judymiller-in-combat-boots.jpg

With just a little judicious editing:

How could the nation's top newspapers, with their extensive resources, their thousands of employees[], their vast networks of all-seeing eyes and ears in the skies, and clusters of informants below, have failed to [] find that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction?

The unforgivable flaw in Judy Miller's alternatively fascinating, infuriating, important, and self-serving article is her failure to explain in any depth, as only she could have, the colossal failures that occurred during her tenure as the NYT's lead security reporter.

"Seeking Shelter From the Storm" (NY Sun) does not lack merit. It should be required reading on how journalism works, or doesn't. But those seeking insight into how and why the media failed in its [] most vital mission [] will be disappointed.

Ms. Miller is understandably furious that her career has been encapsulated in the phrase "I was proved fucking right." But no matter how she attempts to explain what she really meant by it, this article will not prevent the words she admits having uttered with respect to what she calls "reporting" the case for Iraqi WMD [] from dominating her obituary.

[snip]

She also quibbles with the bloggers' broad indictment of the press for its lack of "imagination" and innumerable management and analytical failings. "Several articles I wrote or co-wrote were based on this faulty intelligence, and in May 2004, The Times concluded in an editors' note that its coverage should have reflected greater editorial and reportorial skepticism." Meanwhile, the NYT's ossified bureaucracy, by many accounts, continues to resist "open-source" information and oppose the transparency that the bloggers argued would dramatically enhance its effectiveness.

[snip]

While her portrait of the vindictiveness and deceit within the Administration's inner circle is depressing, so, too, is Ms. Miller's alleged self-serving passivity in the guise of journalistic neutrality. She was never a judge of the facts, she contends, merely a mouthpiece for propaganda — "my job isn't to assess the government's information and be an independent intelligence analyst myself. My job is to tell readers of The New York Times what the government thought about Iraq's arsenal."

What bozo thought that Judy Miller was the appropriate person to write a review pass judgment on George Tenet's self-delusional explanation for his failures?

HAHAHA! HotFlash clicked through to the original and discovered that the ad was ever so appropriate:

And now that the ad at the top of the page reads (at least when I clicked) “the most trusted name in mattresses”.