Times trio visited West Wing before Wiki bombshell

The WikiLeaks report presented a unique dilemma to the three papers given advance copies of the 92,000 reports included in the Afghan war logs -- the New York Times, Germany's Der Speigel and the UK's Guardian. 

The editors couldn't verify the source of the reports -- as they would have done if their own staffers had obtained them -- and they couldn't stop WikiLeaks from posting it, whether they wrote about it or not. 

So they were basically left with proving veracity through official sources and picking through the pile for the bits that seemed to be the most truthful.  Woodward and Bernstein it wasn't.  National Security Adviser Gen. James Jones' statement this evening that "Wikileaks made no effort to contact us about these documents" is true as far as it goes, but it isn't the whole story. 

The Times did attempt to verify what they reported, according to an administration official close to the situation, although it's not clear how much of a head's up the paper gave the White House. 

Washington Bureau Chief Dean Baquet, reporter Mark Mazzetti and a third Timesman presented senior administration officials with synopses of the reports they planned to use, if not the actual documents, at a meeting in the White House late week, the person said. ( By chance, I witnessed the Times contingent walking into the West Wing.) 

They were not apparently asked to spike the whole story, but were reminded that the Wiki logs were, in the opinion of officials, a) old news and b) harmful to the US-Pak partnership. 

Emails to Baquet and Mazzetti weren't immediately returned. 

In a "Note to Readers" on Sunday, The Times editors reported that "Government officials did not dispute that the information was authentic," adding that the paper redacted anything that would hurt individual soldiers and anything that "would harm national security interests." 

WikiLeaks dumped its documents on the papers -- three heavyweights in the three biggest Afghanistan troop contributing nations -- several weeks ago. 

White House officials I talked to feel the Times was conscientious, but a little breathless in their presentation of the material and preferred the Guardian's summation, which was emailed around by Tommy Vietor of the press office:

"[F]or all their eye-popping details, the intelligence files, which are mostly collated by junior officers relying on informants and Afghan officials, fail to provide a convincing smoking gun for ISI complicity.  Most of the reports are vague, filled with incongruent detail, or crudely fabricated.  The same characters – famous Taliban commanders, well-known ISI officials – and scenarios repeatedly pop up.  And few of the events predicted in the reports subsequently occurred." 



The administration was considerably less impressed with the Guardian's outreach efforts -- an administration official described their attempts to verify the reports through the White House and Pentagon as minimal. 

Der Speigel reporters did a little better, requesting comments on a few of the reports, the person added. 

Glenn Thrush is senior staff writer at Politico Magazine.