More on Kay

Jim Miller, who also spotted the abysmal failures of that NPR David Kay interview, linked to a related New York Times article from yesterday. I'm not going to go into the specifics of it, here, because the Times's handling of the interview raises important questions.

The piece is essentially a summary of the interview, and because it appears to have been conducted by Times reporter James Risen, there is nowhere to turn for the original audio or even a transcript. Frankly, I only reluctantly trust anything within that paper's pages that isn't surrounded by quotation marks (and even then, one must be careful). As Roger Simon asks:

Why is not the interview with such an important person on such a key issue published directly without "interpretation" or filtering of what he said, allowing us to draw our own conclusions?

Well, we can guess — remembering that it is an election year. Bill Hobbs's comment focused elsewhere certainly applies to the media treatment of the war from the very first whispers of its possibility:

Having forced Bush to go to the UN - even though it gave President Clinton a pass when he deliberately avoided the UN in the decision to intervene in the Balkans - Congressional Democrats narrowed the focus to Iraq's WMD. Now they complain the war was not justified because, it seems, Iraq had little or no WMD. They may be right about Iraq's WMD, but they are wrong about need to go to war.

Although, according to Scott Ott, Secretary Rumsfeld has apparently had a change of heart.