Documents of War

By Tobin Harshaw

Tags: C.I.A., Iraq War, National Security

“Students of how the Bush administration led the nation into the Iraq war can now go online to browse a comprehensive database of top officials’ statements before the invasion, connecting the dots between hundreds of claims, mostly discredited since then, linking Saddam Hussein to Al Qaeda or warning that he possessed forbidden weapons,” reports this morning’s Times:

The Center for Public Integrity, a research group that focuses on ethics in government and public policy, designed the new Web site to allow simple searches for specific phrases, such as “mushroom cloud” or “yellowcake uranium,” in transcripts and documents totaling some 380,000 words, including remarks by President Bush and most of his top advisers in the two years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks…. There is no startling new information in the archive, because all the documents have been published previously. But the new computer tool is remarkable for its scope, and its replay of the crescendo of statements that led to the war. Muckrakers may find browsing the site reminiscent of what Richard M. Nixon used to dismissively call “wallowing in Watergate.”

While the left side of the blogosphere (see here and here and here) is crowing indignant, you can consider Ed Morrissey less than impressed:

The Center for Public Integrity hardly qualifies as “independent”. It gets much of its funding from George Soros, who has thrown millions of dollars behind Democratic political candidates, and explicitly campaigned to defeat George Bush in 2004 … Besides Soros, it gets financing from the Streisand Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Los Angeles Times Foundation. The FIJ shares most of its board members with the CPI, which hardly makes it a separate entity in terms of its political direction …

In fact, there is nothing new in this site that hasn’t already been picked apart by the blogosphere, and some of it discredited. It includes the debunked charge that Bush lied in the “sixteen words” of the 2003 State of the Union address. Joe Wilson’s own report to the CIA and to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence confirmed that, at least according to Niger’s Prime Minister, Iraq had sought to trade for uranium in 1999. The CPI site has the sixteen words posted as one of their false statements.

Let’s boil this down. An organization funded by known political activists puts up a website with shopworn quotes taken mostly out of context and misrepresented — and this somehow qualifies as news?

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/23/documents-of-war/