Bill Keller, editorialist for The
NY Times and former executive editor of the paper, has recently penned a
strong attack on Vladimir Putin arguing
that Putin’s leadership “deliberately distances Russia from the socially
and culturally liberal West”, describing the Kremlin’s policies as “laws
giving official sanction to the terrorizing of gays and lesbians, the jailing
of members of a punk protest group for offenses against the Russian Orthodox
Church, the demonizing of Western-backed pro-democracy organizations as ‘foreign
agents’, expansive new laws on treason, limits on foreign adoptions.”
Keller, who during his tenure as executive editor of The NY Times argued for the invasion of
Iraq and wrote glowingly of Paul Wolfowitz, makes no
mention of Moscow’s diplomatic maneuvers that successfully avoided a US military
intervention in Syria or the Russian asylum given to Edward Snowden. Keller, who had supported the US intervention in
Syria by writing, “but in Syria, I fear prudence has become fatalism, and
our caution has been the father of missed opportunities, diminished credibility
and enlarged tragedy,” also made no mention of Seymour Hersh’s stinging
dissection of the Obama administration’s misinformation campaign regarding the
sarin attacks in Syria. Hersh’s piece, which drives grave
doubts into the case against Assad actually having carried out the attacks, was
not published in The New Yorker or in The Washington
Post, publications that regularly run his work.