Bill Keller's "entanglement"
The big story coming out of West 43rd Street these days is whether or not Judy Miller comes back to work at the New York Times. (Latest is that she probably won't). That, and her insistence that her so-called "entanglement" with indicted White House aide "Scooter" Libby was not a sexual relationship. "Completely untrue," she says.
The "entanglement" controversy stems from an Oct. 21 memo by Times top editor Bill Keller, who wrote: "But if I had known the details of Judy's entanglement with Libby, I'd have been more careful in how the paper articulated its defense, and perhaps more willing than I had been to support efforts aimed at exploring compromises."
It probably was a poor choice of words. Ultimately, the problem with the "entanglement" here had nothing to do with whether Scooter Libby was screwing Judy Miller, and everything to do with Scooter Libby and his boss using Judy Miller to screw America -- and her willingness to act as a one-note mouthpiece for a dishonest White House.
And in that sense, Bill Keller has his own "entanglement" problem. Because now it turns out that the executive editor of the New York Times was also "in bed with" a Bush administration official, and it may explain both the Times' weak efforts to set the record straight on its pre-war misreporting as well as the continued post-war failure to reign in "Miss Run Amok," a.k.a. Judy Miller.
Bill Keller's entanglement was with Paul Wolfowitz, the then-deputy defense secretary and so-called "chief architect" of the 2003 Iraq invasion. Here's what the New York Daily News buried in its gossip pages today:
Embattled reporter Judy Miller may not have been the only one at The New York Times with a weakness for Bush administration whispers.
Executive Editor Bill Keller has iced out Miller for her "entanglements" with indicted White House leaker Scooter Libby and for championing Bush's search for the illusory weapons of mass destruction.
But we hear that Keller himself fell prey to the spin of former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. Word is that, well after many laughed off Miller's WMD tales, Keller had a series of private meetings with Wolfowitz, who assured him that Saddam was hiding something.
"Keller got snowed by Wolfowitz," says a source. "That's [Keller] who gave Miller the green light" to keep writing her piece.
It's no wonder Wolfowitz would have Keller's ear. In 2002, when he was still a reporter, Keller wrote a profile that applauded the neo-con's "patient logic" and "humanitarian impulse."
Keller's back-channel relationship with Wolfowitz explains a lot. It certainly explains the convuluted pieces that Keller -- who was both a columnist and author of magazine pieces for the Times in 2002 and 2003, before he was called in to replace the ousted Howell Raines -- wrote offering his support for the military action before it was launched.
And when no weapons of mass destruction turned up, Keller wrote a June 14, 2003 column that was called "The Boys Who Cried Wolfowitz" and gives a very benign defense of the neo-cons and their feud with the CIA over pre-war intell on Iraq. He calls the CIA "Team A" and the Wolfowitz-Cheney-Libby boys "Team B."
The B Team comes in with fresh eyes, and fresh assumptions. One assumption, another Wolfowitz mantra, is that more weight should be given to the character of the regime -- in Saddam's case, his transcendent evil and megalomania. While the C.I.A. may say that we have insufficient evidence to conclude that Saddam has reconstituted his nuclear program, Team B starts from the premise that it is just the kind of thing Saddam would do, and it is dangerous to assume he didn't.
Want to hear a great irony? Keller's was printed just two days after...
The Washington Post published a front-page article reporting that the C.I.A. had sent a retired American diplomat to Niger in February 2002 to investigate claims that Iraq had been seeking to buy uranium there. The article did not name the diplomat, who turned out to be Mr. [Joe] Wilson, but it reported that his mission had not corroborated a claim about Iraq's pursuit of nuclear material that the White House had subsequently used in Mr. Bush's 2003 State of the Union address.
June 12, 2003, also happens to be the day when Dick Cheney spoke with Lewis "Scooter" Libby and told him where Joe Wilson's wife worked.
In other words, these things don't happen in a vacuum. How deeply was Bill Keller in the sway of Wolfowitz & Co.? Read this small piece of Keller's glowing, 8,139-word profile of the assistant defense secretary from Sept. 22, 2002, called -- believe it or not -- "The Sunshine Boy" (via Nexis):
The third striking thing about Wolfowitz is an optimism about America's ability to build a better world. He has an almost missionary sense of America's role. In the current case, that means a vision of an Iraq not merely purged of cataclysmic weaponry, not merely a threat disarmed, but an Iraq that becomes a democratic cornerstone of an altogether new Middle East. Given the fatalism that prevails about this most flammable region of the world, that is an audacious optimism indeed.
Keller was taken by a con artist. We don't doubt that Wolfowitz actually believed some of what he was spinning the future No. 1 editor at the Times, but he wasn't giving out the full story -- America's need to have a miltary presence in the region with much of the world's dwindling supply of oil. The U.S. did have troops in Saudi Arabia in 2002, but that was destabilzing the Bush-beloved monarchy there. And in an unguarded moment, Wolfowitz did tell some of the truth, not to Keller but to Vanity Fair:
"The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason," Wolfowitz was quoted as saying in a Pentagon transcript of an interview with Vanity Fair....During his interview with Vanity Fair in early May, Wolfowitz cited several payoffs from the war, including removing the need for American forces in Saudi Arabia.
Is there a problem with Keller having an ongoing reporter-source relationship with a top administration official. Of course not, and in one sense it was a coup for Keller to have such a pipeline into Bush's war cabinet.
The problem with Keller, as with Judy Miller and much of the New York Times as a whole, was an unwillingness to listen to other voices outside of the White House, people who were trying to throw cold water on the case for war from Day One but were ignored in all the high-level wining and dining from Wolfowitz, Libby, and the rest.
Thus, it's no accident that Keller and the Times was still offering the spin even two days after Walter Pincus of the Post was showing that a key piece of the that spin was an out-and-out lie. And so it's Keller's own culpability in all this that has made him so weak in dealing with Miller's reporting and with the messy aftermath.
That's why it's time for Bill Keller to go as executive editor of the Times. What happened here was so much worse than the Jayson Blair scandal, which cost Raines his job. The Times needs a fresh start, and that means it needs to free itself from all "entanglements."
And Judy Miller isn't the only one at the Times tied up in a knot.Posted on November 9, 2005 12:10 PM
Link Here
The "entanglement" controversy stems from an Oct. 21 memo by Times top editor Bill Keller, who wrote: "But if I had known the details of Judy's entanglement with Libby, I'd have been more careful in how the paper articulated its defense, and perhaps more willing than I had been to support efforts aimed at exploring compromises."
It probably was a poor choice of words. Ultimately, the problem with the "entanglement" here had nothing to do with whether Scooter Libby was screwing Judy Miller, and everything to do with Scooter Libby and his boss using Judy Miller to screw America -- and her willingness to act as a one-note mouthpiece for a dishonest White House.
And in that sense, Bill Keller has his own "entanglement" problem. Because now it turns out that the executive editor of the New York Times was also "in bed with" a Bush administration official, and it may explain both the Times' weak efforts to set the record straight on its pre-war misreporting as well as the continued post-war failure to reign in "Miss Run Amok," a.k.a. Judy Miller.
Bill Keller's entanglement was with Paul Wolfowitz, the then-deputy defense secretary and so-called "chief architect" of the 2003 Iraq invasion. Here's what the New York Daily News buried in its gossip pages today:
Embattled reporter Judy Miller may not have been the only one at The New York Times with a weakness for Bush administration whispers.
Executive Editor Bill Keller has iced out Miller for her "entanglements" with indicted White House leaker Scooter Libby and for championing Bush's search for the illusory weapons of mass destruction.
But we hear that Keller himself fell prey to the spin of former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. Word is that, well after many laughed off Miller's WMD tales, Keller had a series of private meetings with Wolfowitz, who assured him that Saddam was hiding something.
"Keller got snowed by Wolfowitz," says a source. "That's [Keller] who gave Miller the green light" to keep writing her piece.
It's no wonder Wolfowitz would have Keller's ear. In 2002, when he was still a reporter, Keller wrote a profile that applauded the neo-con's "patient logic" and "humanitarian impulse."
Keller's back-channel relationship with Wolfowitz explains a lot. It certainly explains the convuluted pieces that Keller -- who was both a columnist and author of magazine pieces for the Times in 2002 and 2003, before he was called in to replace the ousted Howell Raines -- wrote offering his support for the military action before it was launched.
And when no weapons of mass destruction turned up, Keller wrote a June 14, 2003 column that was called "The Boys Who Cried Wolfowitz" and gives a very benign defense of the neo-cons and their feud with the CIA over pre-war intell on Iraq. He calls the CIA "Team A" and the Wolfowitz-Cheney-Libby boys "Team B."
The B Team comes in with fresh eyes, and fresh assumptions. One assumption, another Wolfowitz mantra, is that more weight should be given to the character of the regime -- in Saddam's case, his transcendent evil and megalomania. While the C.I.A. may say that we have insufficient evidence to conclude that Saddam has reconstituted his nuclear program, Team B starts from the premise that it is just the kind of thing Saddam would do, and it is dangerous to assume he didn't.
Want to hear a great irony? Keller's was printed just two days after...
The Washington Post published a front-page article reporting that the C.I.A. had sent a retired American diplomat to Niger in February 2002 to investigate claims that Iraq had been seeking to buy uranium there. The article did not name the diplomat, who turned out to be Mr. [Joe] Wilson, but it reported that his mission had not corroborated a claim about Iraq's pursuit of nuclear material that the White House had subsequently used in Mr. Bush's 2003 State of the Union address.
June 12, 2003, also happens to be the day when Dick Cheney spoke with Lewis "Scooter" Libby and told him where Joe Wilson's wife worked.
In other words, these things don't happen in a vacuum. How deeply was Bill Keller in the sway of Wolfowitz & Co.? Read this small piece of Keller's glowing, 8,139-word profile of the assistant defense secretary from Sept. 22, 2002, called -- believe it or not -- "The Sunshine Boy" (via Nexis):
The third striking thing about Wolfowitz is an optimism about America's ability to build a better world. He has an almost missionary sense of America's role. In the current case, that means a vision of an Iraq not merely purged of cataclysmic weaponry, not merely a threat disarmed, but an Iraq that becomes a democratic cornerstone of an altogether new Middle East. Given the fatalism that prevails about this most flammable region of the world, that is an audacious optimism indeed.
Keller was taken by a con artist. We don't doubt that Wolfowitz actually believed some of what he was spinning the future No. 1 editor at the Times, but he wasn't giving out the full story -- America's need to have a miltary presence in the region with much of the world's dwindling supply of oil. The U.S. did have troops in Saudi Arabia in 2002, but that was destabilzing the Bush-beloved monarchy there. And in an unguarded moment, Wolfowitz did tell some of the truth, not to Keller but to Vanity Fair:
"The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason," Wolfowitz was quoted as saying in a Pentagon transcript of an interview with Vanity Fair....During his interview with Vanity Fair in early May, Wolfowitz cited several payoffs from the war, including removing the need for American forces in Saudi Arabia.
Is there a problem with Keller having an ongoing reporter-source relationship with a top administration official. Of course not, and in one sense it was a coup for Keller to have such a pipeline into Bush's war cabinet.
The problem with Keller, as with Judy Miller and much of the New York Times as a whole, was an unwillingness to listen to other voices outside of the White House, people who were trying to throw cold water on the case for war from Day One but were ignored in all the high-level wining and dining from Wolfowitz, Libby, and the rest.
Thus, it's no accident that Keller and the Times was still offering the spin even two days after Walter Pincus of the Post was showing that a key piece of the that spin was an out-and-out lie. And so it's Keller's own culpability in all this that has made him so weak in dealing with Miller's reporting and with the messy aftermath.
That's why it's time for Bill Keller to go as executive editor of the Times. What happened here was so much worse than the Jayson Blair scandal, which cost Raines his job. The Times needs a fresh start, and that means it needs to free itself from all "entanglements."
And Judy Miller isn't the only one at the Times tied up in a knot.Posted on November 9, 2005 12:10 PM
Link Here
posted by Kangaroo Brisbane Australia at 4:36 PM
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