Judith Miller and the problems of Time Travel
“My job isn’t to assess the government’s information and be an independent intelligence analyst myself. My job is to tell readers of The New York Times what the government thought about Iraq’s arsenal.” — Judith Miller
“There’s a story in the New York Times this morning — this is, and I want to attribute to the Times. I don’t want to talk about, obviously, specific intelligence sources — but it’s now public that in fact he has been seeking to acquire, and we have been able to intercept and prevent him from acquiring, through this particular channel, the kinds of tubes that are necessary to build a centrifuge.” — Vice President Dick Cheney
This juxtaposition reminds me of a science fiction plot device (and I suppose theoretical physics conundrum). It’s the classic time travel paradox. Suppose a person travels to a time before she was born and breaks a causal chain that led to the traveler’s birth. This problem has been commonly explored by asking ‘What if you killed your own grandmother before she first conceived?’ (Curiously the problem is never expressed in terms of killing your own mother). The apparent paradox is then of a logical sort: P entails NOT P and NOT P entails P. If you kill your grandmother then you would not be born, which in turn would bring it about that you not travel into the past, thus you would not kill your grandmother, thus you would be born causing you to again travel into the past to kill your grandmother…. ad infinitum.
But hold on a second. Take a look at the scenario from a sort of third-person limited perspective. Look down upon it, and what you see is a strange man killing the old woman. Now here’s the mystery to this person: WHO IS THIS STRANGE MAN and WHERE DID HE COME FROM and WHY DOES HE NOT EXIST ANYMORE? He simply has no history, and no relation to any point in time and space.
Judith Miller lays out the government’s case for war with Iraq. Dick Cheney then cites Judith Miller, and he wants to attribute it to the Times (not the government, which is what Judith Miller has told us she is writing from). Something existed in between the two, connecting the two, but… it no longer exists in time or space because reality has been subverted by this time travel paradox. Nature abhors a vaccum, so someone somewhere is just going to have to invent something out of whole cloth to act as the placeholder.