Elsewhere on the Chalabi front, a quick search turned up this amusing little tidbit. Somehow, I doubt the local NYT haters will be trumpeting this particular story too much, but who can say? My understanding, though, is that the NYT is bad only when they fail to toe the war propaganda line.
Reassessing Miller slate.msn.com
[excerpt ]
U.S. intelligence on Iraq's WMD deserves a second look. So does the reporting of the New York Times' Judith Miller.
By Jack Shafer
Posted Thursday, May 29, 2003, at 4:11 PM PT
The lead editorial in Monday's New York Times applauds the news reported in the Times' own pages that the CIA is reassessing the prewar intelligence about Iraqi's unconventional weapons programs collected by the CIA, the National Intelligence Council, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and other agencies. The editorial reads:
The failure so far to find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the prime justification for an immediate invasion, or definitive links between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda has raised serious questions about the quality of American intelligence and even dark [sic] hints that the data may have been manipulated to support a pre-emptive war. [Emphasis added.]
If the government must re-examine whether data may have been "manipulated" to support the war, surely the New York Times should conduct a similar postwar inventory of its primary WMD reporter, Judith Miller. In the months running up to the war, Miller painted as grave a picture of Iraq's WMD potential as any U.S. intelligence agency, a take that often directly mirrored the Bush administration's view.
Now, thanks to the reporting of the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz, we understand why Miller and the administration might have seen eye-to-eye on Iraq's WMD. On the same day as the Times editorial appeared, Kurtz reproduced an internal Times e-mail in which Miller described Ahmad Chalabi, the controversial Iraq leader, former exile, and Bush administration fave, as one of her main sources on WMD.
"[Chalabi] has provided most of the front page exclusives on WMD to our paper," Miller e-mailed Times Baghdad bureau chief John Burns. Miller added that the MET Alpha—a military outfit searching for WMD after the invasion—"is using Chalabi's intell and document network for its own WMD work."
The failure of "Chalabi's intell" to uncover any WMD has embarrassed both the United States and Miller. As noted previously in this column, she oversold the successes of the post-invasion WMD search. On April 21, she reported in the Times that an Iraqi scientist had led MET Alpha to a site where Iraqis had buried chemical precursors for chemical and biological weapons. "Officials" told Miller this was "the most important discovery to date in the hunt for illegal weapons." . . . |
