'NY Times' Fails to Acknowledge Its Role in WMD Hype: "Judith Miller and other Times reporters knew, even if CIA analysts did not know the origin of suspect information, that it was provided by exile organizations promoting an American invasion of Iraq.
Incredibly, nevertheless, Miller places the onus on U.S. intelligence for the gross discrepancies between what she reported on Iraqi WMD before the war, and the largely blank sheet of the Iraqi Survey Group submitted by David Kay: 'The fact that the United States so far hasn't found WMD in Iraq is deeply disturbing,' she told Michael Massing in his article 'Now They Tell Us,' in the New York Review of Books (Feb. 26). 'It raises real questions about how good our intelligence was. To beat up on the messenger is to miss the point.' This from a messenger who, in 2002-2003, persisted in publishing shaky and deceptive information that abetted the designs of her high-level administration and INC sources.
But 11 months after the war began, there have been no editors' notes or corrections that single out the 'bum-steer' reports on weapons of mass destruction written mostly by star WMD correspondent Miller, say, between September 2002 and September 2003. Frequently, front-page exclusives were based on INC source information proffered by U.S. government 'officials,' or funneled by defectors and the exile group to the Times directly.
No wonder that it was often impossible to know where the Times left off and the government began, or vice versa, in one 'news' report after another on WMD in Iraq."
- posted by geoff @ #