WaPo Ombudsman on the Blair Memo Story’s Coverage
Here’s a really interesting followup from Michael Getler, the Washington Post’s ombudsman, on his and his paper’s previous handling of the Tony Blair memo story: News over there, but not here.
The key line in the leaked memo, in my view, is the assessment by British intelligence, after a visit to Washington, that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” That kind of assertion has been made by critics and commentators, but it has not been included in official post-invasion assessments here about how the country went to war under what turned out to be false premises about weapons of mass destruction and other matters. Investigating that assessment, coming from the key U.S. ally in the war, certainly seems journalistically mandatory. Indeed, while official U.S. commissions and committees have documented just how bad U.S. intelligence was, they have stopped short of assessing what happened to that intelligence after it was prepared.
