Author: Richard Cohen

Pity poor George Bush. For some reason, he has been beset by delusional aides who, once they leave the White House, write books containing lies, exaggerations and — this is the lowest blow of all — do not take into account the president’s genius and all-around wisdom.

The latest White House aide to betray the president is Richard Clarke, who was in charge of counterterrorism before and after the attacks of 9/11. He says Bush “failed to act prior to September 11 on the threat from al Qaeda.”

As with former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, another fool who had somehow risen to become chairman of Alcoa, Clarke’s account of his more than two years in the Bush White House was immediately denounced by a host of administration aides, some of whom — and this is just the sheerest of coincidences — had once assured us that Iraq was armed to the teeth with nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons.

Among them, of course, was Condoleezza Rice, who on Monday insisted in a Washington Post op-ed essay that Bush not only did everything just right, but so, really, did Bill Clinton. Both administrations “worked hard,” she writes.

Clarke, however, says the Bush administration not only belittled the terrorist threat — China and missile defense were its initial preoccupations — but took its own sweet time coming to grips with al-Qaeda.

From the start, he says, certain White House aides were fixated on Iraq, and after September 11th, apparently so was Bush. He said he encountered the president the next night in the Situation Room. “See if Saddam did it,” the president ordered.

“But Mr. President, al-Qaeda did this,” Clarke says he replied. The president persevered: “I know, I know, but … see if Saddam was involved. Just look. I want to know any shred.”

As Rice did prior to her Post article, Vice President Cheney’s chief aide, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, virtually blamed the Clinton administration for September 11th. In a New Yorker interview in 2002, he listed terrorist attacks on U.S. or allied interests going back to 1993 and concluded that America had shown only weakness in response.

The United States did do precious little. But it took awhile to stir the U.S. and pinpoint bin Laden. That juncture was reached during the Clinton administration when, among other things, an attempt was made to kill bin Laden with missiles. If the Clinton administration had indeed acted slowly, what can then be said about the Bush administration, which had been specifically warned by Clinton aides about al-Qaeda? Clarke says he asked for a Cabinet-level meeting or access to the president to discuss the al-Qaeda threat. For eight months, he got neither.

Instead, he says, the administration was obsessed with Saddam. As did O’Neill, Clarke says that the September 11th attacks were viewed by some high administration officials as an opportunity (pretext?) for going after Saddam. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz wondered out loud why so much attention was being paid to bin Laden when Iraq was the clear danger. Iraq was on the table by September 12th.

The White House has opened its guns on Clarke. He is being contradicted and soon, as with poor O’Neill, his sanity and probity will be questioned. It’s getting to be downright amazing how former White House aides tell the same tale — a case, the White House wants us to believe, of hysteria or unaccountable betrayal. I’d like to believe my president, but as Clarke quotes him in a different context, “I’m looking for any shred.”

As with Saddam, it doesn’t exist.

Richard Cohen is a columnist for The Washington Post.

My record consists of thousands of columns, some that were wise, some that were not, and some that no longer reflect my views. This is the position Howard Dean is in.

The former Vermont governor makes something like one gaffe a day — or so we are told. The latest, which has come to haunt him in Iowa, was made years ago. He disparaged the caucuses, saying they were “dominated by special interests.” As one who has stood in the Iowa cold listening to this or that candidate explain his position on ethanol, industrial hog farming, or — worse yet — the plight of the so-called notch babies (Social Security recipients born in any one of just three years), I found his statement unremarkable at best. It is true beyond a reasonable doubt.

Dean has been campaigning hard in Iowa, and so it behooves him to sing the praises of the caucuses. They have their virtues, but they are odd affairs — and Iowa itself is not your typical state. In traveling with him last week, I heard him answer questions on farming that while not unimportant — if I were a farmer, I might have paid more attention — would strike the average American as having nothing to do with his or her life. But the facts don’t seem to matter. Dean is being quizzed as if he had impugned the patriotism or sexuality of the average Iowan — remarks in such bad taste that his very sanity must be questioned.

Something similar happened when Dean said that the capture of Saddam Hussein has not made America safer. You could quibble with that assessment, but the fact remains that since Saddam’s capture, additional Americans have been killed in Iraq, the United States went to Code Orange, planes were grounded, and some planes were escorted into various U.S. airports by fighter jets. If we are safer, we sure ain’t acting like it.

Nonetheless, Dean’s common-sense observation was treated as if the man had left his senses. He could — and he did — cite the number of American servicemen killed in Iraq since Saddam crawled out of his spider hole, but it did not matter. It was as if Dean had blurted an obscenity.

In Dean’s case, the controversial is being confused with the contemptible. In due course, he will learn his lesson, revert to standard American political pablum, and end each speech with “God Bless America.” A clear voice will be muffled because, among other things, too much of the press prefers to take umbrage by surrogate: My God, did you hear what he said about Iowa — or, earlier, about guys who drive pickups with Confederate flag decals?

In this respect, Dean reminds me of Al Gore, who sometimes went in for self-aggrandizement, a trait not unknown in politics. After a while, it seemed anything he said in the 2000 campaign got vetted by a standard not applied to other politicians — from his role in exposing the pollution of Love Canal to his role in developing the Internet to his role as being a fictitious character in the book and movie Love Story. Gore adhered to virtual truth in all these matters, but somehow his every claim became a tall story. Much of the time, he was right.

With both Gore and Dean, the caricature is based on some truth. Gore did sometimes tweak the facts. Dean does sometimes talk before he thinks, and he stomps on his own message. But some of the time, he does think and what he says reflects thought — but of the unorthodox kind. He said something worthwhile about Saddam’s capture and something reasonable about the Iowa caucuses. The truth is supposed to make you free. In politics, it will make you unemployed. n

Richard Cohen is a columnist for The Washington Post. His work frequently appears in the Flyer.

My joke about Paris Hilton is that none of this would have happened if she had been named Washington Marriott. Then she would have been the child of Mormons and raised quite differently with, one would hope, better results. We would now be watching an Internet tape of her doing missionary work in the Third World instead of assuming that position for much of the First World to see.

Any mention of Paris Hilton leads, in a People magazine sense, to Michael Jackson. The two are starkly different: Jackson is a talented entertainer who originally became famous for his work, although he is now famous for other things. But as with Hilton, a tape exists — or purportedly exists. It was surreptitiously made aboard the airplane that took him from Las Vegas to his arraignment in California as he conferred with his lawyer.

I think both Jackson and Hilton must share a sense of being burglarized of themselves. I use the word burglary because when I was burglarized, I felt an almost inexpressible sense of invasion: Someone had not just taken some items (a radio, a laptop computer), but more importantly my sense of security — that my home was inviolable.

Hilton, in particular, has lost much more than that. She has lost control of who she is — or, at least, who she wants us to think she is. Even though she is a party girl — night after night at New York and L.A. clubs — she could still pretend to be her parents’ little girl or whatever else she wanted to be. Now her sense of who she is has been absconded with. Someone made off with it.

With Jackson, the burglary of self is only potential. The tape has not been shown and may never be. But you can imagine how it might show him saying or doing things that even he would not want the world to know. His is a hard case when arguing for a sense of privacy, but often it takes a celebrity to bring such matters to the public’s attention.

The sense we all once had that we are secure in our own person is gone, probably irrevocably so. Espionage has been democratized. Cell phones come equipped with little cameras so that people in the locker rooms of health clubs have to worry about someone pretending to make a call. Clothing, after all, is the most common of deceptions, because the clothes you wear are your sense of who you are — how you show you are rich, or a football fan, or whatever. The vicious little cameras take you down to your essentials.

Videocams are everywhere — placed there by the police for traffic or public-safety reasons or just haphazardly running because someone is taping his cute grandchild and you happen to be in the background. Sometimes the shooter is his own victim. I am thinking now of Dennis Kozlowski, the former Tyco CEO, who must now see his kitschy choices in furniture and other decorating doodads shown to the world. A proud man has been reduced to a jerk — and that has nothing to do with his guilt or innocence.

You may argue that Hilton and maybe even Jackson deserve no privacy. Hilton, after all, helped make the infamous sex tape herself, and Jackson — well, what can anyone say? But Hilton committed no crime, and while Jackson is accused of one, it does not relate to what he did on that airplane — and the snoopers were not law-enforcement officials. Hilton in particular has been robbed of a commodity that we all value — the face we think we show the world.

Smile, we are all on Candid Camera.

Richard Cohen is a columnist for The Washington Post.

Dick Cheney is sometimes referred to as George W. Bush’s brain or, to be even more mocking, his ventriloquist. It would be fitting then for this most powerful of all vice presidents to be the first in American history to be censured. He has it coming.

It won’t happen, of course. But Cheney ought to be made to account for his repeated exaggerations of the Iraqi threat. I am referring specifically to his dire warning that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was working on a menacing nuclear-weapons program and the United States had to do something about it. We know now that such a program did not exist.

We know it because it cannot be found. We know it because it is impossible to hide such a program since, among other things, traces of it can be detected in the air and in the water. We know it because the experts — Americans and others — have now said so. They have told my Washington Post colleague Barton Gellman that Iraq, in his words, had “no active program to build a weapon, produce its key materials or obtain the technology … needed for either.” That, inconveniently, is what U.N. weapons inspectors maintained all along.

But those inspectors were not only dismissed by Cheney as Saddam’s useful idiots, they were actually bullied by him. Former Assistant Secretary of State James P. Rubin wrote in Foreign Affairs that when Cheney met with Hans Blix and Mohamed El Baradei, the two most prominent U.N. inspectors, he bluntly told them that if the Bush administration found fault with their judgment, “We will not hesitate to discredit you.” It now appears that it’s Cheney who’s been discredited.

Cheney did not limit his bullying to U.N. inspectors. His growling impatience with dissent pervaded the Bush administration, especially the intelligence community. In The New Yorker, Seymour M. Hersh reported that Cheney dismissed intelligence that did not fit his preconceived notions and seized on reports that validated his views. He basically short-circuited the laborious process for vetting intelligence — one that worked well — and instead reached down into the CIA and elsewhere to mine the particles of information that suited his purposes. It was fool’s gold.

Not only did he trample over traditional intelligence procedures, he repeatedly issued Chicken Little warnings about Iraq’s nuclear potential. He characteristically put things in absolute terms. “We do know, with absolute certainty, that he [Saddam] is using his procurement system to acquire the equipment he needs in order to enrich uranium to build a nuclear weapon,” he said a year ago.

We knew no such thing — not with certainty, absolute or otherwise. In fact, the intelligence community had grave doubts about Cheney’s assertion. Ultimately, a version of this fiction wound up in the president’s State of the Union address. It has since been rendered inoperative. Oops.

Cheney was a University of Wisconsin graduate student during the Vietnam era and, by his own admission, took little notice of the antiwar movement on campus. If he had, he might have discerned that it was animated not just by opposition to the war but by the incessant fudging, lying, and misrepresentations of the Johnson administration.

Now Cheney has become a key player in yet another dismal effort to mislead the American people. As with Vietnam itself, issues of candor and judgment are beginning to obscure worthy war aims, like the elimination of Saddam’s murderous regime.

It is hard to know whether Cheney’s repeated assertions about Iraq’s nuclear program were purposeful misrepresentations or the product of a true believer’s faith in his own misconceptions. Either way, the always-smug and contemptuous Cheney has much to answer for. He has failed as George Bush’s brain. Let’s hope he is not his conscience, too.

Richard Cohen is a member of the Washington Post Writers Group.

In the perpetual war against Israel, its enemies are winning. The economy is awful. Parents do not want their children to go out. The beach is presumed safe, but not a cafe or restaurant. A commute on a bus (I have done it) is gut-wrenching. You watch everyone. What does a suicide bomber look like? The last one, the one who blew up a Haifa restaurant, was a 29-year-old woman, a law school graduate. She killed Arab and Jew alike. Even safe places are no longer safe.

So I cannot blame Israel for striking back. It assassinates Hamas and Islamic Jihad leaders and militants. It razes the homes of suicide bombers. It has Yasser Arafat bottled up and may, as threatened, deport or kill him. It has bombed purported terrorist camps in Syria. But nothing Israel has done has brought it peace and security.

If you read the Israeli press, the despair is palpable. To some, especially those on the left, Israel has become virtually a dysfunctional society. The government can’t protect its people. Corruption is endemic. Religious zealots have inordinate influence and their vision, a Greater Israel, compels the building or thickening of West Bank and Gaza Strip settlements. With every suicide bombing, the rational course — a withdrawal from Palestinian areas — seems like weakness rather than wisdom.

Israel must return to the so-called Green line — the border before the 1967 Six Day War. It must dismantle most of the settlements. It must do this because occupation is corrupting and, in the long run, impossible. The more Israel expands or retains settlements, the more it gets stuck in a quagmire where the enemy is everywhere. From September 2000 until recently, about 17,400 attacks were recorded in the territories — and 40 percent of all fatalities. Even when terrorists struck in Israel proper, they invariably came from the West Bank.

Yet Ariel Sharon recently decided to include two major settlements on the Israeli side of the fence that is being built to separate the Jewish state from the West Bank. (A similar fence already separates the Gaza Strip from Israel, and it has proved effective in keeping out suicide bombers.) By extending the fence to encompass the settlements, Sharon is only ensuring the continuation of his problem. He needs to get out.

For a people of the book, for a country created by history as well as by men, Israel acts as if nothing that went before has any bearing on what is happening now. But history admonishes Israel. The only places where a Western culture has successfully transplanted itself are those where great population pressure and genocidal methods were used to extirpate the indigenous peoples. This is what happened in the United States.

Genocide is out of the question. Neither the world nor Israeli morality would permit it. Yet Israel keeps lengthening the odds against itself. Instead of withdrawing to where Jews are a clear majority, it continues to cling to settlements where Jews are outnumbered. Every settlement, every day of occupation, puts Israel in greater and greater danger. Each settlement is a provocation. The deportation or killing of Arafat will do nothing but make him a martyr and exacerbate the chaos. The man himself is only a symptom of Israel’s problem.

The Zionist dream is in tatters. No one wants to go to Israel. On the contrary, people want to leave. For every suicide bombing, countless others are thwarted — 22 in the last month, according to Zeev Schiff, the esteemed military correspondent for the newspaper Haaretz.

Israel thrashes out. It has now bombed Syria. What next? Iran? This is not strategy. It is fury. n

Richard Cohen is a member of the Washington Post Writers Group.

At the moment, the political firmament twinkles with amateurs. Arnold Schwarzenegger is the most famous of them, by virtue of a movie career. Arianna Huffington is another, by virtue of little ideological virtue. They are both running for governor of California where, should either win, neither would have the slightest idea of what to do next. That’s not because they are dumb. It’s because they have never done anything remotely similar in the past.

Something comparable can be said about Wesley Clark and, to a degree, Howard Dean. Clark has never campaigned for anything — and already his inexperience has shown. He stepped all over his overriding message — that he’s the antiwar candidate who has actually been to war — by saying, and then retracting, that he would have voted for the congressional resolution authorizing the Iraq war. With his first campaign shot, Clark got himself right in the foot.

This game of politics is complicated. From time to time, the gifted amateur comes along — Eisenhower, Reagan — but it is no accident that the two are often likened to each other. They were enormously appealing presences, and they both had more than a smattering of political experience — Ike as supreme commander in World War II, Reagan as a union and anti-communist activist.

More important, both Ike and Reagan had important constituencies that urged them to run — and when they did, they won big. Reagan beat his first gubernatorial opponent by almost a million votes. Ike swamped Adlai Stevenson. No one is predicting that kind of win for Schwarzenegger, and no one is predicting anything for Huffington who, nonetheless, has the backing of some very smart people.

What are these people thinking? Huffington could not govern. The Democratic-controlled legislature is not going to play ball with someone who once swooned for Newt Gingrich and helped run her former husband’s Republican senatorial campaign. As for Schwarzenegger, that same legislature is going to be there for him, too. Maybe he can be persuasive, but that’s impossible to say from his record. He has none.

Look at Jesse Ventura, a relative amateur who became governor of Minnesota on the basis of straight talking and a to-hell-with-politics persona. It turned out a big mouth was not enough. Ventura could not get along with the legislature — actually, with almost anyone — and is now back in show business, from which, it can fairly be said, he never left.

I can appreciate the yearning for the outsider, since too many politicians become so burdened by experience they can’t say anything straight. But the tendency to see all issues as contemporary Gordian knots — one slash of the sword will do it — severely underestimates the complexity of governing. After you win, you actually have to do something.

In California, the swallows come back to Capistrano and the chickens come home to roost. The state has term limits, which means it has an ineffective legislative leadership and lobbyists hold enhanced power. It is increasingly ruled by propositions, which means by voter snit. It confuses celebrity with political talent because, somehow, all fame is the same. It has made a mess of itself.

Wes Clark plunged into the presidential race without the foggiest notion of what he thinks on a range of domestic issues. Schwarzenegger mutters “details, details” while reading up on what he should already know. Huffington would govern from the left — or maybe the right. The Candidate was a drama. What’s happening now is a farce.

Richard Cohen writes for the Washington Post Writers Group.

I have no idea whether John J. Geoghan, defrocked priest, child molester, and now murder victim, appreciated irony especially in the last moments of his hideous and tormented life. But as he was being strangled in jail, beaten and stomped on, it might have occurred to him that just as surely as he abused the trust others had placed in him, the Massachusetts prison system had abused the trust its citizens had placed in it.

It is no secret that child molesters are the lowest of the low in any prison population. That is particularly the case when the molester, as with Geoghan, is notorious. He was weak. He was old, 68, and he was such a target that in April he had been moved from one prison to another for his safety. Yet, somehow, another convict managed to get into his cell and kill him.

This might seem an aberration, but it is not. In 1997, the most recent year for which I could find data, 69 inmates in American prisons were killed by other inmates, according to Human Rights Watch.

Geoghan was always afraid for his life, which is why he was placed in protective custody. Ultimately, we will know more about how he died, but it now seems that only one guard was nearby when Joseph L. Druce, a convicted murderer and gay-basher, slipped into Geoghan’s cell and strangled him.

Predictably and maybe truthfully the union for Massachusetts’ prison guards blamed Geoghan’s murder on staff shortages. Some state legislators noted that the prison budget has been cut in recent years. Still, this may simply be a case of negligence one man not doing his job. No amount of money can rectify that.

Whatever the case, we that’s you and I are approximately doing what some of the Catholic hierarchy did about child molestation by priests: shrugging and looking away. We all know what’s happening in prisons, and most of us just don’t give a damn. The answer to the crime problem is to lock up more and more people. No doubt that has had an effect. Criminals who are behind bars cannot commit crimes, not on the outside anyway.

But the sheer size of America’s prison population is stunning 2.1 million people, a good-sized city behind bars. The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. About 17 percent of black men have been to prison or jail, many for drug-related offenses. Many of them return to jail because they have returned to drugs. We don’t care. Drug rehabilitation programs have been cut back.

Years ago I faced the possibility of going to jail for refusing to reveal my sources to a federal judge in Baltimore. I was cocky (also a lot younger), but my confidence soon was replaced by terror when a federal official called to say he would try to have me placed in a safe jail but he could make no guarantees. In the end, the confrontation never took place, but I was scared boy, was I scared.

Back then I wondered why this country would tolerate prisons that were more lawless than the neighborhoods the criminals had come from. The answer, of course, is clear: Inmates don’t vote. Neither do children who become wards of the state, nor the insane, nor the homeless. They are our responsibility, but we treat them like dirt. They lack a vote, a well-heeled lobby. Abandoned kids don’t throw fund-raisers for politicians.

It’s difficult, maybe impossible, to gin up much sympathy for Geoghan. But whatever he was compulsively sick or cheerfully evil he was our ward, sentenced to prison, not to die. Through inattention, parsimony, a casual disregard for people we don’t quite consider people, we failed him, just as the Catholic Church failed the children he abused.

Sidney Blumenthal titles his account of his White House days The Clinton Wars, but it could just as easily be called The Blumenthal Wars. Reviewers have called him a Clinton “courtier,” “Sid Vicious,” a “lady-in-waiting,” and, by the strongest of implications, a liar. Yet to actually read the book brings another term to mind: “mad.” This is what Washington was during the Clinton years.

I do not mean all of Washington. After all, many Democrats fought valiantly for Bill Clinton — or, if not for him, then against Ken Starr, the moralistic prig of a special prosecutor. Ditto some members of the press, who realized that no matter what Clinton did, what was being done to him — and the presidency — was far, far worse.

But you would get little of that from most of the reviews. Barely mentioned are the censorious comments of Samuel Dash, Starr’s ethics counselor, who, in the book, characterizes the special prosecutor as a morally obsessed inquisitor. “He lacked a lot of judgment,” Dash told Blumenthal. “Starr didn’t see the difference between a sin and a crime. His judgments were distorted.” Dash says that Starr could have ended his investigation much earlier than he did. He had, really, nothing.

It certainly wasn’t for lack of trying. Starr was preceded by Robert Fiske, who was removed from office by Republican judges on account of a disabling conflict of interest — experience as a prosecutor, fair-mindedness, and estimable professionalism. Starr was succeeded by a third prosecutor, Robert Ray, another pro. The FBI was in the hands of Louis Freeh, who loathed Clinton. Various congressional committees were run by the likes of Al D’Amato, who — in the manner of naming a nunnery after Hugh Hefner — just got his name put on a Long Island courthouse. As for the news media, they went after both Bill and Hillary Clinton full-time. The result? Zip.

I know Blumenthal. He was my Washington Post colleague. But I also know most of the people who have criticized his book. They are honorable people, but many of them use the book to pick up where they left off. They have no second thoughts, no backward glance to see the mess they made or to wonder how investigative reporting and commentary went right off a cliff and into a sewer. The real scandal for the news media is that no scandal ever materialized.

So we get accusations that Blumenthal spun this or that event. What’s missing is not just an overview but a sense of astonishment. Isn’t it just plain mysterious that Newt Gingrich continues to get respectful media attention when, really, on a given day he is half-mad and almost always blowing smoke? The same could be asked of Tom DeLay, who revived impeachment when the effort flagged for lack of compelling evidence and was determined to smash Clinton — never mind what else he would destroy in the process. Yet he and other Clinton-haters wander the streets of Washington, unscarred, uncensored, but nonetheless unhinged.

The virtue of Blumenthal’s book is that it assembles in one place what happened in Washington during the Clinton years. If you are not already convinced that Clinton was guilty of multiple crimes, then Blumenthal will make you wonder all over again about how partisan politics, even cultural disagreements, got so out of hand that the government wound up in the pornography business. The Starr Report: Wrap it in plain paper, please.

There’s much to criticize in Blumenthal’s book — a detail, an omission, a partisan spin on events. But the book’s reception reminds me of the events it chronicles — a warped obsession with this or that tree when Ken Starr and his Republican allies were clear-cutting much of the forest. Blumenthal’s book, describing what a madhouse Washington became back then, has for some reason been given to the inmates to review.

Richard Cohen is a member of the Washington Post Writers Group; he is a frequent contributor to this page.

My job is to connect the dots. So follow me as I take you from a typical newspaper story about yet another convicted murderer being freed on account of DNA testing to the testimony last week of Attorney General John Ashcroft. The first is clear evidence of the imperfectibility of the criminal justice system, and the second is the smug refusal to admit it. Ashcroft has a serious attitude problem.

That attitude was on display when he testified before the House Judiciary Committee. The attorney general was asked about a report from his own inspector general criticizing the way in which the Justice Department had treated 762 illegal immigrants locked up and detained after the September 11th terrorist attacks. None of them — that’s precisely zero — was ever linked to terrorist activities.

Yet, some of them were held incommunicado for months. Either they were refused lawyers or so many obstacles were put in their way that it amounted to the same thing. They were denied visitors. Some were held in solitary confinement, verbally harassed and threatened, and, on occasion, allegedly physically manhandled. To all of this, Ashcroft responded with a shrug. “We make no apologies,” he said — and, of course, he asked for additional death penalties in terrorism cases.

But apologies are most certainly in order. In the first place, the Justice Department got things exactly backward. In this country, you’re innocent until proven guilty — not the other way around. Second, harsh and inhumane treatment — keeping the cell illuminated 24 hours a day — ought not to be tolerated. After all — and it is worth repeating — the detainees were never charged with any crime linking them to terrorism. Most of them were detained because they were Muslims or Arabs. In this country, that ain’t a crime.

Two caveats are in order. After hacking through the gobbledygook of the inspector-general report (“Prior to September 11, 2001, the MDC had a SHU, but not an ADMAX SHU”), I’d have to say that physical or verbal abuse was not all that common and it seems the Justice Department was more confused than it was tyrannical. After all, it was establishing a detention system virtually from scratch — and in something of a panic, at that.

We also have to remember that some of the September 11th terrorists were in this country because the immigration system had failed. At the time, we were on the lookout for exactly the sort of people who had destroyed the World Trade Center and a section of the Pentagon — young, Islamic males. The detention system made some sense.

Nonetheless, innocent people were held behind bars, sometimes cruelly, for months at a time. The report highlights the experience of one woman who for two months was repeatedly told her husband was not being detained (he was) and who, even after she found him, was permitted to visit him only three times in five months. Isn’t she deserving of an apology?

Not from Ashcroft. To hear him, the system worked perfectly. This is precisely the mindset he brings to capital punishment, of which he clearly cannot get enough. Routinely, it seems, yet another person walks from death row, freed on account of DNA testing. Routinely, we hear of yet another case where the defense lawyer fell asleep, a lab technician lied, or some cop got a confession out of some addled suspect who did not, as it turned out, commit that particular crime. Oops.

I can appreciate the challenge the Justice Department had after September 11th. The FBI was overstretched and its agents were probably dog-tired. America had undergone a wrenching, tragic experience, and there was no reason then — and no reason now — to think it could not be repeated. Unprecedented challenges required unprecedented steps. Some innocent people were bound to be locked up.

But when they were cleared, the detainees were owed an apology. A more humble — a less arrogant — attorney general would have conceded that mistakes were made, procedures violated, and that these are serious matters of concern. In this country, we bend over backward to protect the innocent.

Richard Cohen is a member of the Washington Post Writers Group and a frequent contributor to the Flyer.

Years ago, I wrote a column using information from The New York Times. The story contained a mistake — a whopper, actually — which I repeated in my column. When the person involved called to complain, I checked with lawyers for The Washington Post, fearing a libel suit. Nothing to worry about, I was told. Such was the reputation of the Times for veracity that both law and custom permitted me to use it without further checking.

Now the Times has egg on its face. In a lengthy Page One article on Sunday, the paper admitted that one of its reporters, Jayson Blair, acted as a one-man wrecking crew to the Times‘ well-earned reputation. He fabricated stories. He plagiarized them. He said he was where he was not. He made countless mistakes of fact — and he was, despite all of this, relentlessly promoted. At the age of 27, he had become a national correspondent for the nation’s newspaper of record.

A close reading of the Times‘ own account of what went wrong suggests that the paper itself does not fully comprehend what happened. The Times should have known it had a liar on its hands and, despite obvious warnings, did little about it.

Several times Blair was reprimanded for his blatant inaccuracies. He was deemed so serious a threat to the paper’s well-earned reputation for accuracy that in April 2002 the Times‘ metropolitan editor Jonathan Landman wrote an e-mail message to newsroom administrators, saying, “We have to stop Jayson from writing for the Times. Right now.” Yet not only was Blair not stopped, he was promoted to the national staff and ultimately given more responsibilities. Why?

The answer appears to be precisely what the Times denies: favoritism based on race. Blair is black, and the Times, like other media organizations, is intent on achieving diversity. Sometimes this noble and essential goal comes down to a parody of affirmative action. That seems to be the case with Blair. Supposedly a University of Maryland graduate (actually, he had never graduated), he was “offered a slot in an internship program that was then being used in large part to help the paper diversify the newsroom,” the paper said.

The young reporter did well — he clearly has talent — and also not so well. But the not-so-well part was both serious and ominous — sloppy work habits and erratic behavior. That should have been enough to halt Blair’s career in his tracks. That it didn’t testifies to a newsroom culture, imposed from above, that cherished diversity — not more than accuracy, but so much so that journalistic standards were bent.

The Times‘ senior editors defensively say that wasn’t the case. But the rigorous reporting the paper is noted for is absent here. Assertions that race played no role are made — and then left at that. Both the editor Howell Raines and the publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. are quoted, but neither gives the slightest indication that they are aware of the culture they have imposed on the newsroom. Careful readers of the paper have long discerned such a culture in the news coverage. Now we know it existed in personnel policies as well — what Landman has characterized as top management’s commitment to diversity.

I can only imagine what the Times‘ editorial page would have said if another important institution had conducted a self-investigation into its own misconduct. Senior editors recused themselves from supervising the preparation of the report — but the writers of it still report to them.

A great and invaluable newspaper has been humbled. But its inability to come to grips with what was at the bottom of the Blair affair suggests that it remains blinkered by the very political correctness that has brought about this ignominy. In this case, all the news has not been printed.

Richard Cohen is a columnist for The Washington Post and the Creative Writers Syndicate; his work frequently appears in the Flyer.