Tomorrow's
New York Times editorial page weighs in on the issue of White House leaks, and takes direct aim at the now-thoroughly debunked
Fred Hiatt special from last Sunday.
President Bush says he declassified portions of the prewar intelligence assessment on Iraq because he "wanted people to see the truth" about Iraq's weapons programs and to understand why he kept accusing Saddam Hussein of stockpiling weapons that turned out not to exist. This would be a noble sentiment if it actually bore any relationship to Mr. Bush's actions in this case, or his overall record.
Mr. Bush did not declassify the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq -- in any accepted sense of that word -- when he authorized I. Lewis Libby Jr., through Vice President Dick Cheney, to talk about it with reporters. He permitted a leak of cherry-picked portions of the report. The declassification came later....
This fits the pattern of Mr. Bush's original sales pitch on the Iraq war -- hyping the intelligence that bolstered his case and suppressing the intelligence that undercut it. In this case, Mr. Libby was authorized to talk about claims that Iraq had tried to buy uranium for nuclear weapons in Africa and not more reliable evidence to the contrary.
About a month before, Mr. Bush rushed to announce that American forces had found evidence of a biological weapons program in Iraq -- trailers that could have been used to make doomsday devices. We now know, from a report in The Washington Post, that a Pentagon team actually on the ground in Iraq inspecting the trailers had concluded two days earlier that they were nothing of the kind.
The White House says Mr. Bush was not aware of that report, and was relying on an assessment by the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency. This is hardly the first time we've been told that intelligence reports contradicting administration doctrine somehow did not make it to Mr. Bush's desk. But it does not explain why he and Mr. Cheney went on talking about the trailers for weeks, during which the State Department's intelligence division -- about the only agency that got it right about Iraq -- debunked the mobile-labs theory....
These two opposing editorials demonstrate in sharp relief the varying approaches to editorializing taken by these newspapers of record; The New York Times as opposed to The Washington Post. Here's what the NY Times's ombudsman/public editor, Barney Calame says about it:
Opinions expressed on the editorial and Op-Ed pages of The New York Times aren't part of the public editor's mandate. But the facts are. And so are corrections of any misstatements.
Here's what we heard from WaPo's ombudsman, Deborah Howell, in the wake of the Hiatt "Good Leak" dustup:
[I]t's important to understand that I have no purview over the editorial policy of The Post. The editorial board makes policy, and it is not my job to second-guess it. But this case provides an excellent opportunity to point out to readers how reporters and editorial writers can see things quite differently.
Editorials and news stories have different purposes. News stories are to inform; editorials are to influence.
NY Times: 2
WaPo: 0