Saturday, November 04, 2006

MSM Purposefully Misses the Important News--UPDATED AGAIN Scroll Down!

How big is it that the whole raison d'etre of the Left's opposition to Iraq was undone, inadvertantly I believe, by The New York Times? Sure, the NYT was trying, once again, to influence the election by showing the current administration to be a bunch hypocritical imbeciles. I didn't count the number of anonymous sources in the article, but let's just say, true to form, almost all the sources chose to remain anonymous.

Doing a Google search reveals that this information doesn't concern anyone in the media nearly as much as making it seem like the administration gave every nutjob a cookbook for a bomb. Meanwhile, no one is asking where the cookbook came from: why, it came from IRAQ, of course, who intended to complete bomb-making during 2002. 2002.

Shrinkwrapped, says this:

If you read this story from the point of view of seeking information you might be surprised that the Times reveals such explosive facts which one might expect to help the Republicans next week. Yet if you realize that the goal of printing the story is to frame the Bush administration as stupid and incompetent, so that their opponents, a group of which the Times is a charter member, can maintain the belief in their own intellectual superiority, the contradiction evaporates. To the "left" the story is their wisdom and the "right's" stupidity; they are so sophisticated they don't even see how they discredit themselves.
The rest of the MSM, though, is doing their darnedest to continue The New York Time's Bush is Stupid mantra. Color me unimpressed. The people who are decided about voting in the coming mid-terms won't be swayed by this, but it will give the Left something to talk about besides their own leaders like Kerry who have contempt not just for the President but all the morons who voted for him or vote for anyone not Democrat.

UPDATE:
I guess the Anchoress noticed the same thing. She says:
Doubt making noise will change much. When the press doesn’t want to tell you a story, it doesn’t tell you a story. That’s what blogs are for.

UPDATE II:
Michelle Malkin, via LGF, has a response from Hoekstra (who pushed for the document releases. Like, him, I'll publish a lot of what he said, because it is very important. I will emphasis the important stuff if you want to skim.

"Yesterday's article by the New York Times highlights a number of important issues with respect to Iraq's WMD programs, as well as the importance of the documents that have been recovered in Iraq," said U.S. Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI), Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. "I am pleased that the document release program continues to stimulate public discussion of these issues.

"With respect to the possibility that documents may have been released that should not have been released, I have always been clear that the Director of National Intelligence should take whatever steps necessary to withhold sensitive documents. In fact, as of today the DNI had withheld 59 percent of the documents that it had reviewed, and has become more risk-averse over time. If the DNI believes that the documents that were released were in the safe 40 percent, imagine what the 60 percent being withheld must contain.

"That said, it is also important to emphasize that the IAEA, contrary to its assertions, never raised any concerns about this material with the United States Government before going to the press. Similarly, the DNI's office has informed me that no agency of the U.S. Government had raised any issues about the potential or actual release of these documents before yesterday. If there were such problems, they would have been better addressed through the appropriate channels rather than the press.

"These documents also raise several additional issues of interest. First, it is extraordinary that the New York Times now acknowledges that the captured documents demonstrate that '[Saddam] Hussein's scientists were on the verge of building an atom bomb, as little as a year away.' This only reinforces the value of these documents in understanding the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's regime. Only 1 percent of the estimated 120 million pages of captured documents have been reviewed, and we must continue working to promptly understand these materials. If there is concern about Saddam's nuclear program, there should be similar concern about potential connections between Saddam and al-Qaeda suggested in the documents.

"Second, my staff's preliminary review of the documents in question suggests that at least some of them may be internal IAEA documents. There is a serious question of why and how the Iraqis obtained these documents in the first place. We need to explore that carefully - I certainly hope there will be no evidence that the IAEA had been penetrated by Saddam's regime.

"Finally, it is disappointing but not surprising that the New York Times would continue to participate in such blatant and transparent political ploys, including what I believe are improper efforts by the IAEA to interfere with U.S. domestic affairs. The sad reality is that the New York Times has done far more damage to U.S. national security by the disclosure of vital, classified, intelligence programs than is likely to be caused by the inadvertent disclosure of decades-old information that had already been in the hands of Saddam's regime."