‘There You Go Again: New York Times‘ Tim Weiner’s Dubious Opinions Passed Off As ‘News’

(Washington, D.C.): Yesterday’s New
York Times repeated a mistake it has
made on a number of occasions in recent
years ⁽¹⁾:
It treated an article about “the
Clinton Record on Defense” by staff
writer Tim Weiner as legitimate news,
indeed as front-page news at
that. In fact, Mr. Weiner’s
lengthy essay can be charitably described
as an opinion editorial (at the very
least as “news analysis”
— the euphemism employed by editors to
allow staff op.eds. to be placed on the
news pages).

An alternative description that is
less charitable, but certainly
defensible, is that the Weiner
article amounted to a transparent effort
by the New York Times and its
reporter to curry favor with friends — and
sources — in power.
Assigning a reporter whose previous
writing has thoroughly established his
hostility for (among other things) covert
operations, big-ticket U.S. military
procurement programs in general and
missile defenses in particular to assess
the record of an Administration that
largely shares his hostility virtually
guarantees that the product will be a
puff-piece, not an honest appraisal. If
it is no surprise that Mr. Weiner would
author such a biased article, it is
astounding that the editors of a
newspaper that prides itself on being the
Nation’s journal of record would demean
its own standards by treating the Weiner
essay as “news.”

A Bill of Particulars

The following are among the more
egregious examples of Mr. Weiner’s recent
handiwork that individually and
collectively qualify as opinion — in
many cases highly debatable opinion:

The Retargetting Scam:
Prominently featured on the front page
was the following sentence in the Weiner
article’s fourth paragraph:
“[President Clinton] proudly points
to the fact that Moscow’s
nuclear missiles are no longer aimed at
the United States.” (Emphasis
added.) In case anyone missed this
“fact,” the reporter goes on to
reiterate further down in the piece,
declaring “…those [Russian]
warheads are no longer aimed at the
United States.” As the href=”
index.jsp?section=papers&code=96-D_106at”>attached lead
editorial from today’s Washington
Times makes clear, far from a
“fact,” the claim Mr.
Clinton has made on over 86 occasions
(including a State-of-the-Union address
and a presidential debate) can more
accurately be described as “a
myth.”

At best, it is unknowable whether the
Russians are abiding by their pledge to
target ocean areas (an environmentally
incorrect “nuke-the-whales”
targeting doctrine) instead of the United
States. At worst, it is patently untrue. ⁽²⁾
And even if the Russians have
put different targeting data in their
missile computers, estimates of how long
it would take to reprogram them run from
as much as 15 minutes to as little as 10
seconds.

Clearly, it serves President Clinton’s
immediate electoral interest to promote
the idea that the United States faces no
external threats. The claim that American
children are not threatened by nuclear
missiles also helps deflect Senator
Dole’s criticism that the Clinton
Administration is determined to prevent
the Nation from deploying effective
anti-missile defenses. Mr. Weiner is
clearly sympathetic to both gambits.

Accustomed though voters have become
to politicians’ efforts to mislead them,
the practice should be forcefully
condemned and firmly resisted. It is not
merely cynical; it undermines the
informed electorate crucial to a healthy
democracy. And, if it contributes to a
false sense of security leading to
inaction on military measures needed to
protect that democracy, such disingenuous
hyperbole can actually put the Nation
itself at risk. No major
newspaper, let alone one of the stature
of the New York Times, should
contribute to such a danger by seemingly
attesting to the factual accuracy of
misleading statements simply because its
reporter opposes those military measures.

Undeserved Praise for Clinton
Officials: Mr. Weiner’s essay
makes clear — in his own words and those
of others from whom he solicited quotes
— precisely who are the bad guys and who
are the good ones.

Bad Guys: Citing
a mid-level staffer on George Bush’s
National Security Council, Phil Zelikow,
Weiner condemns President Clinton’s
initial NSC staff as “the worst
since the first Reagan Administration.”
While there is little doubt that Mr.
Clinton has had a weak team, it is not
appreciably weaker than that on which Mr.
Zelikow served. ⁽³⁾
As for the first term Reagan NSC, it is
worth recalling that it, more than any
other part of the U.S. government, was
responsible for the visionary secret
strategy that substantially hastened the
demise of the totalitarian Soviet empire.
This was one of the two greatest foreign
policy accomplishments of this century,
along with the defeat of the fascist Axis
powers in World War II. ⁽⁴⁾

Mr. Zelikow also damned with faint
praise President Clinton’s first CIA
Director, James Woolsey
as “a compulsive truth-teller with a
contrarian impulse, and he thought the
job was a license to tell the truth, the
real story. He did this with the
President. And it was unpopular.” It
is hard to say which is more of an
indictment of this presidency: the fact
that such a man was persona non grata
in the Clinton Administration or the
reasonable inference that Mr. Clinton
sought in Mr. Woolsey’s replacement
someone who would not be a
“compulsive truth-teller.”

Good Guys: As
for Mr. Weiner’s personal pantheon of
white hats, it evidently includes:

• CIA Director John Deutch
  (“[who] is visibly trying to
  improve the ways in which the
  agency gathers and analyzes
  secret information” and
  “has meted out unprecedented
  discipline and set high standards
  of accountability for covert
  operations”);
• Secretary of Defense
  William Perry (again
  citing the ingratiating Mr.
  Zelikow, “a strong defense
  secretary — the strongest in a
  generation, a man with deep
  experience, strong convictions,
  intellectual horsepower [who has
  run] the Pentagon
  competently….”);
• a troika of Harvard professors —
  Joseph Nye, Graham
  Allison and Ashton Carter
  — who offer self-serving
  comments about their tenure as
  senior Clinton officials; and
• John Gannon, the
  Deputy CIA Director for
  Intelligence (who is credited
  with asking intelligence users
  “what they wanted to
  know,” an infelicitous turn
  of phrase in an Administration
  with a reputation for ignoring
  unwelcome information and for
  politicizing intelligence).

The records in office of Mr. Weiner’s
good guys is such that one suspects his
favorable treatment of them has more to
do with the access which they have
granted him and their shared views than
with their actual performance.

Contempt for Covert
Operations: Weiner appears to
identify with “some senior
Administration officials, particularly at
the State Department, [who] seem to
regard the CIA’s covert operations
directorate as illegal, immoral or
irrelevant.” He quotes Loch Johnson,
a former congressional staffer and author
as saying, “The depth of disdain
between State and CIA is remarkable. I
know people in State who think CIA is a
greater enemy than Russia ever was, ⁽⁵⁾
and that feeling is reciprocated.”

Ruing the Failure to Cash in
on the ‘Peace Dividend’: Mr.
Weiner concludes his essay with a reprise
of one of his favorite themes — the
Pentagon spends extravagantly and
excessively. Indulging his demagogic
tendencies, he declares: “Mr.
Clinton’s Pentagon has spent more than $1
trillion, about $30 million an hour, more
than the rest of the world’s top 10
armies combined.” His closing line
condescendingly dismisses the whole point
of that spending: “It provided no
real peace dividend, save the uneasy
prevailing peace.” (Emphasis
added.)

The Bottom Line

The Center for Security Policy
respects the right of Tim Weiner and
other journalists to have opinions —
even those as wrong-headed as are evident
in yesterday’s New York Times. It
is regrettable that an influential
newspaper like the Times insists
on serving up genuine news about security
policy through the prism of Mr. Weiner’s
biases. It is, however, inexcusable
for the opinions of a reporter like Mr.
Weiner to be presented as news when they
are anything but news fit to print.

– 30 –

1. See, for
example, All the ‘News’ That
Fits the Times’ Political Agenda: Latest
Assault on SDI Unfounded, Indefensible
( index.jsp?section=papers&code=95-D_50″>No. 95-D
50, 19 July 1995).

2. Certainly, Mr.
Clinton’s oft-repeated variant on this
claim that says “no nuclear
missiles” are targeted against the
United States is wrong insofar as there
is no basis for believing that China has
stopped aiming its ICBMs at American
targets.

3. Zelikow’s
skewed perspective on this question may
reflect his organizational loyalties. As
a Foreign Service detailee, he probably
mistook the Scrowcroft NSC’s utter
subordination to the Baker State
Department as a model of a strong and
effective mechanism for exercising, as he
puts it, “central direction.”

4. For those
inclined to contest this statement,
National Security Decision Directives 66,
75 and others forged by the National
Security Council during the first Reagan
Administration document the planning and
execution of this momentous strategic
undertaking.

5. Perhaps such
sentiments help explain an extraordinary
development in the case of a Foreign
Service Officer who is suspected of
espionage and has been missing since 30
August. According to today’s Washington
Times, James Schneider — whose body
may or may not have been discovered
Sunday in the Shenandoah Mountains — was
given a job at the State Department after
failing a polygraph test concerning his
contacts with foreign agents while
serving in the Navy, security problem
that made him ineligible for employment
at the CIA.