2005 cartoon that might help baffled editors at the NYT understand why we went to war in Iraq
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Especially with the likes of Judith Miller on the payroll. They'll just rinse and repeat the same old shit because that's what they do.
That's pretty damn shameful. It was costly -- in both human life and treasury.
very long, superb article, I will just post the final 4 paragraphs (it has almost 70 or so)
https://nymag.com/nymetro/news/media/features/9226/
MAY 28, 2004
snip
While the Times has conducted its inquiry, Miller’s WMD coverage has also occasioned a series of less high-minded questions: namely, does Judy Miller live in an apartment divided? During the past year, three intriguing documents have been pushed into the public view that may shed light on this matter. Since 1993, Miller has been married to Jason Epstein, the legendary Random House editor who reinvented paperback publishing in the early fifties. Last May, in the New York Review of Books, Epstein published an excoriation of the Bush administration’s march to war. The war, he blared, was “a preemptive assault whose urgency has not been adequately explained and for which no satisfactory explanation, beyond the zealotry of its sponsors, may exist.” This can be rather effortlessly interpreted as a shot across his wife’s bow: Hadn’t Miller’s oeuvre painted a sufficiently frightening picture of Saddam’s arsenal?
Document No. 2 also appeared in the New York Review. Before I cite the article, however, it is necessary to say a brief word about the venue. Epstein was a founding father of the journal. His first wife, Barbara Epstein, remains an editor there. Therefore, the Review’s pages were odd ones to showcase a vivisection of Judy Miller’s reporting. But last February, the Review published the critic Michael Massing’s devastating analysis of Miller’s work. Document No. 3 helps set the Massing article in context. The same month that Barbara Epstein ran Massing’s piece, Jason Epstein paid tribute to her in a New York Times Magazine food column. Writing a poignant reminiscence of their 1953 honeymoon, he told readers: “The marriage proved to be bountiful. When after many years, it ended, the love that we celebrated on that December day [their wedding day] remained intact.”
Predictably, the editor’s note inaugurated a new round of grumbling inside the paper. Reporters complained that the note had mentioned no names, implicitly equating Miller’s sins with those of less-culpable reporters like Michael Gordon and Chris Hedges. Others remarked that it had been buried on A10, not a space normally reserved for serious statements about the paper. One Timesman speculated that these complaints would wend their way into the press: “The rumbling on this reminds me of all the Howell-Blair stuff. Once people started complaining publicly … the proverbial cat was out of the bag.” And of course, by making this observation to me, he had fulfilled his own prophecy. A few days later, Daniel Okrent, the public editor, was expected to unveil the conclusions of his own investigation, one he had vowed not to conduct because it concerned events that preceded his—and the new, kinder, more transparent Times’—arrival.
But making the process more transparent is easier than reforming the profession itself, which inevitably relies on people. People like Miller, with her outsize journalistic temperament of ambition, obsession, and competitive fervor, relying on people like Ahmad Chalabi, with his smooth, affable exterior retailing false information for his own motives, for the benefit of people reading a newspaper, trying to get at the truth of what’s what.
...but I hear the troops in the Iraq War are eligible for this patch. 
