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A colleague and reader pointed out something really chilling to me today, that a Nexis search confirms. Until Frank Rich mentioned it in his column today, the New York Times has never mentioned the White House Iraq Group. Not once. Nor as far as I can tell, referred to it, even once, without that name. As if it didn't exist. How is that possible?
Update: Kevin Drum writes to say, there aren't many mentions of WHIG in other newspapers either. But that's true and not true. A Nexis search the other day showed something like 57 mentions of the White House Iraq Group, from major news outlets, total. Two of those were in the Washington Post, one the definitive August 2003 Barton Gellman and Walter Pincus piece that goes into the WHIG for the first time at length, and its role. Sourced to senior officials who participated in the group, the piece says that a heretofore unknown internal White House working group, that included the top advisors in the White House, the Vice President's office, and the National Security Council, ran an Iraq task force whose policy function was seamlessly melded into a propaganda campaign (Andy Card's famous line that "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August." Shortly after Labor Day 2002, top Bush administration officials including Cheney went onto the Sunday talk shows to talk about the prospect of an Iraq nuclear "mushroom cloud"). The Los Angeles Times has three stories that mention the White House Iraq Group by name, two of them from March 2004 reporting on subpoenas issued by Fitzgerald requesting documentation from it relating to the Plame matter. The WSJ mentioned the WHIG in a story last week describing its members and activities as a focus of the Fitzgerald investigation.
The NYT considers itself and the Washington Post in a league of their own when it comes to national security reporting. And I just don't see how the NYT national security team couldn't not appreciate what Gellman/Pincus had reported. Perhaps I'm overblowing it, but Fitzgerald seems to have considered the activities of this group central to his investigation for more than a year. The thing we know about the Rove/Libby conversations with reporters about Wilson's wife, and the WH calls to six other reporters that July 2003 about Wilson's wife, is that they were coordinated. These conversations were not random, they were part of a campaign. Who or what was the coordinating entity? Remember, after Rove spoke with Time's Matt Cooper, he emailed then deputy national security advisor Stephen Hadley to tell him how he handled the call. Anyhow, the WHIG certainly seems worthy of at least a small mention, doesn't it?
Monday Update: A friend writes with a link to Elisabeth Bumiller's September 7 2002 NYT story about the White House's marketing campaign for war in Iraq, as it was being launched, that contained the famous Andy Card line about not introducing new products in August. But still, retrospectively, the effort was never described in its coordinated fullness -- that a White House task force with a consistent membership fused policy and propaganda functions in advance of and during the Iraq war to a startling degree, to sell the war to Congress and the American public. Nor any mention of the WHIG as Fitzgerald was specifically subpoenaing the group's documentation from July 2003.