LA Times followed White House's deceptive conflation of "pressure" on analysts, "manipulation" of intelligence
In a November 15 article by staff writer Peter Wallsten, the Los Angeles Times falsely identified the yet-to-be-completed "phase two" of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on prewar Iraq intelligence as an "inquiry into whether the [Bush] administration pressured intelligence analysts to conclude that Iraq had pursued chemical, biological and nuclear weapons." In fact, according to the agreement reached by Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS) and ranking Democrat Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), phase two is set to investigate not whether the White House pressured intelligence analysts to produce assessments favorable to their case for war -- which was examined in the first phase of the committee's report -- but whether the administration manipulated or misused that intelligence once it received it.
The Times' apparent confusion between "pressure" and "manipulation" comes just days after President Bush explicitly conflated the two issues in a November 11 speech:
Some Democrats and anti-war critics are now claiming we manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people about why we went to war. These critics are fully aware that a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community's judgments related to Iraq's weapons programs.
But as Media Matters for America has documented, phase two of the Senate Intelligence Committee report would mark the first assessment of whether White House officials manipulated intelligence in the run-up to the war. While both phase one of the Senate Intelligence Committee report and the Robb-Silberman Commission's report on intelligence capabilities regarding weapons of mass destruction (WMD) found no evidence of "pressure," neither report was authorized to investigate the issue of how the administration used intelligence. Even the conclusion of these two reports that analysts received no "pressure" in gathering intelligence has been disputed by several senior intelligence officials, including W. Patrick Lang, the former chief of the Middle East office of the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and Richard Kerr, a one-time acting CIA director who led an internal investigation of the CIA's failure to correctly assess Iraq's WMD capabilities.
Memo to LAT:
Phase I: Did the White House pressure intelligence agencies to color their reports before they were submitted?
Phase II: What did the White House do with those reports once it got them?
There - was that so hard?
However, I don't know that this example constitutes misinformation as the term is normally understood (i.e., there is something conscious about it) so much as it demonstrates a form of incompetence.
That's what's wrong with so much of our media: It's not so much that they deliberately parrot the White House line as that they are just not willing to put in the effort - whether because of deadline pressures, commercial considerations, or just plain laziness - to actually understand and keep straight what they're writing about when it's so much easier (and safer) to just paraphrase press releases.
And really, in your excellent analysis, it's not that hard or complicated. Through MMFA and other sites, the media is being exposed for it's lazy complicity to BushieCo. Is American and more likely American corporation Me-First-ism the real culprit in the media's "taking a knee?" It should be pointed out that the football teams that take a knee usually end up losing.
From listening to Kristina Borjesson this morning on the radio, the classified version of the NEI contained plenty of unvarnished truth. The unclassified version published just in time for the Congressional vote on use of force in Iraq left out all the disagreeable parts -- such as the bit where the The State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research stated: "The activities we have detected do not, however, add up to a compelling case that Iraq is currently pursuing what (the bureau) would consider to be an integrated and comprehensive approach to acquire nuclear weapons."