"Gentlemanly Minimum"
Phil Carter's take on the flyboy's stint in the guard, and why it matters.
I'm not sure I agree with Phil completely. It was a different time, a different war. The reason it matters so much more now than it did in the 2000 election cycle is because Bush's credibility or lack thereof, has been exposed completely. He and his aides lied about the effect the tax cuts would have on the deficit, on who will pay for any "fixes" to Social Security, and, oh yeah, on the reason for going to war with Iraq, to name just a few. If Bush had simply said, "Look, I've admitted that I wasn't the most upstanding guy when I was a young man. I saw a chance to learn to fly and to do it close to home. And to avoid dying in Vietnam. So I took it. I'm not proud of that now. I have nothing but respect for the men who fought in Vietnam and for the men and women in our military and national guard today. Judge me on who I am today, not on my 'youthful indiscretions,'" then I don't think this would be an issue. But he didn't. He stonewalled on this and continues to do so. And while playing rope-a-dope on this issue, he calls himself a "War President," says he supported "my government" on Vietnam, and attacks Kerry for daring to compare his guard "service" to draft dodgers.
"Gentlemanly Minimum" my ass. How long will Clinton be out of office before Hitchens stops raising his awful specter on every conceivable piece of Bush misbehavior?
CBS can't win for losing these days, but I applaud their decision to pull the Bush campaign... er... the ad for the new Medicare prescription drug law.
Billmon has an interesting take on why Bush hasn't fired Tenet and why, if the intelligence was so faulty (as opposed to misuse and exaggeration by the administration) no one in the CIA has been brought to heel.
"'Six in ten who think the U.S. intelligence agencies did an excellent or good job assessing the weapons situation also believe the Administration accurately interpreted the information it received, but seven in ten Americans who think the intelligence agencies performed badly say the Administration exaggerated what it knew.'
"In other words, in terms of public opinion, Bush and the CIA appear to be joined together at the hip on this issue. Most of those who support the administration don't want to admit the CIA screwed up; those who oppose Bush aren't inclined to cut the CIA any slack for the way the White House abused the intelligence process."
And I finally had a chance to read Michael Massing's important essay in The New York Review of Books, "Now They Tell Us." It's an examination of how news organizations failed to question the paper thin intelligence on WMD during the run up to war. You can read it here.
I won't try to summarize Massing's findings, Jack Shafer does a great job of that on Slate, especially on the horrendous reporting of Judy Miller of The Times. But Massing's thesis is clear: Reporters covering the Bush administration rely too heavily on senior officials -- the "white collar guys" -- who are politically appointed and fall in lock-step and on-message, rather than the worker bees -- the "blue collars" -- actually producing and analyzing the intelligence. If more reporters had talked to them, then the administration's "the smoking gun may well be a mushroom could" argument would have been more skeptically received.
In the period before the war, US journalists were far too reliant on sources sympathetic to the administration. Those with dissenting views?and there were more than a few?were shut out. Reflecting this, the coverage was highly deferential to the White House. This was especially apparent on the issue of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction? the heart of the President's case for war. Despite abundant evidence of the administration's brazen misuse of intelligence in this matter, the press repeatedly let officials get away with it. As journalists rush to chronicle the administration's failings on Iraq, they should pay some attention to their own.
While The Times and The Post were swallowing whole the administration's every claim about Iraq's nuclear capabilities and ties to al Qaeda, some reporters were, well, actually investigating.
Meanwhile, the tubes were drawing the notice of Knight Ridder's Washington bureau, which serves Knight Ridder's thirty-one newspapers in the US, including The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Miami Herald, and The Detroit Free Press. Almost alone among national news organizations, Knight Ridder had decided to take a hard look at the administration's justifications for war. As Washington bureau chief John Walcott recalled, in the late summer of 2002 "we began hearing from sources in the military, the intelligence community, and the foreign service of doubts about the arguments the administration was making." Much of the dissent came from career officers disturbed over the allegations being made by political appointees. "These people," he said, "were better informed about the details of the intelligence than the people higher up in the food chain, and they were deeply troubled by what they regarded as the administration's deliberate misrepresentation of intelligence, ranging from overstating the case to outright fabrication.
But Knight Ridder doesn't have a paper in New York or Washington to this reporting was invisible to the punditocracy. Meanwhile, the Post was running stuff so poorly reported that their own ombudsman took it to task.
On December 12, for example, The Washington Post ran a front-page story by Barton Gellman contending that al-Qaeda had obtained a nerve agent from Iraq. Most of the evidence came from administration officials, and it was so shaky as to draw the attention of Michael Getler, the paper's ombudsman. In his weekly column, Getler wrote that the article had so many qualifiers and caveats that
"the effect on the complaining readers, and on me, is to ask what, after all, is the use of this story that practically begs you not to put much credence in it? Why was it so prominently displayed, and why not wait until there was more certainty about the intelligence?"
And why, he might have added, didn't the Post and other papers devote more time to pursuing the claims about the administration's manipulation of intelligence? Part of the explanation, no doubt, rests with the Bush administration's skill at controlling the flow of news. "Their management of information is far greater than that of any administration I've seen," Knight Ridder's John Walcott observed. "They've made it extremely difficult to do this kind of [investigative] work." That management could take both positive forms?rewarding sympathetic reporters with leaks, background interviews, and seats on official flights?and negative ones? freezing out reporters who didn't play along. In a city where access is all, few wanted to risk losing it.
And the so-called liberal media was ready to pounce should any journalist fall out of line.
Such sanctions were reinforced by the national political climate. With a popular president promoting war, Democrats in Congress were reluctant to criticize him. This deprived reporters of opposition voices to quote, and of hearings to cover. Many readers, meanwhile, were intolerant of articles critical of the President. Whenever The Washington Post ran such pieces, reporter Dana Priest recalls, "We got tons of hate mail and threats, calling our patriotism into question." Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and The Weekly Standard, among others, all stood ready to pounce on journalists who strayed, branding them liberals or traitors?labels that could permanently damage a career. Gradually, journalists began to muzzle themselves.
David Albright experienced this firsthand when, during the fall, he often appeared as a commentator on TV. "I felt a lot of pressure" from journalists "to stick to the subject, which was Iraq's bad behavior," Albright says. And that, in turn, reflected pressure from the administration: "I always felt the administration was setting the agenda for what stories should be covered, and the news media bought into that, rather than take a critical look at the administration's underlying reasons for war." Once, on a cable news show, Albright said that he felt the inspections should continue, that the impasse over Iraq was not simply France's fault; during the break, he recalls, the host "got really mad and chastised me."
Meanwhile, The Times' stenographer, Judy Miller, gives a seminar on investigative journalism technique.
Yet there were many people challenging the administration's assertions. It's revealing that Gordon encountered so few of them. On the aluminum tubes, David Albright, as noted above, made a special effort to alert Judith Miller to the dissent surrounding them, to no avail.
Asked about this, Miller said that as an investigative reporter in the intelligence area, "my job isn't to assess the government's information and be an independent intelligence analyst myself. My job is to tell readers of The New York Times what the government thought about Iraq's arsenal." Many journalists would disagree with this; instead, they would consider offering an independent evaluation of official claims one of their chief responsibilities.
*****
Interesting. Barry Bonds has been on the Atkins diet I guess.
And Alan Barra takes the sensible view on why A-Rod going to the Yankees, while not so good for the Red Sox, is good for A-Rod, is good for the Yanks, is good for the Rangers, and, in fact, is good for baseball [sorry subscription required].
I'm not sure I agree with Phil completely. It was a different time, a different war. The reason it matters so much more now than it did in the 2000 election cycle is because Bush's credibility or lack thereof, has been exposed completely. He and his aides lied about the effect the tax cuts would have on the deficit, on who will pay for any "fixes" to Social Security, and, oh yeah, on the reason for going to war with Iraq, to name just a few. If Bush had simply said, "Look, I've admitted that I wasn't the most upstanding guy when I was a young man. I saw a chance to learn to fly and to do it close to home. And to avoid dying in Vietnam. So I took it. I'm not proud of that now. I have nothing but respect for the men who fought in Vietnam and for the men and women in our military and national guard today. Judge me on who I am today, not on my 'youthful indiscretions,'" then I don't think this would be an issue. But he didn't. He stonewalled on this and continues to do so. And while playing rope-a-dope on this issue, he calls himself a "War President," says he supported "my government" on Vietnam, and attacks Kerry for daring to compare his guard "service" to draft dodgers.
"Gentlemanly Minimum" my ass. How long will Clinton be out of office before Hitchens stops raising his awful specter on every conceivable piece of Bush misbehavior?
CBS can't win for losing these days, but I applaud their decision to pull the Bush campaign... er... the ad for the new Medicare prescription drug law.
Billmon has an interesting take on why Bush hasn't fired Tenet and why, if the intelligence was so faulty (as opposed to misuse and exaggeration by the administration) no one in the CIA has been brought to heel.
"'Six in ten who think the U.S. intelligence agencies did an excellent or good job assessing the weapons situation also believe the Administration accurately interpreted the information it received, but seven in ten Americans who think the intelligence agencies performed badly say the Administration exaggerated what it knew.'
"In other words, in terms of public opinion, Bush and the CIA appear to be joined together at the hip on this issue. Most of those who support the administration don't want to admit the CIA screwed up; those who oppose Bush aren't inclined to cut the CIA any slack for the way the White House abused the intelligence process."
And I finally had a chance to read Michael Massing's important essay in The New York Review of Books, "Now They Tell Us." It's an examination of how news organizations failed to question the paper thin intelligence on WMD during the run up to war. You can read it here.
I won't try to summarize Massing's findings, Jack Shafer does a great job of that on Slate, especially on the horrendous reporting of Judy Miller of The Times. But Massing's thesis is clear: Reporters covering the Bush administration rely too heavily on senior officials -- the "white collar guys" -- who are politically appointed and fall in lock-step and on-message, rather than the worker bees -- the "blue collars" -- actually producing and analyzing the intelligence. If more reporters had talked to them, then the administration's "the smoking gun may well be a mushroom could" argument would have been more skeptically received.
In the period before the war, US journalists were far too reliant on sources sympathetic to the administration. Those with dissenting views?and there were more than a few?were shut out. Reflecting this, the coverage was highly deferential to the White House. This was especially apparent on the issue of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction? the heart of the President's case for war. Despite abundant evidence of the administration's brazen misuse of intelligence in this matter, the press repeatedly let officials get away with it. As journalists rush to chronicle the administration's failings on Iraq, they should pay some attention to their own.
While The Times and The Post were swallowing whole the administration's every claim about Iraq's nuclear capabilities and ties to al Qaeda, some reporters were, well, actually investigating.
Meanwhile, the tubes were drawing the notice of Knight Ridder's Washington bureau, which serves Knight Ridder's thirty-one newspapers in the US, including The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Miami Herald, and The Detroit Free Press. Almost alone among national news organizations, Knight Ridder had decided to take a hard look at the administration's justifications for war. As Washington bureau chief John Walcott recalled, in the late summer of 2002 "we began hearing from sources in the military, the intelligence community, and the foreign service of doubts about the arguments the administration was making." Much of the dissent came from career officers disturbed over the allegations being made by political appointees. "These people," he said, "were better informed about the details of the intelligence than the people higher up in the food chain, and they were deeply troubled by what they regarded as the administration's deliberate misrepresentation of intelligence, ranging from overstating the case to outright fabrication.
But Knight Ridder doesn't have a paper in New York or Washington to this reporting was invisible to the punditocracy. Meanwhile, the Post was running stuff so poorly reported that their own ombudsman took it to task.
On December 12, for example, The Washington Post ran a front-page story by Barton Gellman contending that al-Qaeda had obtained a nerve agent from Iraq. Most of the evidence came from administration officials, and it was so shaky as to draw the attention of Michael Getler, the paper's ombudsman. In his weekly column, Getler wrote that the article had so many qualifiers and caveats that
"the effect on the complaining readers, and on me, is to ask what, after all, is the use of this story that practically begs you not to put much credence in it? Why was it so prominently displayed, and why not wait until there was more certainty about the intelligence?"
And why, he might have added, didn't the Post and other papers devote more time to pursuing the claims about the administration's manipulation of intelligence? Part of the explanation, no doubt, rests with the Bush administration's skill at controlling the flow of news. "Their management of information is far greater than that of any administration I've seen," Knight Ridder's John Walcott observed. "They've made it extremely difficult to do this kind of [investigative] work." That management could take both positive forms?rewarding sympathetic reporters with leaks, background interviews, and seats on official flights?and negative ones? freezing out reporters who didn't play along. In a city where access is all, few wanted to risk losing it.
And the so-called liberal media was ready to pounce should any journalist fall out of line.
Such sanctions were reinforced by the national political climate. With a popular president promoting war, Democrats in Congress were reluctant to criticize him. This deprived reporters of opposition voices to quote, and of hearings to cover. Many readers, meanwhile, were intolerant of articles critical of the President. Whenever The Washington Post ran such pieces, reporter Dana Priest recalls, "We got tons of hate mail and threats, calling our patriotism into question." Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and The Weekly Standard, among others, all stood ready to pounce on journalists who strayed, branding them liberals or traitors?labels that could permanently damage a career. Gradually, journalists began to muzzle themselves.
David Albright experienced this firsthand when, during the fall, he often appeared as a commentator on TV. "I felt a lot of pressure" from journalists "to stick to the subject, which was Iraq's bad behavior," Albright says. And that, in turn, reflected pressure from the administration: "I always felt the administration was setting the agenda for what stories should be covered, and the news media bought into that, rather than take a critical look at the administration's underlying reasons for war." Once, on a cable news show, Albright said that he felt the inspections should continue, that the impasse over Iraq was not simply France's fault; during the break, he recalls, the host "got really mad and chastised me."
Meanwhile, The Times' stenographer, Judy Miller, gives a seminar on investigative journalism technique.
Yet there were many people challenging the administration's assertions. It's revealing that Gordon encountered so few of them. On the aluminum tubes, David Albright, as noted above, made a special effort to alert Judith Miller to the dissent surrounding them, to no avail.
Asked about this, Miller said that as an investigative reporter in the intelligence area, "my job isn't to assess the government's information and be an independent intelligence analyst myself. My job is to tell readers of The New York Times what the government thought about Iraq's arsenal." Many journalists would disagree with this; instead, they would consider offering an independent evaluation of official claims one of their chief responsibilities.
*****
Interesting. Barry Bonds has been on the Atkins diet I guess.
And Alan Barra takes the sensible view on why A-Rod going to the Yankees, while not so good for the Red Sox, is good for A-Rod, is good for the Yanks, is good for the Rangers, and, in fact, is good for baseball [sorry subscription required].
posted by John at 5:36 PM
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