In response to the mea culpa Sunday by New York Times public editor Daniel Okrent relating to the Gray Lady's reportage leading up to the Iraq war,The New York Sun, a rival paper, has taken the unusual step of defending Times reporter Judith Miller in an editorial. As usual, the Sun asks questions others won't.
The Times management and other critics of the reporting by Ms. Miller and her colleagues seem to give Saddam the benefit of the doubt. Certain things just don’t add up. If Salman Pak was really a counterterrorism training camp, what were Egyptians doing there? Couldn’t Egypt get counterterrorism training from America? And with Saddam claiming that U.N. sanctions were starving his people, did he really need to spend money on mobile weather balloon trucks? Was Zarqawi’s block of cyanide salt for electroplating jewelry? Was the sarin shell accidentally waylaid? Did the biological weapons scientist just decide to take some work home with him at night?
The kind of information Ms. Miller and her colleagues were bringing in strikes us as highly newsworthy. It’s hard to imagine that after September 11 many Americans would be willing to stake their safety on the notion that Saddam’s forces and foreign fighters running around a passenger plane fuselage were engaged in “counter-terrorism” training. Or on the idea that Saddam’s trucks with chemical tanks were used to inflate “weather balloons.”Imagine how a newspaper would look if it buried that information — the sarin, the cyanide salt, the mobile labs, the plane fuselage, the botulinum — and an attack took place. It would be a journalistic and a national security error far worse than anything of which Ms. Miller or the Times have been accused.
It is unfortunate that the Times chose to specifically single out Judith Miller for her pre-war news stories. She is an excellent reporter of the highest quality and integrity and was only doing her job.
# posted by Adam Daifallah : 8:57 AM
