Calling All Ombudsmen

The press in this country is unbelievably bad. So bad that I am tempted to say it is urredeemable.

Everybody is all excited by Newsweek’s revelation of the “Gonzales Memo” like they’ve just uncovered the Rosetta stone. Michael Isikoff claims right there in the article:

The memo—and strong dissents by Secretary of State Colin Powell and his chief legal advisor, William Howard Taft IV—are among hundreds of pages of internal administration documents on the Geneva Convention and related issues that have been obtained by NEWSWEEK and are reported for the first time in this week’s magazine.

In light of all this hoopla, one of my readers wrote me asking who might have leaked this memo. It’s an excellent question. Who leaked it and why right now?

Well, I don’t know who just recently gave Isikoff the copy of the memo, but the fact is that it was leaked more than two years ago to the Washington Times (likely as a shot at Powell) and was written about in the NY Times by none other than William Safire. Even a googling blogger like me referred to it in a post last week as a “famous early skirmish” in the Bush administration’s ongoing civil war because of Colin Powell’s vociferous objections to Gonzales’s recommendations. The Washington Times story contains the “quaint” quote and everything.

Here’s the Washington Times article for January 26, 2002, one day after the memo was written. Powell urges POW status

Here’s Safire’s column from January 29, 2002.

Jayzuz.