AMERICAN FUTURE

The motto of the New York Times is “All the News That’s Fit To Print.” This post will show that this claim is demonstrably false.

On October 19, Lawrence Wilkerson, who was Colin Powell’s chief of staff at the State Department, spoke at the New America Foundation. In its coverage of the speech, the Times extensively quoted Wilkerson’s severe criticisms of the Bush administration. Over the ensuing ten days, these quotes served as the raw material for columns by Frank Rich, Bob Herbert, Maureen Dowd, and Paul Krugman.

At no time did the Times report on Wilkerson’s comments on pre-war intelligence. These comments refute the “Bush lied” meme. Coming from a former bureaucrat speaking out against the administration that employed him, they are all the more credible. They were ignored because they were not consistent with the Times’ political agenda.

In what follows, I document my case by detailing what the Times chose to print, and what it chose not to print.

The News That Was Fit To Print

On October 21, the Times, in an article entitled “Former Powell Aide Says Bush Policy Is Run by ‘Cabal’,” reported on his speech. As published, the article included these quotations and no others:

‘’I would say that we have courted disaster, in Iraq, in North Korea, in Iran, generally with regard to domestic crises like Katrina, Rita—and I could go on back,’’ he said. ‘’We haven’t done very well on anything like that in a long time.’’

Mr. Wilkerson suggested that the dysfunction within the administration was so grave that ‘’if something comes along that is truly serious, truly serious, something like a nuclear weapon going off in a major American city, or something like a major pandemic, you are going to see the ineptitude of this government in a way that will take you back to the Declaration of Independence.’’

. . . what he saw in Mr. Bush’s first term ‘’was a case that I have never seen in my studies of aberration, bastardizations’’ and ‘’perturbations.’’

‘’What I saw was a cabal between the vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues,’’ he said.

The former aide referred to Mr. Bush as someone who ‘’is not versed in international relations, and not too much interested in them, either.’’ He was far more admiring of the president’s father, whom he called ‘’one of the finest presidents we’ve ever had.’’

On October 23, Frank Rich, in “Karl and Scooter’s Excellent Adventure,” said this:

THIS is what Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell’s wartime chief of staff, was talking about last week when he publicly chastised the ‘’Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal’’ for sowing potential disaster in Iraq, North Korea and Iran. It’s this cabal that in 2002 pushed for much of the bogus W.M.D. evidence that ended up in Mr. Powell’s now infamous February 2003 presentation to the U.N. It’s this cabal whose propaganda was sold by the war’s unannounced marketing arm, the White House Iraq Group, or WHIG, in which both Mr. Libby and Mr. Rove served in the second half of 2002.

Also on October 23, in “Washington Memo; Leak Case Renews Questions on War’s Rationale,” the Times reported that

The combatants’ intensity was underscored this week in a speech by Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin L. Powell while he was secretary of state, who complained of a ‘’cabal’’ between Mr. Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld when it came to Iraq and other national security issues and of a ‘’real dysfunctionality’’ in the administration’s foreign policy team.

The next day, Bob Herbert repeated the quotations in the Times’ original story in his “How Scary Is This?” column. To Herbert’s credit, he also included this:

While not ‘’evaluating the decision to go to war,’’ Mr. Wilkerson told his audience that under the present circumstances ‘’we can’t leave Iraq. We simply can’t.’’ In his view, if American forces were to pull out too quickly, the U.S. would end up returning to the Middle East with ‘’five million men and women under arms’’ within a decade.

Herbert’s column ends this way:

Nevertheless, he is appalled at the way the war was launched and conducted, and outraged by ‘’the detainee abuse issue.’’ In 10 years, he said, when this matter is ‘’put to the acid test, ironed out, and people have looked at it from every angle, we are going to be ashamed of what we allowed to happen.’’ . . . If nothing is done about the current state of affairs, he said, ‘’it’s going to get even more dangerous than it already is.’’

A week after Wilkerson’s speech, Maureen Dowd, in “Dick at the Heart of Darkness,” chimed in with

. . . he is appalled at the way the war was launched and conducted, and outraged by ‘’the detainee abuse issue.’’ In 10 years, he said, when this matter is ‘’put to the acid test, ironed out, and people have looked at it from every angle, we are going to be ashamed of what we allowed to happen.’’

Finally, on October 31, Paul Krugman, in “Ending the Fraudulence,” put in his two cents worth:

It’s a sad commentary on the timidity of most Democrats that even now, with Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, telling us how policy was ‘’hijacked’’ by the Cheney-Rumsfeld ‘’cabal,’’ it’s hard to get leading figures to admit that they were misled into supporting the Iraq war.

The News That Was Not Fit To Print

In response to the first question asked after his speech ended, Wilkerson said

I can’t tell you why the French, the Germans, the Brits and us thought that most of the material, if not all of it, that we presented at the U.N. on 5 February 2003 was the truth. I can’t. I’ve wrestled with it. I don’t know – and people say, well, INR [State Department Intelligence] dissented. That’s a bunch of bull. INR dissented that the nuclear program was up and running. That’s all INR dissented on. They were right there with the chems and the bios . . . I wasn’t all that convinced by the evidence I’d seen that he had a nuclear program other than the software. That is to say there are some discs or there were some scientists and so forth but he hadn’t reconstituted it. He was going to wait until the international tension was off of him, until the sanctions were down, and then he was going to go back – certainly go back to all of his programs. I mean, I was convinced of that.

But I saw satellite evidence, and I’ve looked at satellite pictures for much of my career. I saw information that would lead me to believe that Saddam Hussein, at least on occasion, was spoofing us, was giving us disinformation. When you see a satellite photograph of all the signs of the chemical weapons ASP – Ammunition Supply Point – with chemical weapons, and you match all those signs with your matrix on what should show a chemical ASP, and they’re there, you have to conclude that it’s a chemical ASP, especially when you see the next satellite photograph which shows the U.N. inspectors wheeling in in their white vehicles with black markings on them to that same ASP and everything is changed, everything is clean. None of those signs are there anymore.

Well, Saddam Hussein really cared about deterring the Persians – the Iranians – and his own people. He didn’t give a hang about us except on occasion. And so he had to convince those audiences that he still was a powerful man. So who better to do that through than the INC, Ahmad Chalabi and his boys, and by spoofing our eyes in the sky and our little HUMINT, and the Brits and the French and the Germans, too. That’s all I can figure.

The consensus of the intelligence community was overwhelming. I can still hear George Tenet telling me, and telling my boss in the bowels of the CIA, that the information we were delivering – which we had called considerably – we had called it very much – we had thrown whole reams of paper out that the White House had created. But George was convinced, John McLaughlin was convinced that what we were presented was accurate. And contrary to what you were hearing in the papers and other places, one of the best relationships we had in fighting terrorists and in intelligence in general was with guess who? The French. In fact, it was probably the best. And they were right there with us.

In fact, I’ll just cite one more thing. The French came in in the middle of my deliberations at the CIA and said, we have just spun aluminum tubes, and by god, we did it to this RPM, et cetera, et cetera, and it was all, you know, proof positive that the aluminum tubes were not for mortar casings or artillery casings, they were for centrifuges. Otherwise, why would you have such exquisite instruments? We were wrong. We were wrong.