The Washington Post raises the bar

Andrew Sullivan explains how the Washington Post, through its anti-war reporter, Walter Pincus gives short shrift to the Defense Department memo detailing the ten-year history of the connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam’s Iraq. Pincus buries mention of the memo in a story entitled “CIA Finds No Evidence Hussein Sought to Arm Terrorists.” Pincus then shrugs off the memo, stating “The classified annex summarized raw intelligence reports but did not analyze them or address their accuracy, according to a senior administration official familiar with the matter.” But Sullivan disagrees: “reading Hayes’ summary, you find plenty of CIA analysis of various bits of information, and assessments of varying reliability. Maybe the analysis isn’t thorough or skeptical enough for Pincus but it sure exists – and seems to baldly contradict Pincus’ piece.”
I suppose that, if conclusive evidence were obtained that Saddam provided Al Qaeda with anthrax, Pincus’ story would be entitled “CIA finds no evidence that Al Qaeda used Saddam’s anthrax.”