corrente

Well, the editorial page editors do, at least. It's a good editorial. Just two years too late, since all the facts in it were available to anyone at the time who had an open mind (i.e., paid attention to the blogosphere or the prescient anti-war critique in general):

The [Senate] report [on pre-war Intelligence failures] was heavily censored by the administration and is too narrowly focused on the bungling of just the Central Intelligence Agency. But what comes through is thoroughly damning. Put simply, the Bush administration's intelligence analysts cooked the books to give Congress and the public the impression that Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons and was developing nuclear arms, that he was plotting to give such weapons to terrorists, and that he was an imminent threat.

Yes. Where was the Times when the news was breaking?

The report reaffirmed a finding by another panel investigating intelligence failures before the 9/11 attacks in saying that there was no "established formal relationship" between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda.

Yes. Where was the Times when the news was breaking?

Sadly, the investigation stopped without assessing how President Bush had used the incompetent intelligence reports to justify war. It left open the question of whether the analysts thought they were doing what Mr. Bush wanted. While the panel said it had found no analyst who reported being pressured to change a finding, its vice chairman, Senator John Rockefeller IV, said there had been an "environment of intense pressure". But the issue was glossed over so the report could be adopted unanimously.

Yes. Where was the Times when the news was breaking?

The panel's investigation into how President Bush handled the intelligence has been postponed until after the election. But the bottom line already seems pretty clear. No one had to pressure analysts to change their findings because the findings were determined before the work started.

Yes. Where was the Times when the news was breaking?

The Senate Intelligence Committee's report ought to be the first move back from the brink of destructive public cynicism. The next must come from the president, who could help restore confidence in the government's risk assessment by simply being frank about the errors his administration made and the lessons it learned. That would do more to prepare the country for the next crisis than a full season of scary press conferences by Mr. Ridge.
(via the slowly awakening from deep sleep Times)

Um. "Cynicism"? Don't you mean "realism"?

Where was the Times when the news was breaking?

Every damning indictment the report makes, and that the Times repeats, was repeatedly evidenced in the run up to the war—with the blogsosphere doing a lot of the heavy lifting. And where was the Times? Buying Chalabi slut Judith Miller a clean set of kneepads, that's where. And then another, another, and another. (Why, oh why, does Miller still have a job, seeing as what she did, unlike Jason Blair little stories, actually changed history and might have cost American lives.)

I remember the exact story that made me understand how decrepit, how complicit, and how complacent the Times had become, the moment when things snapped: when I read the story the times "broke" that showed how the "bourgeois rioters" who intimidated voting officials in Florida 2000 where really paid Republican staffers. They had the video that gave the evidence while the recount was still going on but only published the story well after the Supreme Court selected Bush. So, the answer to the question, Where was the Times when the news was breaking? has, for a long time, been... What? "Nowhere"? "In the tank"?

When will the Times become a news gathering organization again?