Like Floyd Mayweather knocking down Ricky Hatton in the recent welterweight title fight, the White House has exposed how the New York Times makes things up for dramatic political effect.
The paper has now corrected the record in its coverage of White House statements on the CIA destruction of interrogation tapes. It’s a knockout win for the White House and a loss for the Bush-bashing press.
The battle with the Times has to be put in context. This is really an effort by the liberal media to continue to try to make a controversy over the waterboarding, or the simulated drowning, of terrorists. It is a practice that has saved American lives. But liberal reporters who lay awake at night worried about protecting the rights of terrorists find it horrifying. With the destruction of the CIA’s waterboarding tapes, the media have found that this constitutes possible “destruction of evidence” and a potential criminal act. Then along comes the Times, suggesting that White House officials knew more than what had previously been acknowledged. Breathlessly following the coverage, liberal Democrats must have been salivating at the prospect of holding another hearing.
This is how the media concoct a “scandal” in Washington, D.C. It is completely phony when the administration can honestly be criticized on so many other policy fronts. But it gives the Bush-bashing commentators on MSNBC something else to talk about. On Wednesday night, MSNBC host Dan Abrams even tried to make an anti-Bush point out of Britney Spears’ kid sister getting pregnant. Incredibly, he cited the pregnancy as proof that Bush-supported federally-funded abstinence-only programs don’t work. He had also shown, without irony, film footage of Senator Ted Kennedy, who left a young lady to die in the bottom of his submerged car, trying to make a controversy out of pouring water over the face of a terrorist.
We can all laugh at a clown like Abrams, who doesn’t seem to understand how ridiculous he looks in serving as a shill for the lunatic left. But when the New York Times tries to make a scandal out of the handling of CIA interrogation tapes, it should be taken seriously. It’s good the White House did so.
The last time I checked, the First Amendment applies to all Americans, even officials who work at the White House. So it’s appropriate and necessary for them to confront a paper like the New York Times when they see its sensational and hyped coverage as being inaccurate and unfair. In this controversy, the White House asked for and received a correction of the record. The White House should go further and seek to identify the officials who are secretly leaking information to the press. That’s the only way to put an end to this scandal-mongering.
The leaker may be one of the administration lawyers or officials named in the article. This may sound strange, but some of them have been at each other’s throats in the past.
As the Joe Wilson/Valerie Plame case demonstrated, the Times is a mouthpiece for certain CIA elements that want to discredit the administration and set policy. It is an assault on our constitutional form of government. The White House badly mishandled that controversy, but perhaps it has learned its lesson. In the CIA tapes controversy, the White House seems to recognize that some elements are trying to use the paper to shift the blame to the White House. In other words, the Times is in classic scandal mode. My assumption would be that the leaker has or has had ties to the CIA.
It is also a safe assumption that the leaker is someone uncomfortable with the administration’s aggressive policy in the war on international Islamic terrorism. It may be someone who has had to defend that policy but doesn’t like doing so. So he leaks to the press to get back at the administration.
It is necessary to speculate on this point because there is such a concerted effort by some elements of the press to undermine the administration’s counter-terrorism policy using anonymous sources. As usual, of course, the Times won’t identify its “sources.”
The White House response, which hopefully signals a more aggressive posture with the liberal press, included a statement that the paper had implied that the White House “has been misleading in publicly acknowledging or discussing details related to the CIA’s decision to destroy interrogation tapes.”
The White House statement said that “The sub-headline of the story inaccurately says that the ‘White House Role Was Wider Than It Said,’ and the story states that ‘...the involvement of White House officials in the discussions before the destruction of the tapes...was more extensive than Bush administration officials have acknowledged.’ Under direction from the White House General Counsel while the Department of Justice and the CIA Inspector General conduct a preliminary inquiry, we have not publicly commented on facts relating to this issue, except to note President Bush’s immediate reaction upon being briefed on the matter. Furthermore, we have not described—neither to highlight, nor to minimize—the role or deliberations of White House officials in this matter.”
The statement added that “The New York Times’ inference that there is an effort to mislead in this matter is pernicious and troubling, and we are formally requesting that NYT correct the sub-headline of this story.”
The New York Times statement in response to the controversy consisted of the following: “The White House has not challenged the contents of our story, but it questioned the precision of the second deck of our headline: ‘White House Role Was Wider Than It Said.’ While Bush Administration officials have discussed the White House role in the tapes episode (asserting, for example, that Harriet Miers opposed the destruction of the tapes) ‘the White House’ has not officially said anything on the subject. We have made the appropriate correction on line, and will print a correction.”
The correction in the Times’ Thursday edition noted that the paper “referred imprecisely to the White House’s position thus far on the matter. While Bush administration officials have acknowledged some discussions leading up to the destruction of the tapes in November 2005, as the article noted, the White House itself has not officially said anything on the subject, so its role was not ‘wider than it said.’”
Notice what the Times is admitting to. The subheading said the White House role was wider than it had previously claimed. This had all the ingredients of a cover-up, or so the Times wanted people to believe. But the White House had not officially said anything about that aspect of the controversy. So the paper was making a false charge. It was a concoction intended to create another in a series of endless “scandals” for the administration on the handling of terrorists. This is what passes for “investigative journalism” these days. It is designed to win a journalism prize.
The White House should take this further and challenge the “contents” of the story, at least in the sense of trying to find out where it is all coming from. That’s where the real “scandal” lies.
There is a view that the White House should just sit back and take it when a paper like the Times launches an attack. This view is based on the erroneous assumption that the Times (or the Washington Post, for that matter) is an honest broker of information. We cannot afford, during a time of war, to take such a benign view of anonymous sources. These “sources” could be spies or traitors. The public has a right to know who they are.
The scandal in this case is the conduct of the press, not the administration.
