March 31, 2004

I'm as shocked as you are
Posted by Jon Henke

Well, the New York Times....(wait for it, there's a big surprise coming)...is misrepresenting a quote in a way that makes the Bush administration look bad.

Mr. Duelfer took over from Mr. Kay, who at the time of his resignation in January said that American officials were "almost all wrong, probably" in assessing before the war that Mr. Hussein's government possessed illicit weapons.
Quick! To the transcript, Batman!
I would also point out that many governments that chose not to support this war -- certainly, the French president, [Jacques] Chirac, as I recall in April of last year, referred to Iraq's possession of WMD.

The Germans certainly -- the intelligence service believed that there were WMD.

It turns out that we were all wrong, probably in my judgment, and that is most disturbing.

So, by "we", David Kay was referring to the international community....not merely "American officials".

Methinks Mr Okrent will be getting an email.

UPDATE: In response to my email, the New York Times issued a correction. Details here.

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Comments

I commented to this point the other day, about the Times.

The problems exposed by Blair's debacle, have not been solved, they've gotten worse, since his firing. The problem of course is the ownership,a nd Sulzburger doesn't look to be leaving any time soon. Personally, I've given up the Times as a lost cause and refuse to link to them anymore.

Posted by: Bithead at March 31, 2004 03:07 PM

SO Okrent gets an e-mail, or 500 e-mails. So what? Maybe Okrent actually gets a correction printed, or a column about it with a mea culpa. So what?

The problem is still there, like a cancer in the gut of the Times.

Now if Okrent actually was in a position to change things....that would be different. All this is doing is fighting the symptoms, not the disease

Posted by: shark at March 31, 2004 03:38 PM

Good catch. But even without such (routine) distortion, Kay's become a quote machine for the dim or intellectually dishonest opposition. His worst failure was precisely inverting the relationship between ambiguous intelligence and pre-emption, saying that one precludes the other, when of course it is mostly the inescapable ambiguity of intel that makes pre-emption a prudent option. Of course it would be nice if a senior admin. official would just lay this out clearly once, so the slower kids could get it too. Cohen did a nice job of it inadvertently the other day before the 9/11 Commission -- funny, I don't think the NYT or any other major media outlet picked up on that ....

Posted by: IceCold at April 1, 2004 12:34 AM