Judith Miller got all the notoriety, but William Safire was even more dishonest. From 2001 until the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, William Safire printed a series of columns in the New York Times that must hold the Guiness Book of World Records title for warmongering. As longtime reader, wanderindiana pointed out in 2005, “in the period from 3/31/2002 to 3/31/2003, there are 8 Safire-written New York Times pieces that specifically mention Mohamed Atta.” My favorite is from his May 9, 2002 piece, “Mr. Atta Goes to Prague.”
A misdirection play is under way in the C.I.A.’s all-out attempt to discredit an account of a suspicious meeting in Prague a year ago. Mohamed Atta, destined to be the leading Sept. 11 suicide hijacker, was reported last fall by Czech intelligence to have met at least once with Saddam Hussein’s espionage chief in the Iraqi Embassy — Ahmed al-Ani, a spymaster whom the Czechs were keeping under tight surveillance.
If the report proves accurate, a connection would exist between Al Qaeda’s murder of 3,000 Americans and Iraq’s Saddam. That would clearly be a casus belli, calling for our immediate military response, separate from the need to stop a demonstrated mass killer from acquiring nuclear and germ weapons. Accordingly, high C.I.A. and Justice officials — worried about exposure of the agency’s inability to conduct covert operations — desperately want Atta’s Saddam connection to be disbelieved.
They are telling favored journalists: Shoot this troublesome story down.
Safire was still humping that corpse in January 2003, long after the president himself had been forced to deny it had any validity. Safire knew better, but he wanted us to invade Iraq in the worst way and he was willing to become Cheney’s stenographer to help see that it happened. The New York Times gave him a quiet retirement in 2005, while letting him continue on in his “On Language” column for the Magazine.
The New York Times’s eulogy makes no mention of the disgrace Safire brought upon their editorial page, nor of his contribution to getting hundreds of thousands of people needlessly killed.
Safire will always be remembered for these sins.