Here's someone who thinks the New York Times was not just letting the Bush administration get away with murder but that it could be considered complicit. He writes:
You designate Judith Miller as your in-house WMD expert. She coordinates her reporting with the Office of Special Plans - a rogue Pentagon intelligence outfit set up by Wolfowitz and Feith to fix intelligence. Miller role is to ‘confirm’ OSP intelligence by consulting Ahmed Chalabi – a convicted embezzler who is the very same source feeding the same exact garbage to the OSP. You know that Wolfowitz and Feith and Chalabi go back a long way. Judith reports their fiction as gospel truth and attributes it to two separate sources: ‘inside intelligence sources that declined to be identified’ and ‘Iraqi dissidents who also refused to reveal their identity’. Technically, she has double-sourced her canards. You are aware that if Miller had bothered to identify her sources – informed observers would recognize that Chalabi and Wolfowitz and Richard Perle are all members of the same War Party.
The New York Times lets Miller pull this same prank over and over again. At the same time your editorial pages beat the drums for war based on Miller’s assertions that Iraq possessed WMDs. Thomas Friedman pipes in that he has no problem with a ‘war for oil’ – so long as it’s followed by an effort at conservation. How environmentally correct. At the ‘paper of record’, Miller and Friedman are designated hit men for the War Party. They get paid for their talents as propagandists and can take significant partial credit for a war that has turned out very badly for both Iraqis and Americans. Sulzberger is well advised to change his corporate motto to “all the news that’s fit to fix.”
Classified British memos reveal that there was no intelligence failure. Rather, there was an orchestrated project to manipulate intelligence to make the case for invading Iraq. You refuse to cover this and many other stories that prove that “we went to war on the intelligence we fixed - not the intelligence we had.” You finally relent under pressure from your readers who get wind of the story from the alternative press on the Internet. In doing so, you make sure that the Bush administration and Tony Blair get ample room to spin the story. Once again, that’s not illegal – but it also doesn’t amount to protecting the public’s right to know. In any case, that’s not the business you’re in. Your line of work revolves around incessantly bombarding your readers with high caliber weapons of mass deception.
Once it became clear that Iraq had no links to 9/11 and was probably the only major country in the region that didn’t possess WMDs, the administration shifted gears. Bush made up the unlikely story that he was really on a mission to spread liberty to the ‘Greater Middle East.’ In a nicely coordinated move, your paper also switches gears and goes along for the ride. This will no doubt please all your pals in the administration who refuse to be identified and who promise you that the next time they feel an urge to leak, they will leak on the New York Times...
And that's only part of it!
