Michael Massing, an editor of the Columbia Journalism Review who writes frequently on the press and foreign policy, on the prewar failures of the press to show any skepticism about the Administration’s WMD line:
In recent months, US news organizations have rushed to expose the Bush administration’s pre-war failings on Iraq. “Iraq’s Arsenal Was Only on Paper,” declared a recent headline in The Washington Post. “Pressure Rises for Probe of Prewar-Intelligence,” said The Wall Street Journal. “So, What Went Wrong?” asked Time. In The New Yorker, Seymour Hersh described how the Pentagon set up its own intelligence unit, the Office of Special Plans, to sift for data to support the administration’s claims about Iraq. And on “Truth, War and Consequences,” a Frontline documentary that aired last October, a procession of intelligence analysts testified to the administration’s use of what one of them called “faith-based intelligence.”
Watching and reading all this, one is tempted to ask, where were you all before the war? Why didn’t we learn more about these deceptions and concealments in the months when the administration was pressing its case for regime change?when, in short, it might have made a difference? Some maintain that the many analysts who’ve spoken out since the end of the war were mute before it. But that’s not true. Beginning in the summer of 2002, the “intelligence community” was rent by bitter disputes over how Bush officials were using the data on Iraq. Many journalists knew about this, yet few chose to write about it.
New York Times reporter Judith Miller, about whose credulous parroting of Iraqi opposition leader Ahmed Chalabi’s propaganda about the Saddam threat much has already been said here and elsewhere, comes in for particular scorn from Massing. Miller blames her credulity on poor intelligence, about as credible as Dubya’s use of that excuse is. She pleads with Massing, “Don’t shoot the messenger.” But think about it for a moment; that is an essential perversion of the meaning of that maxim. —New York Review of Books
