Tuesday, June 27, 2006

****UPDATE**** The NYT is Full of 'it

As I discussed in yesterday's post, New York Times editor Bill Keller, in his editorial in defense of aiding in the leaking of highly classified information, lamented that the NYT was not critical enough of the Bush Administration's case for war in the beginning, and cited this as one compelling reason to publish the leak/article (despite seemingly overwhelmingly compelling reasons not to).

In Bill Keller's editorial, he laments that,
"Some of the reporting in The Times and elsewhere prior to the war in Iraq was criticized for not being skeptical enough of the Administration's claims about the Iraqi threat."

An article today in the Weekly Standard gives quite a compelling reason for this. The reason? Quite ironic actually. It turns out that the willful publishing of highly classified information by the NYT contributed to the failure of the NYT (not to mention U.S. intelligence) to be able to gather the best and most accurate intelligence on Iraq.

Gabriel Schoenfeld of the Weekly Standard explains:

"In waging the war on terrorism, the United States depends heavily on cooperation with allied intelligence agencies. But when our own intelligence services demonstrate that they are unable to keep shared information under wraps, international cooperation grinds to a halt. This is a matter not of idle conjecture but of demonstrable fact. During the run-up to the Iraq war, the United States was urgently attempting to assess the state of play of Saddam Hussein's program to acquire weapons of mass destruction. One of the key sources suggesting that an ambitious WMD buildup was underway was an Iraqi defector, known by the codename of Curveball, who was talking to German intelligence. But Washington remained in the dark about Curveball's true identity, and the fact that he was a serial fabricator.

Why would the Germans not identify Curveball? According to the Silberman-Robb WMD Commission report, they refused "to share crucial information with the United States because of fear of leaks." In other words, some of the blame for our mistaken intelligence about Iraq's WMD program rests with leakers and those in the media who rush to publish the leaks."


Oh, when the chickens come home to roost................

Bill Keller claims to take seriously into consideration the national security of this country before publishing highly classified material. Perhaps this crystal clear revelation of the consequences of his ignorant actions will make him think twice next time.

But I wont hold my breath on that one.

Thanks again for nothing, Bill.

-The Analyst

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