I’ve gotten lots of e-mail about the Zarqawi story (see posts here and here) that has asked, more or less, why I would ever believe anything from the mainstream media with its obvious anti-Bush bias. I’ve responded, over and over again, that I know the rules reporters for major mainstream American news sources work under, and that if an NBC reporter claims to have “Pentagon sources” for a claim, then he does have such sources.
But, amidst all the media bias e-mail, an important question hasn’t been asked, one that doesn’t require us to disbelieve the reporter at all.
The original report said:
Military officials insist their case for attacking Zarqawi’s operation was airtight, but the administration feared destroying the terrorist camp in Iraq could undercut its case for war against Saddam.
That’s all that’s said about the most explosive version of the case. “Military officials” told Jim Miklaszewski that the NSC killed the plan because destroying the camp could remove a pillar from the case for the war.
How do they know what the NSC’s motives were?
Since the report came from a TV network and not from the Times or the Post, it lacks the elaborate code telling us what rank the military officials hold and how close they were to the key meetings. It could be that the sources were involved in drawing the plans up, but very far from the NSC decisionmaking about what to do with the plans. They considered their case “airtight,” and when the NSC said no, they imputed bad motives to the NSC.
NBC would have told the truth; it doesn’t place the officials at the meeting. The officials would be telling the truth as best they understand it. But the underlying charge still might not be true.
Conversely, maybe the military officials do have good information on what was said at the NSC; maybe they were in the room. Or maybe Roger Cressey, quoted elsewhere in the article and still in the White House (though no longer on the NSC staff) by the time of some of the relevant meetings, knows what went on. But the report really isn’t clear enough on how the Pentagon staff whose plans were rejected know why they were rejected. As it stands, the charge could be a kind of bureaucratic sour grapes.
Of course, the officials quoted might be falsely imputing motives without the real motives being adequate or sufficient. But how much evidentiary weight do we put on these Pentagon sources? I don’t know, because Miklaszewski doesn’t tell us how they would know what they claim to know.
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