Uh ... Kudos (!) To The LATimes (Gasp!)

Reading the NYTimes and WaPo reports on the release of the National Intelligence Estimate, you'd think the released Key Judgments document supported every biased distortion they published on Sunday.

Here's the NYT lead:

The war in Iraq has become a “cause célèbre” for Islamic militants, “breeding a deep resentment” of the United States in the Muslim world, according to declassified excerpts from a major intelligence report that were released late this afternoon.

And WaPo's:

The Bush administration yesterday released portions of a classified intelligence estimate that says the global jihadist movement is growing and being fueled by the war in Iraq even as it becomes more decentralized, making it harder to identify potential terrorists and prevent attacks.

As of this hour, the LATimes still has not run a story on the released document, running instead a story headlined "Iraq War and Terrorism Report to be Declassified." It reads as if the whuppin' it had just received actually disciplined the brat's ornery behavior:

WASHINGTON -- President Bush denied today that the world is more dangerous for Americans because the U.S. war in Iraq has created more terrorists than it has eliminated, and he ordered some of a classified intelligence report made public to prove it.

"I think it's a mistake for people to believe that going on the offense against people that want to do harm to the American people makes us less safe," Bush declared at a joint press conference with Hamid Karzai, the president of Afghanistan, after meeting with Karzai at the White House.

An April national intelligence estimate, prepared by the government's 16 spy agencies, states that the U.S. war in Iraq has radicalized many young Muslims and made the world more dangerous for the United States, the New York Times first reported on its website Saturday.

"I'm not surprised the enemy is exploiting the situation in Iraq and using it as a propaganda tool to try to recruit more people to their murderous ways," Bush said.

But he added that the last 20 years have shown that staying out of Iraq would not have yielded "a rosier scenario, with fewer extremists joining the radical movement."

Even before the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and the subsequent invasion of Iraq, Bush said, "thousands of fighters were trained in terror camps" in Afghanistan. American forces were not in Iraq when terrorists bombed the World Trade Center in 1993 and U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 2000, he said.

"If we weren't in Iraq, they'd find some other excuse," he said. "They kill in order to achieve their objectives."

Bush fell back on a familiar argument, saying that "the best way to protect America is defeat these killers overseas so we do not have to face them here at home. We're not going to let lies and propaganda by the enemy dictate how we win this war."

That's got to be one of the longest un-interrupted presentation of President Bush's defense of the War on Terror that has ever appeared in one of the Big Three. And it even goes on from there, with more Bush and supporting quotes from John Negroponte.

Of course, I expect all this to change once the LAT editors read the NYT and WaPo stories. They'll be soooo embarassed!

Related Tags: Media bias, MSM, NIE, Bush