While the New York Times' Judith Miller continues to file unconfirmed, weakly sourced dispatches, now buried by the Times, that increasingly signal the decline and fall of American journalism, she's likely blissfully unaware of the hammering she's taking back home, most effectively at the hands of Slate's Jack Shafer:
Miller retreats from the candor of her NewsHour discussion with another piece in today's New York Times: "Focus Shifts From Weapons to the People Behind Them" (April 23). If the April 21 story was about "the most important discovery to date in the hunt for illegal weapons," today's story is about reducing the inflated expectations created by that scoop—and never mind that cheerleading NewsHour proclamation that a "silver bullet" has been found.
Miller quotes an unnamed MET Alpha source who says the "paradigm has shifted" in the search for weapons of mass destruction. At first, the United States was trying to locate the vast stores of WMD that were described in Secretary of State Colin Powell's presentation before the U.N. Security Council. Finding none in 75 of the 150 suspected sites, it pared back its search to WMD precursors. Now, says the MET Alpha source, the investigators are concentrating on finding scientists who worked on WMD programs. She writes:
Based on what the Iraqi scientist had said about weapons being destroyed or stocks being hidden, military experts said they now believed they might not find large caches of illicit chemicals or biological agents, at least not in Iraq.Paradigm shift, my ass! Powell's intelligence report insisted there were tons of WMD and now the military—and Miller—are preparing us for their complete absence. That's what I call the most important discovery to date in the hunt for illegal weapons!
We can assume today's dispatch wasn't reviewed by military censors because Miller is silent on that score. But we can also safely assume Miller has been told a lot more than she's writing and is actively self-censoring. What isn't she telling us? That some Iraqi Dr. Evil found a way to convert George Foreman grills into WMD machines that transmogrify Bisquick and toluene into sarin, and the ubiquity of this technology makes the Iraqi WMD program invisible to military investigators?
Read the whole story.
posted by dackWhen I read that I wrote this article. I'll bet this propaganda works.
Posted by: ted on April 24, 2003 11:45 AM