NYT on WMD Intelligence
Today’s New York Times contains the following editorial: Was the intelligence cooked?
Righty bloggers have no doubt already swung into action, linking the “idiocy” of the editorial to the same muddled thinking that gave us Jayson Blair and the Raines resignation. But I wish they could forget the messenger for a minute, and concentrate on the message. It’s important. It’s also clear, unambiguous, and untainted by elliptical distortion.
Maybe it was just reading those accounts of Leo Strauss’s appeal for an actual questioning dialog, one that seeks to illuminate the truth, rather than the kind of partisan sophistry I’ve been wading through lately, but I’m getting tired of people whose claims of certainty increase rather than diminish when the evidence supporting their position starts eroding.
More detail comes from the Times’ Week in Review piece by Steven R. Weisman: Truth is the first casualty. Is credibility second?
Update: The Washington Post takes a similar, if more restrained, position in its own lead editorial today: Hunting Iraq’s weapons.
