A column set to appear in Sunday's New York Times by Frank Rich explores the similarities between former Times reporter Judith Miller and Washington Post's Bob Woodward, RAW STORY has learned.
Both Woodward and Miller were informed by top White House Administration officials that Ambassador Joe Wilson's wife worked for the CIA before Robert Novak outed her in July of 2003 yet failed to recognize the importance of their 'scoops' which have become the "drip-drip-drip exposing the debacle of Iraq." In contrast, Rich praises the "reporters who didn't have top-level access to the likes of Bush and Cheney who have gotten the Iraq story right."
Excerpts from Sunday's Times column, 'All the President's flacks,' by Frank Rich:
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"WMD -- I got it totally wrong," Judy Miller said, with no exaggeration, before leaving The Times. The Woodward affair, for all its superficial similarities to the Miller drama, offers an even wider window onto the White House flimflams and the press's role in enabling them. Woodward knows more about the internal workings of this presidency than any other reporter. He has been granted access to all its top officials, including lengthy interviews with the president himself, to produce two Bush best sellers since 9/11. But he was gamed anyway by the White House, which exploited his special stature to the fullest for its own propagandistic ends."
Woodward, to his credit, is not guilty of hyping Saddam's WMDs. And his books did contain valuable news: of the Wolfowitz axis' early push to take on Iraq, of the president's messianic view of himself as God's chosen warrior, of the Powell-Rumsfeld conflicts that led to the war's catastrophic execution. Yet to reread these Woodward books today, especially the second, the 2004 "Plan of Attack," is to understand just how slickly his lofty sources deflected him from the big picture, of which the Wilson case is just one small, if illuminating, piece.
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What remains unrecorded in "Plan of Attack" is any inkling of the disinformation campaign built to gin up this war. While Woodward tells us about the controversial posturing of Douglas Feith, the former under secretary of defense for policy, there's only an incidental, even dismissive allusion to Feith's Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group. That was the secret intelligence unit established at the Pentagon to "prove" Iraq-Qaida connections, which Vice President Dick Cheney then would trumpet in arenas like "Meet the Press." Woodward mentions in passing the White House Iraq Group, convened to market the war, but ignores the direct correlation between WHIG's inception and the accelerating hysteria in the Bush-Cheney-Rice warnings about Saddam's impending mushroom clouds in the late summer and fall of 2002. This story was broken by Barton Gellman and Walter Pincus in Woodward's own paper eight months before "Plan of Attack" was published.
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Frank Rich's column can be read in full by Times Select subscribers at the New York Times Website: link.
