This may be somewhat old news by now, but the New York Times
article about Richard Clarke by Miller Bumiller and Stevenson (oh my) is really, really bad.
Yes, that's as shocking as finding out that Dick Cheney spends time in undisclosed locations.
I once wrote a college paper dissecting Judith Miller's shockingly bad sourcing in a muddled book she wrote about the legacy of the Holocaust. Once I noticed a few discrepancies in her sourcing, I was sucked into two lost weekends of trying to sort through the mess. I've learned my lesson, so let's look at just three pieces of Tuesday's Times article.
First, as many already know, Rand Beers is much more than Clarke's "best buddy [who] is Senator Kerry's principal foreign policy adviser." That was White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan's description of Beers, repeated twice without comment or elaboration by the Times. But as Josh Marshall reminded everyone today, Beers was essentially Clarke's successor as the administration's highest-ranking expert on counter-terrorism. Like Clarke, he resigned in disgust over the administration's fixation on Iraq to the detriment of a full and proper focus on Al Qaeda. But Miller et al just print McClellan's dismissal of Beer's stature, not to mention the shocking fact two consecutive counter-terrorism experts, both known for impartiality and excellent service to Presidents of both parties, have resigned from their posts.
Second, there's this:
One ally, Mr. Clarke's former deputy, Roger Cressey, backed the thrust of one of the most incendiary accusations in the book, about a conversation that Mr. Clarke said he had with Mr. Bush in the White House Situation Room on the night of Sept. 12, 2001. Mr. Clarke said Mr. Bush pressed him three times to find evidence that Iraq was behind the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The accusation is explosive because no such link has ever been proved.
"I want you, as soon as you can, to go back over everything, everything," Mr. Clarke writes that Mr. Bush told him. "See if Saddam did this. See if he's linked in any way."
When Mr. Clarke protested that the culprit was Al Qaeda, not Iraq, Mr. Bush testily ordered him, he writes, to "look into Iraq, Saddam," and then left the room.
Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, responded at a White House briefing on Monday that Mr. Bush did not remember having the conversation, and that there were no records that placed the president in the Situation Room at the time.
Mr. Clarke countered in a telephone interview on Monday that he had four witnesses, including Mr. Cressey, who is a partner with Mr. Clarke in a consulting company that advises on cybersecurity issues. In an interview, Mr. Cressey said the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, also witnessed the exchange. Administration officials said Ms. Rice had no recollection of it...
In addition to Mr. Cressey, at least two other former officials with knowledge of what occurred in the Situation Room that day also backed up the thrust of Mr. Clarke's account, though one of the two challenged Mr. Clarke's assertion that Mr. Bush's demeanor and that of other senior White House officials was intimidating.
Reading that you may think the Times does a pretty good job of making it clear that at least four people do remember the conversation between Clarke and Bush, and that Bush and Rice don't remember the conversation, but don't say that it didn't happen. But the Times article is not so clear, since there is a 20 paragraph gap between the last two paragraphs highlighted above. Between those paragraphs there is the crap about Rand Beers. You have Rice's spokesman claiming that Clarke didn't give Rice any of the warnings he wrote in his book when they met after the start of the Iraq war, without pointing out that Clarke's entire point is that he had already repeatedly given those warnings, and they had been ignored. But they don't draw out the obvious and relevant conclusion: Clarke and at least three witnesses say the conversation occurred, and the White House, despite repeating Bush and Rice's claims that don't remember the exchanges, cannot negate the affirmative claims of Clarke and his witnesses.
One final point, this one about weasel words. McClellan says there are no records that place the President inside the Situation Room at the time of the purported conversation. So what? In his 60 Minutes interview, Clarke--who obviously would know his way around the West Wing, having worked there with a high security clearance for over a decade--didn't say the conversation took place in the Situation Room itself:
Te president -- we were in the situation room complex -- the president dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door, and said, 'I want you to find whether Iraq did this.'
It's too bad that none of the Times' three "crack" reporters could have been bothered to look at the transcript or try to follow up with Clarke to see if Clarke had actually claimed that the meeting took place inside the Situation Room itself. Apparently Miller was too busy chatting with her buddy Ahmed Chalibi to actually get something right.