Looks like the York Times has a scoop today, and is looking to do a sequel to its famous Pentagon Papers dustup. (free registration required):
WASHINGTON, July 4 — An American military planning document calls for air, land and sea-based forces to attack Iraq from three directions — the north, south and west — in a campaign to topple President Saddam Hussein, according to a person familiar with the document.
The document envisions tens of thousands of marines and soldiers probably invading from Kuwait. Hundreds of warplanes based in as many as eight countries, possibly including Turkey and Qatar, would unleash a huge air assault against thousands of targets, including airfields, roadways and fiber-optics communications sites.
If I’m reading this Times piece correctly, they’ve got a single source who described the document to them — and apparently, didn’t even let them see it themselves. And he’s got a beef against it, too:
The source familiar with the document described its contents to The New York Times on the condition of anonymity, expressing frustration that the planning reflected at least in this set of briefing slides was insufficiently creative, and failed to incorporate fully the advances in tactics and technology that the military has made since the Persian Gulf war in 1991.
This seems like really dicey stuff, from my not-so-professional journalistic ethics perspective. At least in the Pentagon Papers, the Times had the documents in hand — they knew for sure what they said, and weren’t relying on a single source with a grudge. And even worse, this is classified information about a future military operation — not a retrospective on past mistakes as the Pentagon papers were.
Could someone help me understand how a crime wasn’t committed here? Or perhaps, several?
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technology meets creativity in a disaster-prone world. confident enough to try; humble enough to learn.