This week, well known NYT reporter Judith Miller wrote about Syria's attempts to develop nuclear weapons.
Assad is a 24 carrat scoundrel. He is capable of any kind of nastiness. But I no longer trust Miller's word for it. Jack Shafer has been keeping a vigil on Judith Miller's reporting on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Also read Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz (who has his own conflict of interest) on the subject of Judith Miller. Her credibility on the subject of WMD is shot to pieces. I am awed that NYT would let her report on this subject so soon after the last fiasco.
Talking of credibility, check out Walter Pincus and Dana Millbank's story on Dick Cheney's defence of the US administration's Iraq policy on the talk show circuit last sunday:
Similarly, Cheney argued that the administration did not understate the cost of the war in Iraq, saying it did not put a precise figure on it. Asked about previous assertions by then-White House Budget Director Mitchell E. Daniels Jr. that the war would cost $50 billion to $60 billion and that a figure in the range of $100 billion to $200 billion was too high, Cheney replied: "Well, that might have been, but I don't know what his basis was for making that judgment."
.....He then revived the possibility that Mohamed Atta, who led the Sept. 11 attacks, allegedly met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Baghdad five months before the attack.. ....An FBI investigation concluded that Atta was apparently in Florida at the time of the alleged meeting, and the CIA has always doubted it took place. Czech authorities, who first mentioned the alleged meeting in October 2001 to U.S. officials, have since said they no longer are certain the individual in the video of the supposed meeting was Atta. Meanwhile, in July, the U.S. military captured the Iraqi intelligence officer who was supposed to have met Atta and has not obtained confirmation from him.
Cheney also seemed to broaden the intelligence on other alleged al Qaeda connections with Hussein, saying, "The Iraqi government or the Iraqi intelligence service had a relationship with al Qaeda that stretched back through most of the decade of the '90s." Up to now, administration officials and CIA documents have said there had been eight meetings, primarily in the early 1990s, when bin Laden was in Sudan.
Cheney was less forthcoming when asked about Saudi Arabia's ties to al Qaeda and the Sept. 11 hijackers. "I don't want to speculate," he said, adding that Sept. 11 is "over with now, it's done, it's history and we can put it behind us."
....Of the weapons search, Cheney said, "We've got a very good man now in charge of the operation, David Kay, who used to run UNSCOM." Kay, who is heading the 1,200-person search group, did not in fact run UNSCOM, the U.N. Special Commission that directed inspections in Iraq from 1991 through 1998; he was for one year the chief inspector for the International Atomic Energy Agency, which handled the nuclear portion of those investigations for UNSCOM.
As evidence that Hussein had "reconstituted" his nuclear weapons program, as Cheney had said before the war, the vice president cited Hussein's prewar possession of "500 tons of uranium." But the material was low-grade uranium, the waste product of a nuclear reactor unusable for weapons production without sophisticated processing that Iraq could not do.
Cheney also spoke of a "a gentleman" who had come forward "with full designs for a process centrifuge system to enrich uranium and the key parts that you need to build such a system." The man, Iraqi scientist Mahdi Obeidi, had denied that the nuclear program had been reconstituted after 1991.
But Cheney knows what he was doing. A lot more people would watch the sound bites on TV than would read Washington Post.
A few weeks back, a Washingtonian story had puzzled over why the Post doesnt love Walter Pincus:
On March 16, the eve of war, Pincus wrote in the Post that ?U.S. intelligence agencies have been unable to give Congress or the Pentagon specific information? about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
At the time, the Bush White House was telling the world that America had to invade Iraq to root out weapons of mass destruction. Pincus quoted sources saying that there was ?a lack of hard evidence.? And they also said the White House had ?exaggerated intelligence? to back up its drive toward war.
Pincus was uniquely positioned to delve into the intricacies of the weapons question. At 70, he had been reporting on national security for 25 years at the Post. Along the way he had cultivated sources in Congress, the CIA, the Pentagon, and the scientific community. For decades, he has been close to chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix.
Yet the Post buried Pincus?s March 16 story on page A17. It took help from Bob Woodward to get the story published at all....According to reporters, editors continually underplayed Pincus?s scoops and discounted their stories that ran counter to Bush?s call to arms. None of which deterred him, especially after he dissected Secretary of State Colin Powell?s February 5 speech to the United Nations. ?I suddenly realized everything he said was inferential,? says Pincus. As he did with stories about the neutron bomb in the 1970s and the Iran-Contra affair in the 1980s, Pincus burrowed deep and wrote often.
...In June Pincus sunk his teeth deeper into the emerging story of the nuclear material that Iraq was supposed to have sought from Niger to make nuclear bombs. US officials repeated the claim as fact and talked ominously of mushroom clouds. President Bush mentioned ?significant quantities of uranium? in his State of the Union speech. .... Pincus pursued it day after day. He says he had to fight to get it on the front page. ?The best way to get a memo to the President is the front page of the Post,? he says. Finally, at the end of May, Pincus broke onto the front page with a story about the nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. He stayed there as his stories?some with other reporters?put pressure on the White House to admit that the President?s 16-word sentence about uranium going to Iraq was not credible.
Pincus eventually prevailed within his own newspaper, but why did a veteran reporter have to bow and scrape to get his stories noticed and then printed?
....What Pincus did was help put the Post in front of the biggest story of the day. Managing editor Steve Coll says of Pincus: ?We were proud of his coverage before the war, and we?re proud of it now, and we?ve tried to give it prominent display throughout.?
(Some links via TPM)