Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? (Another New York Times Edition)

A Tiny Revolution is shrill:

A Tiny Revolution: NY Times: Downing Street Memo Background Is Too Good For The Likes Of Us: James Risen's new book State of War... contains critical new background on the Downing Street Memo. And incredibly enough, this information has NEVER been published by the New York Times.... [T]he Downing Street Memo is the official minutes to a meeting of the highest officials of the British government... on July 23, 2002. Part of the memo describes a presentation by Sir Richard Dearlove, head of MI6, the British equivalent of the CIA:

[Dearlove] reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.

...[W]ho exactly [did] Dearlove [meet] with in Washington.... Pundits wishing to play down the significance of the memo, such as Michael Kinsley, opined that Dearlove may have just been talking to "the usual freelance chatterboxes" and perhaps was simply reporting on the "mood and gossip of 'Washington.'"

This isn't what Risen writes, to say the least. According to State of War:

Dearlove was in part reporting on a CIA-MI6 summit he attended with other top MI6 officials at CIA headquarters on Saturday, July 20, 2002... the meeting was held "at the urgent request of the British"; CIA officials believe "Blair had ordered Dearlove to go to Washington to find out what the Bush administration was really thinking about Iraq"... Dearlove met privately with CIA head George Tenet for an hour and a half....

But the most puzzling issue may be this: what on earth makes the New York Times just sit on this kind of information?... As various outlets have reported, State of War also reveals that the CIA sent thirty relatives of Iraqi scientists to Iraq to ask them whether they were working on WMD programs. Every single relative reported back that the scientists said they weren't, and that Iraq had nothing. Not a word of this has appeared in the Times.

And it doesn't seem to be because Risen wasn't trying. The New York Observer has reported that:

...according to current and former Times sources familiar with the Washington bureau, Mr. Risen was gathering reporting from sources in the prewar period that cast a skeptical light on Saddam Hussein's alleged W.M.D. stockpiles, but either couldn't get his stories in the paper or else found them buried on the inside pages....

From the Times' perspective, there are some things we members of the great unwashed simply don't need to know.

Comments

[Howard]

as historians contemplate the great failure of media responsibility that was the runup to the iraq war, one word will echo in their minds, although they will be too polite to write it:

chickenshit.

[jerry]

"From the Times' perspective, there are some things we members of the great unwashed simply don't need to know."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Los_Angeles,_California#Initial_growth_1851-1913

"Sometime between 1899 and 1903, Harrison Gray Otis and his son-in-law successor, Harry Chandler, engaged in successful efforts at buying up cheap land on the northern outskirts of Los Angeles in the San Fernando Valley. At the same time they enlisted the help of William Mulholland, chief engineer of the Los Angeles Water Department (later the LADWP), and J.B. Lippencott, of the United States Reclamation Service. Lippencott performed water surveys in the Owens Valley for the Service while secretly receiving a salary from the City of Los Angeles. He succeeded in persuading Owens Valley farmers and mutual water companies to pool their interests and surrender the water rights to 200,000 acres (800 km²) of land to Fred Eden, Lippencott's agent and a former mayor of Los Angeles. Eden then resigned from the Reclamation Service, took a job with the Los Angeles Water Department as assistant to Mulholland, and turned over the Reclamation Service maps, field surveys and stream measurements to the city. Those studies served as the basis for designing the longest aqueduct in the world.

By July 1905, Chandler's L.A. Times began to warn the voters of Los Angeles that the county would soon dry up unless they voted bonds for building the aqueduct. Artificial drought conditions were created when water was run into the sewers to decrease the supply in the reservoirs and residents were forbidden to water their lawns and gardens. On election day, the people of Los Angeles voted for $22.5 million worth of bonds to build an aqueduct from the Owens River and to defray other expenses of the project. With this money, and with a special Act of Congress allowing cities to own property outside their boundaries, the City acquired the land that Eden had acquired from the Owens Valley farmers and started to build the aqueduct. On the occasion of the opening of the Los Angeles Aqueduct on November 5, 1913 Mullholland's entire speech was five words: "There it is. Take it.""

A different time and a different Times, but it makes me wonder how much Haliburton or Mobil is in Sulzberger's portfolio.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/10/politics/10cnd-prexy.html?ex=1294549200&en=12d1246eaac6f666&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

January 10, 2006

Bush Issues Stark Warning on Iraq Debate
By DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON - President Bush issued an unusually stark warning to Democrats today about how to conduct the debate on Iraq as midterm elections approach, declaring that Americans know the difference "between honest critics" and those "who claim that we acted in Iraq because of oil, or because of Israel, or because we misled the American people."

In a speech here to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Mr. Bush appeared to be issuing a pre-emptive warning to critics at a time when Democrats are divided between those who say the United States should begin a troop withdrawal now and those who have criticized Mr. Bush but say the United States should stay in Iraq as long as necessary.

In some of his most combative language yet directed as his critics, Mr. Bush said Americans should insist on a debate "that brings credit to our democracy, not comfort to our adversaries."

Mr. Bush was speaking in the same room in a Washington hotel where last month he described the effort to reconstruct Iraq before a skeptical audience: the Council on Foreign Relations, whose members greeted him with only tepid applause. But today 425 members of the V.F.W., which has passed a resolution supporting the Iraq action, interrupted the president repeatedly as he predicted that progress would be made in both fighting the insurgency and stabilizing the newly elected government.

Mr. Bush acknowledged major human rights abuses by the Iraqi police, who he said have been "accused of committing abuses against Iraqi civilians."

"That's unacceptable," he said, adding that the United States was adjusting how it trains Iraqi police officers, including the establishment of a new "Police Ethics and Leadership Institute" in Baghdad that will establish a curriculum for the nine Iraqi police academies. He made no references to disclosures over the past year of American abuses of detainees, in Iraq and elsewhere.

The president acknowledged slow progress in restoring basic services in Iraq, but argued that those problems paled in comparison to the progress he said Iraq was making.

"The vast majority of Iraqis prefer freedom with intermittent power to life in the permanent darkness of tyranny and terror," he said, an amplification of the theme he hit repeatedly in December in an effort to rebuild support for the war at home.

President Bush also pressed countries that have promised aid to Iraq to make good on their pledges. He praised Slovakia and Malta for forgiving all of Iraq's previous debts to those countries - though their concessions amounted to a couple of hundred million dollars. Among large countries, only the United States has forgiven all past Iraqi debt.

But it was Mr. Bush's warning to Democrats that ventured into new territory....

[justpete]

Didn't the NYT not report the story of the device worn under Bush's jacket in the debates because they admitted that it would influence the election?

But to this latest post, the irony is that basic everyday republicans, the NYT will remain the flagship of evil liberalism.

[jlw]

See, the grand narrative arc that Judith Miller was constructing would have been ruined by this information. Surely that is more important than the acknowledgement of the bastard birth of a war.

[Howard]

Anne, timely reminder: the american public, i think, is tired of the shallow little man in the oval office's shtick, but he doesn't have anything else to offer.

he's a nasty little piece of work with one of the thinnest skins ever seen in public life (comes from living a life without achievment or substance), but he's ready to rabbit punch in the clinches, and sometimes, that's all you need.

[bcinaz]

paper.of.who's.record?

[Ginger Yellow]

Is it just me, or are America's newspapers turning into research units for book authors?

[Ari]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/10/politics/10cnd-prexy.html?ex=1294549200&en=12d1246eaac6f666&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

Bush Issues Stark Warning on Iraq Debate
By DAVID E. SANGER

[This is an especially important post for it shows clearly how rough and tough a manner Bush has adopted in being President. When a President tells the opposition party during a war not to debate so as to "give comfort to our adversaries," this is intimidating, very intimidating.]

[Ari]

This Administration has repeatedly used fear to have its way with policy, but fear can be a powerful and effective tool.

[Ari]

Brad DeLong needs to continue to push to make the New York Times better, but the Times is excellent and has obviously learned a lot about how to cover the Administration more meticulously. Covering an Administration that uses fear as this one does to rationalize policy is difficult.

[Charles]

The New York Times is, I think, the unofficial voice of the State Department, independent of which party is in power.

It helped talk the American people into Iraq. It cheered on the laughable coup against Hugo Chavez, whose only success was in totally discrediting the US in Latin America. It silenced Ray Bonner when his reporting on American-sanctioned and even American-led genocide in Central American inconvenienced the Reagan Administration. It only opposed Vietnam *after* public sentiment had turned against it.

Massaging of the news goes back many years. Right-wingers like to point to how the NYT's correspondent to the USSR failed to notice Stalin's purge of the Ukraine, variously estimated at 3-20 million people (www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/USSR.TAB4A.GIF). They ascribe that to the NYT's supposed pro-communism, but that's ridiculous. The US also managed to fail to notice 50 million people killed under European colonialism (http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/) and continues to miss mass genocides such as occurred in Rwanda. The Bush Administration has presently concluded an alliance with the same people in Darfur who they were calling mass murderers, beyond the pale, a few short months ago.

Digression: My own guess is that Duranty wasn't willing or able to get out to the Ukraine and that the party leadership kept him happy and well-fed with news tidbits in Moscow. If George Kennan didn't know about it (www.delcotimes.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=14179064&BRD=1675&PAG=740&dept_id=226958&rfi=6), why should Duranty? But it's certainly possible that it was State Department policy not to notice Stalin's depradations-- just as Presidents Reagan and Bush didn't notice Saddam's depradations until he crossed the Kuwaiti border. Certainly the right-wing faction financing the rise of Hitler would not have minded at all Stalin killing off the young men he would need to defend himself a few years later.

Naturally, this is speculation. But the NYT's submissiveness to Washington does not seem to be partisan in nature. Instead, it seems to represent an internationalist faction inside government, slightly less paleo than the current Administration, but definitely Establishmentarian, pro-business, and dedicated above all to well-being of the American empire.

[psh]

Where did I see that research on factors associated with military coups? I seem to recall 3. In our case:

Civil institutions: perverted into polarizing factions
Legitimacy: long since flushed away
Prior coups: a near one, 30 years ago

So we're ripe for a military coup. It would greatly improve governance if the generals took over. More effective than impeachment., given our Congress, the servile since Tiberius ruled. I think we ought to be calling for a coup as the best of the realistic options. Our second best hope is Russian subversion through agents of influence such as Tom Delay.

[bob]

"It would greatly improve governance if the generals took over."
Max Weber's 1918 conversation with Ludendorff (as given in From Max Weber, ed. by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, p. 42)
L: ... what do you mean by a democracy?
W: In a democracy the people choose a leader in whom they trust. Then the chosen leader says 'Now shut up and obey me.' People and party are then no longer free to interfere in his business.
L: I could like such democracy.
W: Later the people can sit in judgement. If the leader has made mistakes - to the gallows with him!