NY Times - Tweedledum or Tweedledee?

Like John Kerry, the New York Times is often for things before they are against them. All of us are prone to overlooking conflicts between what we say today and what we said last week or last year... but the editors and publishers of the New York Times are true masters of the practice. Today, they weighed in, for the umpteenth time, about a political scandal which they (almost) single-handedly created.

A quick history is in order. First, the Times ran an op/ed by former Ambassador Joseph Wilson to discredit President Bush, providing Wilson a platform to disclose (falsely) the results of his CIA-sponsored trip to Niger on a matter involving national security. (By the way, has anybody ever inquired about how this op/ed came about? Did Wilson approach the NYT, or did they solicit the story from him? Did Plame shop it to them through her press contacts?) Then, they called for a special prosecutor (though not an independent counsel) to investigate the leak to Robert Novak of Wilson's CIA wife's name. Once the special prosecutor got started and quickly moved past Novak, and began looking at NY Times reporters, the paper quickly turned against unbridled special prosecutors. Through it all, they blamed the Bush Administration for all the evils brought about by the investigation, at one point asserting: "Mr. Rove could clear all this up quickly. All he has to do is call a press conference and tell everyone what conversations he had and with whom."

Now, of course, we know that Novak's source, the man who started "Plamegate", was Richard Armitage, a State Department appointee not fond of the Bush Administration or the war in Iraq, who casually mentioned the fact to Novak, as Washington gossip. Lacking the decency to admit the error of its ways from beginning to end, the Times continues to dissemble, mislead, and blame the Bush White House for all the ills begun by its own decision to commission or publish the Wilson op/ed. Let's take a close look at its call for "Answers". The following is the text of the Sept. 6 Times editorial, interspersed with my own observations and suggested edits:

For three years, ever since we used "former Ambassador" Joe Wilson to aid our attacks on the Bush Administration, Washington has been periodically consumed, whenever we choose to write about it, with the question of who unmasked a covert C.I.A. agent to the columnist Robert Novak. It has been a huge distraction for the White House (ok, so it hasn't been all bad), resulted in the unjustified jailing of one reporter, and led to perjury charges against the vice president’s chief of staff (not as good as a Rove indictment, but we'll take it). Last week, it was reported that Richard Armitage, then deputy secretary of state, was the first to mention Valerie Wilson to Mr. Novak, and that the federal prosecutor knew this more than two and a half years ago (how dare he not leak it to us 2 years ago... doesn't he know how this town works?).

The revelation tells us something important. But, unfortunately, it is not the answer to the central question in the investigation — whether there was an organized attempt by the White House to use Mrs. Wilson to discredit or punish her husband, Joseph Wilson. [Yeah, yeah, we know: the "official" purpose of a criminal investigation is to decide whether and by whom a crime may have been committed. But don't you know how this town works? Special prosecutors really work for us; free labor with subpoena powers!] A former diplomat, Mr. Wilson debunked the claim that Saddam Hussein tried to buy uranium from Niger to make nuclear weapons. [Debunked: That's our story and we're sticking to it. Don't bother us with details. Scoring that op/ed was a real coup for us, and we're not giving up on it that easy.].

Mr. Armitage, a White House outsider, would be an odd participant in such a plot. He is said to have learned from a State Department memo that Mrs. Wilson had recommended sending her husband to check the Niger story since he had worked there as a diplomat. We should know, since we reported that Armitage ordered the memo delivered to Secretary Powell. The memo was prepared for Mr. Cheney, who was eager to prove that there was an Iraqi nuclear weapons program and to silence critics. You readers don't need to know that the memo was prepared at the Powell State Department and dated June 10, about 4 weeks before we ran the Wilson op/ed.

It’s conceivable that Patrick Fitzgerald, the federal prosecutor, has evidence that suggests the information in the memo was used in some illegal manner. Or his investigators may have learned something troubling about the second, unknown (actually, we've previously reported that Karl Rove was the second source, but who needs consistency?), source cited in Mr. Novak’s column, or about some other illegal activity. But whatever it is needs to be made public, because our reporters are the only people entitled to keep anything secret in this town. The Armitage story is mainly a reminder that this investigation has gone on too long. What? No, no, no. It couldn't possibly be a reminder that we were wrong on this from the very beginning. Don't you understand that we're the New York Times?

While this page opposed calls for reviving the special prosecutor law for this case, we did say that someone outside the White House orbit should be in charge, rather than Attorney General John Ashcroft. Like most others, we saw Mr. Fitzgerald as a good choice. Now we fear he has succumbed to the prosecutor’s foot-dragging disease. (What? No, no, no. We don't have to admit this was inevitable just because every single special prosecutor we've ever had caught the same disease. We're the New York Times; only Presidents should admit their mistakes.) He kept the case open after I. Lewis Libby, Mr. Cheney’s chief of staff, was indicted, which is all we really needed him to do for us. At the time he hinted that he would have more to say on the original crime he was investigating. That was last October.

It’s time for Mr. Fitzgerald to provide answers (i.e., issue a report ratting out how nasty the Administration is before the upcoming election) or admit that this investigation has run its course. He didn't bag Rove or Cheney, but we'll take Libby. Mr. Fitzgerald has proved more trouble to us and our reporters than he was worth. Otherwise, he risks being lumped in with the special prosecutor who spent a decade investigating the former Clinton cabinet member Henry Cisneros, and wound up with nothing more than his conviction that he had yet to get to the bottom of things. Yeah, yeah, we know that independent prosecutors wasted a lot of time and money tarnishing the good names of Republican officials, too, but we don't care about them. Republicans don't have good names. Don't you know who we are? Don't you know how this town works?

Hat tip: Althouse and her commenters