EL WASHINGTON POST sigue siendo el mejor y más ecuánime de los grandes periódicos estadounidenses. Lo demuestra en su editorial sobre el informe de ayer de la comisión investigadora del 11-S; por cierto un informe no definitivo, redactado por personal adjunto y no por los propios miembros de la comisión, que aún han de preparar las conclusiones definitivas.

A lo que iba. El Post escribe, a propósito de la fijación mediática que ha distorsionado un punto concreto -los posibles vínculos entre Saddam y al-Qaeda- en perjuicio de lo verdaderamente importante, que es la narración detallada de cómo se llevó a cabo el 11-S:

IN A PAIR of interim staff reports, the Sept. 11 commission yesterday gave the fullest and most detailed report on the planning of the attacks that the American public has received to date. Yet showing a peculiar instinct for the capillaries rather than the jugular, part of the public debate immediately focused on a single passing point that is no kind of revelation at all: "We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States." Administration foes seized on this sentence to claim that Vice President Cheney has been lying, as recently as this week, about a purported relationship between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. The accusation is nearly as irresponsible as the Bush administration's rhetoric has been.

The importance of the two new reports lies not in the clarification of any supposed Iraq link but in the new details that fill in and correct the state of the public's knowledge of the attacks themselves. Osama bin Laden, we learn, has not actually financed al Qaeda himself and never received his famed $300 million inheritance; al Qaeda, rather, "relied primarily on a fundraising network developed over time." Sept. 11 was initially planned as an even more ambitious attack -- involving 10 planes and targets on both coasts. Osama bin Laden was directly involved in key aspects of planning and target selection. There was division within al Qaeda's leadership as to whether the plan should go forward. And internal disagreement among the conspirators at times threatened its success. The reports offer the first substantive look at what key al Qaeda detainees such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh have been telling their interrogators, and it sheds light as well on the likely role of accused conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui. The commission, in short, is adding a good deal of new information to the discussion and usefully reprocessing existing data.

All of which makes the flap over Mr. Cheney's statements a bit frustrating. The administration has not recently suggested that Iraq was behind Sept. 11. Nor, in fact, did the commission yesterday contradict what Mr. Cheney actually said -- and President Bush backed up -- earlier this week: that there were "long-established ties" between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Rather, the commission reported that a "senior Iraqi intelligence officer" met with Osama bin Laden in Sudan in 1994 and that contacts continued after he relocated to Afghanistan. Captured al Qaeda operatives, the report notes, have "adamantly denied" a connection with Iraq, and the famed meeting in Prague between Sept. 11 ringleader Mohamed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence operative appears never to have happened. Indeed, there is no evidence of operational support for the group by Iraq, the commission staff argues; al Qaeda's requests apparently went unanswered. That said, the commission has not denied that there were contacts over a protracted period.

Vía Cori Dauber, en un post que es de imprescindible lectura, igual que este otro; ya había puesto ambos en una actualización del post anterior, pero los vuelvo a destacar aquí para que no se os pasen por alto.

ACTUALIZACIÓN: Y en este post, Cori Dauber deja fuera de toda duda el por qué, a diferencia del Washington Post, el New York Times no es ni una sombra de lo que alguna vez fue. Hace mucho tiempo.