Flip FLOP

And the Times falls down. Looks like the NYT has a stake in Chalabi's 'fall from grace'. According to commentator, William E. Jackson (emphasis mine):

Yesterday, American and Iraqi forces raided and ransacked the Iraqi National Congress leader's office in Baghdad, completing his fall from grace as what the Times terms a "favorite" of the Bush administration. Today, two front-page articles in the paper, and an editorial titled "Friends Like This," take a harsh view of Chalabi. One would never know that the Times itself once relied on him heavily for its "scoops" on Saddam's WMD stockpiles.

...

And in today's Times editorial: 'Before the war, Ahmad Chalabi told Washington hawks exactly what they wanted to hear about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction ... Much of the information Mr. Chalabi had produced was dead wrong. He was one of the chief cheerleaders for the theory that Iraq had vast quantities of weapons of mass destruction. ... But he can't be made a scapegoat.

'The Bush administration should have known what it was doing when it gave enormous credence to a questionable character whose own self-interest was totally invested in getting the Americans to invade Iraq. ...'

Left unsaid is that the Times should have known better, as well. Yet, incredibly, the paper of record has never run a corrective editor's note to clean up the mess that Miller made for the Times' integrity.

(hat tip to Drudge)