector, a former Iraqi major, was issued by the D.I.A [Defense Intelligence Agency] to other American intelligence agencies in May 2002, but it was then repeatedly overlooked, three senior intelligence officials said. ... Intelligence officers from the D.I.A. ... concluded [the defector] had no firsthand information and might have been coached by the Iraqi National Congress ..."
• A sharp and genuinely analytic piece of news analysis by David E. Sanger ("Administration's Message on Iraq Now Strikes Discordant Notes") on A6 that comes uncomfortably close to honesty in an Executive Moment. This is as much reporting as it is analysis, in fact, and offers context that might well have been included in Douglas Jehl's front-page news piece about the Bush intelligence whitewash panel and wasn't. "People close to Mr. Bush say he has been frustrated that Mr. Kay's assessment rekindled all the arguments that dominated the news over the summer ... Mr. Bush certainly was in no mood Friday to entertain many questions on the issue of intelligence. He announced the commission's formation in a five-minute statement. He barely introduced its co-chairmen, former Senator Charles S. Robb of Virginia and Laurence H. Silberman, a senior federal appeals judge in Washington. He left the room without taking questions. More to the point, Mr. Bush never explained whether the charter of the commission would extend beyond intelligence gathering to the politically crucial question of how the White House had used the intelligence it received."

And for those keeping track at home, the first two items are national stories actually broken by Times reporters, a thing that as far as I can tell happens all too rarely these days.

But see, here's the deal. I can understand that Jehl's defector piece doesn't make it onto A1—what the story points to, that phony intelligence was fed by the INC to willing clients within the Bush war party, isn't much of a surprise, though I've never seen it documented to this degree before. And it's reasonable to want to set some limit on front-page coverage having to do with Iraq, and if it's a competition between Gettleman's assassination story and Jehl's report, I'd have gone with Gettleman too.

But the Jehl piece isn't an Iraq story, it's a Washington story about Iraq-war intelligence: and on a day when an inquiry into that intelligence is the lead item, why does the defector story wind up on A6, with a brace of articles datelined in or near Iraq, and not on A8, devoted to coverage of the intelligence panel, where it would seem to belong? Maybe that looks like nitpicking. But notice as well that, in its placement of Sanger's article, the Times has broken with its usual practice, in the case of a major Presidential announcement, of locating an analysis piece on A1 in direct apposition to the straight-news report. In the slot where you'd expect Sanger's article to have gone appears instead—bizarrely—a tepid rehash of John Kerry's 1996 Senate campaign against William Weld. (The author, Kate Zernike, gambits for relevance by saying that "how John Kerry bounced back from being declared dead in 1996 provides valuable insights into him as a campaigner," but you can tell from the article her heart's not really in it.)

To me, the Kerry piece is the giveaway. I can only come to the conclusion that, on a day when their reporters aren't pulling enough punches, the Times editors'll make up for it by pulling a few of their own. The Dear Leader and his Great Crusade may be hurting a bit right now, but please, let's do what we can to minimize the damage, OK?

posted by michael  1:30:39 PM  
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