Author: Jonathan Schwarz

Dear White House reporters,

Here’s a question you might ask Tony Snow at one of those little get-togethers you have:

Tony, as you know, Dan Bartlett said back in July, 2003 that President Bush didn’t read all of the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq before he took the country to war.

In the five months since it’s been completed, has the president read all of the most recent National Intelligence Estimate on terrorism?

Let me know if you find out the answer.

your friend,
Jon

From Hubris by Michael Isikoff and David Corn:

It rankled Powell that his U.N. presentation had come to be considered a pivotal event on the path to war: “It’s annoying to me. Everyone focuses on my presentation…Well the same goddamn case was presented to the U.S. Senate and the Congress and they voted for [Bush’s Iraq] resolution…Why aren’t they outraged? They’re the ones who are supposed to do oversight. The same case was presented to the president. Why isn’t the president outraged? It’s always, ‘Gee, Powell, you made this speech to the U.N.'”

Beyond the general mopery—I do one little presentation in front of the entire world at the U.N. calling for war that turns out to be 100% false and suddenly everyone’s pointing fingers at me!—I enjoy the implication that Powell is in fact outraged by what happened.

I guess this burning outrage he feels has manifested itself by him (1) never saying anything in public about it unless asked and (2) taking no actions of any kind. He’s so unbelievably outraged that he hasn’t even bothered to find out the names of the people he claims are responsible:

POWELL: George Tenet did not sit there for five days with me, misleading me… He believed what he was giving to me was accurate. The intelligence system did not work well. There was some people in the intelligence community who knew at that time that some of these sources were not good and shouldn’t be relied upon, and they didn’t speak up. That devastated me.

WALTERS: Want to name names?

POWELL: I don’t have the names. These are not senior people but these are people who were aware that some of these sources should not be considered reliable. And they were aware that we were putting this information in the believing.

For a detailed look back at what exactly Powell’s subordinates were telling him at the time, go here.

Today:

Q: Thank you, Mr. President. Earlier this week, you told a group of journalists that you thought the idea of sending special forces to Pakistan to hunt down bin Laden was a strategy that would not work…recently you’ve also described bin Laden as a sort of modern day Hitler or Mussolini. And I’m wondering why, if you can explain why you think it’s a bad idea to send more resources to hunt down bin Laden, wherever he is?

THE PRESIDENT: Pakistan is a sovereign nation. In order for us to send thousands of troops into a sovereign nation, we’ve got to be invited by the government of Pakistan.

Man, I hope no one tells President Bush or Vice President Cheney about this! They’d be really mad!

2004 State of the Union Address:

BUSH: America will never seek a permission slip to defend the security of our country.

Two months later:

CHENEY: The United States will never seek a permission slip to defend the security of our country.

Here’s a story from page A17 of the Washington Post today, September 14, 2006:

U.N. INSPECTORS DISPUTE IRAN REPORT BY HOUSE PANEL
Paper on Nuclear Aims Called Dishonest

U.N. inspectors investigating Iran’s nuclear program angrily complained to the Bush administration and to a Republican congressman yesterday about a recent House committee report on Iran’s capabilities, calling parts of the document “outrageous and dishonest” and offering evidence to refute its central claims…

“This is like prewar Iraq all over again,” said David Albright, a former nuclear inspector…

Here’s a story from page A18 of the Washington Post exactly four years ago this week, on September 19, 2002:

EVIDENCE ON IRAQ CHALLENGED
Experts Question if Tubes Were Meant for Weapons Program

A key piece of evidence in the Bush administration’s case against Iraq is being challenged in a report by independent experts who question whether thousands of high-strength aluminum tubes recently sought by Iraq were intended for a secret nuclear weapons program…

Here’s the Washington Post’s Iraq mea culpa from August 11, 2004:

THE POST ON WMDS: AN INSIDE STORY
Prewar Articles Questioning Threat Often Didn’t Make Front Page

…“The paper was not front-paging stuff,” said Pentagon correspondent Thomas Ricks. “Administration assertions were on the front page. Things that challenged the administration were on A18 on Sunday or A24 on Monday”…

In retrospect, said Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr., “we were so focused on trying to figure out what the administration was doing that we were not giving the same play to people who said it wouldn’t be a good idea to go to war and were questioning the administration’s rationale. Not enough of those stories were put on the front page. That was a mistake on my part.”

Here’s the famous Dudley Moore-Peter Cook sketch “The Frog and Peach”:

INTERVIEWER: Do you feel you’ve learnt by your mistakes here?

SIR ARTHUR STREEB-GREEBLING: I think I have, yes, and I think I can probably repeat them almost perfectly.

(Edited for clarity.)

This is from the new book Hubris by Michael Isikoff and David Corn:

On the eve of war in Washington, journalists and others gathered at a cocktail party at the home of Philip Taubman, the Washington bureau chief of the New York Times…Judy Miller was one of several Times reporters there, and she seemed excited. Another journalist present asked if she was planning to head over to Iraq to cover the invasion. Miller, according to the other guest, could barely contain herself. “Are you kidding?” she asked. “I’ve been waiting for this war for ten years. I wouldn’t miss it for the world!”

I see.

Miller got herself a special embedding deal with one of the military teams searching for banned weapons. She then immediately wrote one of the most notoriously stupid stories ever to appear in the New York Times. (It was about how she was allowed to look at from a distance—but not meet or interview—an Iraqi wearing a baseball cap who purportedly said (1) Iraq was bursting at the seams with WMD, (2) Saddam and Osama were Best Friends Forever, and (3) Saddam was jealous of George Bush because Bush is so handsome.)

Here’s what the U.S. government thought of her, according to Hubris:

Judy Miller “is probably the best ally we have out there in the media,” Colonel Richard McPhee, the commander of the 75th Exploitation Task Force told one of the unit’s public affairs officers, Sergeant Eugene Pomeroy, according to an email Pomeroy sent to a colleague.

And what does Miller have to say about that story today?

Asked about the baseball-cap story several years later, Miller told the authors of this book, “I won’t talk about the baseball-cap guy.”

Judith Miller was employed by the New York Times for twenty-eight years.