Walter Pincus gets less press than Sy Hersh but he deserves as much if not more credit for presenting a model of what a reporter should be. While pussies like Isikoff make shit up, and offer fodder to Bushco, Pincus has been dismantling the lies and incompetence of this Nit Whithouse one story at at time... Beyond today's blockbuster story about the British memo indicating that they knew Bushco was fucking up the planning for the post-war, here are excerpts from an article from the September 2003 Washingtonian which presciently lays out the case for Pincus to enter the Pantheon of journalistic prophets...
Why Doesn't the Post Love Walter Pincus?
If President Bush suffers because it turns out he took the country to war on false pretenses, he might look back on stories by Walter Pincus for drawing first blood.
On March 16, the eve of war, Pincus wrote in the Post that "U.S. intelligence agencies have been unable to give Congress or the Pentagon specific information" about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
More below the fold...
At the time, the Bush White House was telling the world that America had to invade Iraq to root out weapons of mass destruction. Pincus quoted sources saying that there was "a lack of hard evidence." And they also said the White House had "exaggerated intelligence" to back up its drive toward war... Snip
Yet the Post buried Pincus's March 16 story on page A17. It took help from Bob Woodward to get the story published at all... Snip
Pincus had been writing about the buildup to theinvasion for months, along with Post writers Dana Priest, Karen DeYoung, Barton Gellman, and others who gathered at "war meetings" every day. But according to reporters, editors continually underplayed Pincus's scoops and discounted their stories that ran counter to Bush's call to arms. None of which deterred him, especially after he dissected Secretary of State Colin Powell's February 5 speech to the United Nations.
"I suddenly realized everything he said was inferential," says Pincus. As he did with stories about the neutron bomb in the 1970s and the Iran-Contra affair in the 1980s, Pincus burrowed deep and wrote often... Snip
In June Pincus sunk his teeth deeper into the emerging story of the nuclear material that Iraq was supposed to have sought from Niger to make nuclear bombs. US officials repeated the claim as fact and talked ominously of mushroom clouds. President Bush mentioned "significant quantities of uranium" in his State of the Union speech... Snip
Finally, at the end of May, Pincus broke onto the front page with a story about the nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. He stayed there as his stories--some with other reporters--put pressure on the White House to admit that the President's 16-word sentence about uranium going to Iraq was not credible.
Pincus eventually prevailed within his own newspaper, but why did a veteran reporter have to bow and scrape to get his stories noticed and then printed?
"It was ridiculous. Many of the stories were buried," says Priest, also a star on the national-security beat. "Editors continually undervalued what he does."
--HARRY JAFFE
For the full story...
http://www.washingtonian.com/inwashington/buzz/pincus.html
This is as big as, if not bigger than, what Sy Hersh does. More props to Mr. Picus from Kosdom.