Back in the shadows again. Less than a week after she crawled out of her spider hole to take the Times' tentative first jab at Richard Clarke, Judy Miller seems to have been un-personed again. At least, that's one conclusion you could draw from Dexter Filkins' article today on "nimble and protean" Ahmad Chalabi ("Chalabi, Nimble Exile, Searches for Role in Iraq"). In a piece devoted to putting as plausible a face as possible on Chalabi's prospects for taking a lead political role in Iraq (prospect somewhat mixed, since three times as many Iraqis in a recent ABC News/BBC poll indicated they didn't trust Chalabi "at all" as said the same about Saddam Hussein), Filkins rather delicately notes that Chalabi's credibility has "come under assault" (it's quite a week for credibility assaults, isn't it?) here in the States:

Mr. Chalabi's star began to wane in Washington, as the Bush administration's claims about Mr. Hussein's weapons capabilities and his presumed ties to Al Qaeda — in no small part based on information provided by Mr. Chalabi — failed to be confirmed.

Nevertheless, the Department of Defense continues to pay his organization $340,000 a month to gather intelligence in Iraq.

Mr. Chalabi has no regrets about any information, however misleading, that he passed to the Americans before the war. "We are heroes in error," Mr. Chalabi told The Daily Telegraph of Britain in an interview last month. "As far as we're concerned we've been entirely successful. That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important. The Bush administration is looking for a scapegoat. We're ready to fall on our swords if he wants."

And Miller, the American media's chief enabler of Chalabi's WMD fictions? Doesn't come up: Filkins seems to have forgotten about her entirely. Poor Judy, a prophet without honor ...

posted by michael  6:29:22 PM  
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Condi-scension. Two reports, four reporters. That's how much it takes at the Times to get things wronger than not about l'affaire Condi: i.e., the will-she-won't-she hubbub about Rice appearing again before the 9/11 panel. Put another way, the Times is on this like ugly on Tom DeLay, with the emphasis on ugly. Key grafs, first from the sorry, half-coherent hash of the A1 story:

In a letter to the commission's chairman, the White House counsel, Alberto R. Gonzales, said a return session would allow Ms. Rice to clear up "a number of mischaracterizations" of her statements and positions. Mr. Gonzales said she would not appear at a public session of the panel because, he wrote, it was critical that presidential advisers "not be compelled to testify publicly before Congressional bodies such as the commission." ...

Ms. Rice told commissioners that White House officials had told her she should not testify under oath. While the panel requires officials appearing in public to testify under oath, there is no such requirement for those testifying in private.

Adam Nagourney and Richard W. Stevenson, "Rice Is Agreeable to Return for More of 9/11 Panel's Queries"

Liz Bumiller and Philip Shenon spend inexplicable column inches on A12 duplicating the effort:

Ms. Rice has said repeatedly that if she had her way, she would testify, and late on Thursday she offered to be interviewed in private, as she was for four hours on Feb. 7. But President Bush, her close confidante, has been adamant, White House officials say, that any public appearance would violate longstanding precedent against incumbent national security advisers testifying before a legislative body.

Bumiller and Shenon, "Panel Hasn't Heard From Official It Wants Most"

A couple of salient, corrective facts seem to have escaped the grasp of these dual duumvirates: Condi is not offering, as Nagourney and Stevenson have it, to "testify in private," because it isn't testimony, by definition and by commission procedure, if you don't swear to it. Bumiller and Shenon also elide the distinction between testifying and being interviewed. MSNBC, on the other hand, managed to navigate the difference just fine in its report, and to note that it's not just a finical issue: Rice is trying an end-around (my conclusion, not MSNBC's), since "the panel has consistently required anyone rebutting sworn testimony to be similarly under oath." And Josh Marshall didn't have to sweat too much to learn, actually before Bumiller and Shenon glibly parroted it as fact, that no "longstanding precedent" against testimony from sitting national security advisers actually exists: as he reports from a 2002 Congressional Research Service study, "two of Rice's predecessors as National Security Advisor [have] given public testimony: Zbigniew Brzezinski in 1980 and Sandy Berger in 1997."

The two articles repeat criticism of Rice, some of it salient, but there's a line they simply won't cross: suggesting that maybe Condi isn't testifying (or otherwise appearing, yet) because she's possibly not that keen on having to speak under oath and in an environment she can't control. On the contrary. Nagourney and Stevenson are happy to spend a paragraph giving commission member Jim Thompson space to praise Condi's marvelous (in the Jane Austen sense) condescension:

"She said, `If you need me back at any time, I'd be delighted,' " Mr. Thompson said. "So my guess is that we will call her back."

And the graf quoted from Bumiller and Shenon's article, making sure we know that Dubya is Rice's good good pal ("her close confidant") and citing Dear Leader and his nice concern for precedent as the adamantine force in the equation—surely that betrays the touch of the master? Indeed, the next graf after it reads like an outtake from a White House [Love] Letter:

Ms. Rice is described by administration officials as being frustrated at having to remain publicly silent before the commission and as being eager to make her arguments against the case that Richard A. Clarke, her former subordinate, has marshaled against her.

The needless anonymity, the lap-dog repetition of gosh-darn-sincere Republican self-assessment: pure Lizzy Boo. I can just see Dubya holding Condi back (with maybe some stout support from Alberto Gonzalez) as she strains to bum-rush the door into the commission's chambers, ready to shout her story to the rooftops. Yeah, that's the ticket.

posted by michael  5:39:13 PM  
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