After reading the New York Times apologia this morning per their "Editor's Note" I felt compelled to let Ms. Miller know this reader is well aware of her complicity in this Times fiasco. My letter to her was as follows:
To: judym@nytimes.com
Subject: Priam's Stepchild
Ms. Miller:
I read with great interest the 'Editor's Note' in today's New York Times edition titled, "The Times and Iraq." Though you weren't mentioned by name, there is no doubt you were the raison d'etre for this rather sanguine editorial mea culpa. I found this paean to the journalistic pursuit of truth to have a hollow ring of crocodile tear stained contrition. Your work coupled with the weight of staff editorial approval only served to prop up the rantings of an ideologically driven administration whose zeal to oust an illegitimate regime of oppression is tragically contrasted with it's own questions of legitimacy.
As I write this, there are 913 non-Iraqi families who must surely feel no consolation in this sudden realization that more "aggressive investigative measures" should have been taken by the Times. The majority of the Iraqi civilian population, whose untold losses to date only compounds their unimaginable misery, thankfully has oceanic, continental, cultural and language divides that serve to make your publications complicity to that misery incomprehensible.
As a disenfranchised voter residing here in Florida who has watched this horror slowly unfold before his eyes, I understand and comprehend all too well the relationship this installed administration has with the corporate media and the likes of a pliant press corps that is obviously cowed by the cloak of resoluteness and ideological righteousness. The fact that President Clinton served under no such pretenses other than a pragmatic approach to serve the electoral majority made him fair game for the salacious appetite of a bored press corps caught in the grips of prosperity taken in by the illusionary excesses of the fringe right obsessed with non existent prurient vignettes of a seemingly backwater Arkansas politician whose intellectual capacity dwarfed those that covered and opposed him.
Your part in this complex American play that makes Greek tragedy seem contrite by comparison now that so many have died has now come full circle. How ironic and prophetic that Hollywood has seen fit to come out with a work about a Trojan King named Priam who had a daughter named Cassandra endowed with the gift of prophecy but fated never to be believed. Whereas you began with your Aesopian cries of wolf about Iraqi WMD's you surely now find yourself to be relegated to the fate of Cassandra, a prophet never to be believed again.
As a Shakespearean King once pleaded in vain, "Oh great Neptune's oceans wash the blood from these hands" I wanted to take the time to let you know that there aren't enough oceans in the universe to wash the blood from your hands.
Michael Aiken,
residing in the Bush Banana Republic of Florida
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"Treatment of crime and criminals is one of the most unfailing tests of civilization of any country."
~Winston Churchill