Not Mentioned by Instapundit
Glenn Reynolds has shown a lot of interest in coverage of major stories by the NY Times in the past--whether the "newspaper of record" deserves to be blamed for bias, or not, for example. He has a strong interest in whether it is fair to say the major media have a liberal bias, and above all, an anti-Iraq war or anti-Bush bias.
I just searched for "Judith Miller" in his archive. The only post that comes up is from June 25, 2003. Reynolds links to a Washington Post article which suggests on the one hand that Miller has worked too closely with the military unit she is embedded with, and become "too aggressive"; and on the other hand that she "helped the United States take custody of two important Iraqis." He says he is letting readers decide, but he is pretty clearly pro-Miller.
The Post article includes this: "In a May 1 e-mail to Times colleague John Burns, The Post reported, Miller said: 'I've been covering Chalabi for about 10 years, and have done most of the stories about him for our paper. . . . He has provided most of the front page exclusives on WMD to our paper.'"
It has become a pretty significant story that Chalabi and the INC deliberately spread stories that were not just exaggerations, but wholly and completely untrue. Miller, whatever else she was doing, was acting as Chalabi's dupe. By her complete failure to carry out even elementary checking of the amazing stories she was told by one source, she displayed worse dishonesty than Rick Bragg, who was forced to resign from the Times, and probably worse than Jayson Blair.
According to Jack Shafer in Slate, Chalabi's INC has made it more or less official that they succeeded in placing their "product" or message--their detailed and fairly sophisticated line of crap--in 108 different media articles and broadcasts between October 2001 and May 2002. Many of these placements were in the "elite" big media, including, of course, the NYT.
Now there's a story of bias, no doubt some deliberate deception on a huge scale by the INC, in-group thinking that fails to question alternatives, talking in an echo chamber, etc. Yet it does not attract Instapundit's attention.
How about Chalabi himself? Here Reynolds has been raising questions--and in fact, in this connection he says the NYT is likely to be embarrassed if the charges against Chalabi turn out to be true.
What about the fact that the allegations about corruption in the oil-for-food program mostly originate with Chalabi? As far as I know, Reynolds has not mentioned that.
What about the new evidence that Dick Cheney actually did use his position to steer some business in Iraq to Halliburton, the company where he used to be CEO? Nothing so far.
What about the fact that Bush apparently had three chances to kill Zarqawi, and chose not to do so. Before March 2003, Zarqawi may have been the only Al Qaeda operative in Iraq. He stayed for the most part in the part of the country controlled by Kurds, and it has not been shown that he was ever the guest of Saddam. Bush may have wanted to avoid giving the impression that actual Al Qaeda leaders could be removed from Iraq without invading the country. Zarqawi may be one of the biggest sources of violent attacks in Iraq today. Reynolds, I believe, has mentioned none of this.
Tony Pierce has brought up another story more than once. President Bush's uncle had a senior position with a bank that handled discreet transactions for embassies in Washington, including the Saudi embassy, before 9/11. It is possible, according to Pierce, that Bush's uncle actually expedited the funding of the attacks on 9/11--although presumably without knowing what he was doing. Instapundit has not mentioned this story, either.
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