September 29, 2003



Judy Miller Watch

This piece by Douglas Jehl should prompt the Times to publish a Jayson Blair-ish correction/apology/mea culpa for the complete and utter bullshit Judith Miller wrote about Iraq for the past year.

Lies, Damn Lies, and Partial Poll Data

Walter Pincus takes a closer look at a couple of recent polls cited by pro-war folk and administration officials, and finds that Iraqis' love of occupation isn't what it's cracked up to be.

The Unbuilding of Iraq

Newsweek has an excellent anaylsis of the bungled occupation, with lots of juicy quotes and an inside-the-ropes look at the State vs. Defense Department battle. Highly recommended.

Just doing the news roundup here ... Time also has a story about "what went wrong." And a much better cover:

Tricky Dick Trickier than the Original?

One last thing ... the Post has a must-read article about Cheney repeatedly telling the Mohamed Atta-Prague tale and trying to get it into Powell's Feb 2003 UN presentation after it had been debunked.

A couple of telling paragraphs:

But behind the scenes, the Atta meeting remained tantalizing to Cheney and his staff. Libby -- along with deputy national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley, a longtime Cheney associate -- began pushing to include the Atta claim in Powell's appearance before the U.N. Security Council a week after the State of the Union speech. Powell's presentation was aimed at convincing the world of Iraq's ties to terrorists and its pursuit of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.

On Jan. 25, with a stack of notebooks at his side, color-coded with the sources for the information, Libby laid out the potential case against Iraq to a packed White House situation room. "We read [their proposal to include Atta] and some of us said, 'Wow! Here we go again,' " said one official who helped draft the speech. "You write it. You take it out, and then it comes back again."
posted by dack


Comments

Juan Cole also has a post about the polls in Iraq.

Posted by: Ted on September 29, 2003 04:59 PM


Judith Miller was on CNN this morning (9/30), presented as some sort of WMD expert. To date, she's just seemed to me somewhat sloppy and sensationalist, kind of a glorified print version of Geraldo Rivera. But now she's turning into a real shill for the White House. Her characterization of the upcoming WMD report was as weaselly as the official party line -- she described the weapons search as "inconclusive", used phrases along the lines of "no CURRENT weapons" to imply evidence of defunct or hidden programs. Give it up, lady. They don't exist. They never existed. You were all wrong.

Posted by: Thom on September 30, 2003 11:59 AM