I recently talked about how to read the news. Now I'd like to talk about what's clearly not the news.

David E. Sanger is the White House Correspondent for the New York Times. I hadn't realized that correspondents wrote op-ed pieces, nor had I realized that op-ed pieces were now called 'news analyses.'

That's exactly what Sanger's latest piece is, A Doctrine Under Pressure: Pre-emption Is Redefined:

But the C.I.A. report released last week, written by Charles A. Duelfer, described the evidence as anything but clear and the peril as far from urgent. Mr. Hussein's military power began waning after the 1991 Persian Gulf war, the report concluded. While Mr. Hussein most probably wanted to rebuild his illicit weapons, there is no evidence he had started by the time Mr. Bush was delivering that speech.

The speech referred to was that made by the President on October 7th 2002, a speech made when John Kerry, who had seen the same intelligence as President Bush, apparently agreed with and supported him.

Sanger's column continues the narrow reading of the Duelfer report that is patently being used to support the Kerry Doctrine, while completely disregarding the language of the report itself. Oddly enough he quotes the President giving a fair assessment of the Duelfer Report:

"We did not find the stockpiles we thought were there," Mr. Bush told supporters in Waterloo, Iowa, on Saturday. "But I want you to remember what the Duelfer report said. It said that Saddam Hussein was gaming the oil-for-food program to get rid of sanctions. And why? Because he had the capability and knowledge to rebuild his weapon programs. And the great danger we face in the world today is that a terrorist organization could end up with weapons of mass destruction."

One of the main things that separates bloggers from the old media is that we don't simply interpret data or pass judgment on events: we also deal with open data, share our sources, and challenge others to read or investigate for themselves what we're writing about.

Sanger and his editors fail to provide his readers with links to check his claims. And this stuff is easy enough to find. The entire report is accessible at cia.gov.

Let's just glance at a portion of the CIA's handy 19 page 'Key Findings' PDF which offers an overview of some of what's most important in the 1000+ page report (which, incidentally, I sincerely doubt Sanger read):

One aspect of Saddam’s strategy of unhinging the UN’s sanctions against Iraq, centered on Saddam’s efforts to influence certain UN SC permanent members, such as Russia, France, and China and some nonpermanent (Syria, Ukraine) members to end UN sanctions. Under Saddam’s orders, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) formulated and implemented a strategy aimed at these UNSC members and international public opinion with the purpose of ending UN sanctions and undermining its subsequent OFF program by diplomatic and economic means. At a minimum, Saddam wanted to divide the five permanent members and foment international public support of Iraq at the UN and throughout the world by a savvy public relations campaign and an extensive diplomatic effort.

Hm ... seems that much was a success.

Another element of this strategy involved circumventing UN sanctions and the OFF program by means of “Protocols” or government-to-government economic trade agreements. Protocols allowed Saddam to generate a large amount of revenue outside the purview of the UN. The successful implementation of the Protocols, continued oil smuggling efforts, and the manipulation of UN OFF contracts emboldened Saddam to pursue his military reconstitution efforts starting in 1997 and peaking in 2001. These efforts covered conventional arms, dual-use goods acquisition, and some WMD-related programs.

So why are people like Sanger lying about the Duelfer report?

Because the alternative would be to report its contents accurately while claiming it to be a pack of partisan lies. Then, instead of competing 'interpretations,' the talking heads would be fighting over whether the report is accurate. The story would be about the details, and people would be forced to discuss the Oil-for-Food scandal, the involvement of French and Russian officials, and whether Saddam Hussein really posed an impending threat to Mid-East stability.

What Kerry supporters have chosen to do, to repeat mechanically that there were no WMDs at the time of invasion, is a rhetorical game played by smart alecky children. It's like missing the forest for the trees, but doing so because the forest isn't good politics for your guy.

There's more chicanery in Sanger's opinion piece:

Traditionally, pre-empting an enemy is all about urgency, striking before the enemy strikes. In the prelude to the invasion in March of last year, Mr. Bush and his aides stopping short of saying Saddam Hussein posed an "imminent" threat. Still, they used urgent-sounding language at every turn to explain why they could not afford to wait for inspectors to complete their work, or for the United Nations Security Council to come to a consensus on authorizing military action. "Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud," he said in a speech delivered Oct. 7, 2002.

Emphasis mine.

The argument of the piece is that President Bush is redefining his own definition of pre-emptive war, that there's some sort of back-pedalling in the face of the 'damning' Duelfer report. But what this passage shows is that Sanger himself has defined the terms of pre-emptive war and has even acknowledged that the president never used the same terms. How then is there a redfinition on the President's part? But his statements sure were urgent-sounding.

Next Sanger will turn the urgent-sounding language against the president:

But the C.I.A. report released last week, written by Charles A. Duelfer, described the evidence as anything but clear and the peril as far from urgent.

This is more chicanery. Or ignorance. And really the question isn't about a redifinition of pre-emptive war. It's about pre-war intelligence opposed to post-war findings, and manipulative conflation of the two on the part of partisans.

The evidence which Sanger refers to in the Duelfer report is not the same evidence that led to the President's decision. Here Sanger is playing on ambiguity to unfairly prejudice his readers. If he'd read just a few pages of the Duelfer report he'd have to know that this evidence was largely culled from interviews with former members of Saddam's regime. I think it's safe to say that all or nearly all of this evidence could only be gathered after the war. It did not exist before the war.

Pre-war evidence was limited to intelligence reports, not direct testimony and physical materials gathered in post-war Iraq.

To try to equate the information in the Duelfer report with pre-war intelligence reports is misleading and intellectually irresponsible. Sanger tries to give this an air of respectability by quoting a Harvard man and former NIC director under President:

Taken at face value, Mr. Bush appears to be saying that under his new standard, a country merely has to be thinking about developing illicit weapons at some time. "He's saying intent is enough," said Joseph Nye, a Harvard professor who under the Clinton administration headed the National Intelligence Council, the group that assesses for the president when countries have trespassed that hard-to-define line.

"The classical definition for pre-emption was 'imminent threat,' " Mr. Nye said. Then, with the development of the president's "National Security Policy of the United States," that moved to something less than imminent, because, as Mr. Bush argued, it is often hard to know when a country is about to attack. Now, said Mr. Nye, "the Duelfer report pushed him into a box where capability is not the standard, but merely intention."

Sanger was careful enough to preface the professor's statement by saying, "Taken at face value, Mr. Bush appears to be saying that under his new standard, a country merely has to be thinking about developing illicit weapons at some time."

The politics of appearance rears its head and we hit the heart of Sangers piece: it's not what the President mean, but what we can interpret it to mean. What does it seem to say on the surface?

But beyond that quoting Dr. Nye is a kind of game. This appeal to authority is meant to disqualify those who lack the experience and academic standing of the expert witness. But prestige and experience never trump logic.

You can not take the president's decision out of time, or apply what we know now to decisions made in the past. The claim that intention is enough to launch pre-emptive war is a stretch because the President made his decision based on intelligence that said the weapons were there. He didn't make that decision based on the Duelfer report.

That report can not be applied transhistorically to invalidate or vitiate the decision to go to war when the intelligence that had existed then, and which John Kerry had also seen and agreed with, justified the decision.

The President's argument today—that the Duelfer report demonstrates Saddam's plan to manipulate the Oil-for-Food program, to bribe world officials toward ending sanctions, and to renew WMD programs in the future—does not replace a decision made in the past. That's not how history works.

This is a simple:
(a) We thought Saddam had WMDs.
(b) We agreed to use force to remove a threat.
(c) With the threat removed, we discovered that the he did not have WMDs, but that he was manipulating the system of sanctions with the goal of reconstituting his weapons program.
(d) Ultimately, though the intelligence was faulty, illegal activity channeled through the U.N. was stopped, the future threat of WMDs in Saddam's hand was removed, and his brutal regime was removed.

History moves forward, and you can't fault the President for not being omniscient.

And you can't claim that the President has opened the door for pre-emptive attack based on a post-war assessment of new evidence.

MORE: I've been glancing at Volume 1 of the Comprehensive Report, and found this very instructive about this so-called damning document:

Readers will draw their own conclusions about various national and international actions and policies. This report will, hopefully, allow a more complete examination of these events by showing the dynamics involved within the Regime and where it was headed as well as the status of the WMD on the ground in 2003. The events surrounding Iraqi WMD have caused too much turmoil to be reduced to simple binary discussions of whether weapons existed at one moment in time versus another. They deserve at least an attempt to look at the dynamics rather than a description of a single frame of a movie. It deserves calculus not algebra. This report will deny the reader any simple answers. It will seek to force broader and deeper understanding from multiple perspectives over time.

A lesson for the likes of Sanger.