Miller in NYT versus Gellman in WaPo on Clarke

The only game you can play when confronted with irrefutable accusations is "smear the messenger" - so that's all the White House has done in the Clarke case.

The only factual rebuttal they've attempted to make has been to deny that Bush ever had a conversation with Clarke in front of Condi in the Situation Room on 9/12 where Bush urged Clarke to find an Iraq angle to 9/11.

But that rebuttal, which Stephen Hadley trotted out on CBS Sunday night, isn't holding up very well, as Hadley visibly flinched when he was told by "60 Minutes'" Leslie Stahl that there were two eyewitnesses corroborating Clarke's version of this incident. (The Washington Post also claims that two witnesses corroborate Clarke on this point. And Hadley's reputation is hardly sterling - as Condi's second in command, he's the guy who took the blame for putting the "16 words" about Niger yellowcake uranium in Bush's State of the Union argument to invade Iraq last year.)

So with no other factual rebuttals possible, the White House has no other option but to try to smear Clarke.

Of course, if you smear the messenger too openly the smearing itself becomes suspect - so the first rule of smearing is to be subtle about it.

Ethically challenged New York Times "reporter" Judith Miller is known as "Steno Judy" for not only blindly parroting the White House's phony WMD claims but then having the nerve to publicly claim that her job is to merely "report" what the White House says, without first checking to see whether it's actually true. In Monday's New York Times, "Steno Judy" helped the White House once again: this time by doing a subtle smear job against Richard Clarke.

If you didn't already know that Clarke is one of our top authorities on counter-terrorism, you certainly wouldn't find that out from Miller's faint "reporting" of his credentials. Aside from the numerous factual errors in Miller's article (amply documented elsewhere on the web*), most of Clarke's impressive accomplishments are simply left out, while his nuanced assertions are overstated so as to make them seem less reasonable.

Compare Judith Miller in the NYT vs Barton Gellman in WaPo this Monday on Clarke's bombshell revelations in his new book "Against All Enemies":


Miller: Richard A. Clarke, who was counter-terrorism coordinator for President Bill Clinton and President Bush...

Gellman: Acknowledged by foes and friends as a leading figure among career national security officials, Clarke served more than two years in the Bush White House after holding senior posts under Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton.

= = =

Miller: Mr. Clarke, who has spent more than 30 years as a civil servant in Republican and Democratic administrations...

Gellman: Clarke's...muscular national security views allied him often over the years with most of the leading figures advising Bush on terrorism and Iraq. As an assistant secretary of state in 1991, Clarke worked closely with Wolfowitz and then-Defense Secretary {Dick} Cheney to marshal the 32-nation coalition that expelled Iraqi forces from Kuwait. Clarke sided with Wolfowitz -- against Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff -- in a losing argument to extend that war long enough to destroy Iraq's Republican Guard. Later, Clarke was principal author of the hawkish U.S. plan to rid Iraq of its nonconventional weapons under threat of further military force.
...
Gellman: In the first minutes after hijacked planes struck the World Trade Center towers on Sept. 11, Rice placed Clarke in her chair in the Situation Room and asked him to direct the government's crisis response.

= = =

Miller: Richard A. Clarke...asserts that...the Bush administration has undermined American national security by...ignoring the threat of Al Qaeda in order to invade Iraq.

Gellman: "Any leader whom one can imagine as president on September 11 would have declared a 'war on terrorism' and would have ended the Afghan sanctuary by invading," Clarke writes. "What was unique about George Bush's reaction" was the additional choice to invade "not a country that had been engaging in anti-U.S. terrorism but one that had not been, Iraq." In so doing, he estranged allies, enraged potential friends in the Arab and Islamic worlds, and produced "more terrorists than we jail or shoot."

= = =

On top of all this subtly slanted "reporting" which does not do justice to Clarke's stature as one of our nation's top counter-terrorism veterans, there are numerous lies and omissions in Miller's article, already amply documented on some of the better blogs:

http://billmon.org/archives/001254.html#more
http://atrios.blogspot.com/2004_03_21_atrios_archive.html#107997698642852209
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_03_21.html#002741
http://corrente.blogspot.com/2004_03_21_corrente_archive.html#108000142246646570

Clarke is not some wild-eyed lunatic - he is an ultrahawk with over ten years at the helm of our country's counter-terrorism efforts, and he is just the latest in a stream of high-ranking conservative Republican insiders who have abandoned the current Administration in disillusionment over its rudderless and reckless "policies". Clarke accuses Bush of stubbornly ignoring intelligence before 9/11 and cynically distorting intelligence in the aftermath, all to suit a private agenda which we can only guess at. Clarke's allegations are serious, plausible, and vitally important both to the current general election and to our country's security, and they do not deserve to be shunted to the back pages and covered by a damaged Times reporter.

Clarke is a hero who has amply proven himself by running the Situation Room in DC during 9/11 and, before that, "going to battle stations" and "shaking the trees" to foil the Y2K terrorist plot on LAX under Clinton.

Clarke may not agree with the current Administration, but he has served as terrorism czar under three Republican Presidents and one Democrat, and he is one of the most experienced voices we have in the war on terror. His credentials should be clearly and honestly stated and his opinions and recommendations should be openly evaluated - not distorted and hidden in the back of the paper.

Clarke's quiet, hands-on, can-do approach to preventing terror stands in stark contrast with the Bush administration's divisive grandstanding and fear-mongering, posturing and politicking on terror. Terrorism does involve many "unknowns", and reasonable people may differ on whether Clarke's or Bush's approach to the war on terror is right - but it is clear that this issue is one of the most pressing of our time. If the media could endlessly run pictures of the collapsing World Trade Towers in their lead stories, surely when a leading counter-terrorism veteran comes along to give us his advice, we should have the courage to feature his story on the front page as well and report it honestly.

It is clear that either Clarke or Condi is lying about what happened before 9/11. It isn't Judith Miller's job to unquestioningly repeat Condi's side of this great debate; Miller is a reporter at a paper that calls itself the "newspaper of record"; she is not a White House spokesperson. Her job is to do some digging to get the facts so that we can make up our minds whether Condi or Clarke is telling the truth.

If one of our country's top counter-terrorism experts is having a spat with the White House over how to handle terrorism, that story belongs on the front page and it deserves to be covered by a reporter with impeccable credentials, not the ethically compromised Judith Miller. By distorting the whistleblower's credentials and favoring the White House's official line - when public hearings are about to commence on the gravest security lapse in our nation's history since Pearl Harbor - Judith Miller and The New York Times are actively impeding the investigation into 9/11, and history may show that their subtle partisanship hindered us from learning how to prevent future terrorist attacks.

and thanks for your good work --

"PUBLIC EDITOR
To reach Daniel Okrent, who represents the readers, e-mail public@nytimes.com."

Nathan Thurm, the character Martin Short developed when he was on Saturday Night Live? Whenever they did 60 Minutes parodies with Harry Shearer playing Mike Wallace, whatever scumbag corporation he had to go after was always represented by Nate.

He had slicked down hair, was covered in flop sweat, chain smoked (nervous hands shaking the whole time, letting the ash grow to nearly an inch on the end of the butt), and inevitably tried to deflect questions with inane misdirection.

That's exactly who Hadley reminded me of the other night.

Bullshit trumps birdshit.

on edit: BTW, thanks for that well-argued post.