Since the New York Times is unwilling to mount a robust defense of the reporting by its own Judith Miller and her colleagues on the hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, we’ll have a try. It strikes us that in the vanity of contrition that has come over the Times, important information about Saddam Hussein’s regime is in danger of getting lost.

The May 26 editor’s note in the Times describes as “problematic” and as an example of how the paper “fell for misinformation” a November 8, 2001, article describing “a secret Iraqi camp where Islamic terrorists were trained.””These accounts have never been independently verified,” the Times editor’s note said. The November 8, 2001, article — by the Times’s Chris Hedges — had quoted a U.N. weapons inspector, Richard Spertzel, as speaking of the camp, known as Salman Pak, as “the terrorist training camp.” The article reported that the fuselage of a passenger airplane was at the site and that the Iraqi government claimed the site was used for “anti-terror training.”

The Times’s claim that its own account has “never been independently verified” strikes us as awfully dainty. There are widely available satellite images of the passenger airplane fuselage at Salman Pak, credited to a reputable satellite imagery company. There has also been reporting from on the ground at Salman Pak. The Associated Press’s Ravi Nessman filed a dispatch from the site on April 6, 2003, and reported,”The passenger plane’s sun-bleached fuselage lay alone in a large, barren field.”The Houston Chronicle reported on April 7, 2003, that American forces in Iraq “had captured Syrians, Egyptians and Sudanese who said they had trained in the Salman Pak camp southeast of Baghdad.”

“We believe that this camp had been used to train these foreign fighters in terror tactics,” the Chronicle quoted Brigadier General Vincent Brooks of the United States Army as saying. Indeed, a transcript of a briefing by General Brooks in Qatar on April 6, 2003, had him referring to captured Egyptians and Sudanese in Iraq and saying,”The nature of the work being done by some of those people that we captured, their inferences to the type of training they received — all these things give us the impression that there is terrorist training that was conducted at Salman Pak.”

Against this, the New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh, on May 12, 2003, quoted an anonymous “former C.I.A. station chief and a former military intelligence analyst” as buying into the Saddam regime’s explanation that the plane was used for “counter-terrorism training.” In March 2004, Knight-Ridder’s Jonathan Landay and Tish Wells quoted an anonymous “senior U.S. official” as saying “nothing” had been found to substantiate claims that Salman Pak was used as a terrorist training camp. Well, what about the passenger airplane fuselage? What about the Egyptian and Sudanese fighters?

New York magazine this week issued a long profile of Ms. Miller. Between chronicling her former love interests, Franklin Foer claims, “there were no WMDs.” There’s nary a mention of the 7-pound block of cyanide salt found in the Baghdad safehouse of Abu Musab Zarqawi in January 2004. Or the sarin shell found as part of a roadside bomb in Iraq last month. Or about what David Kay, testifying to Congress on October 2,2003,called “a vial of live C. botulinum Okra B. from which a biological agent can be produced.…hidden in the home” of a biological weapons scientist.

One of the dispatches the Times is backing away from is Ms. Miller’s reporting on the trucks that Ms. Miller reported the military believed could be mobile labs that were part of its weapons program. This idea is also derided in the New Yorker by Jane Mayer, who quotes “experts” as saying that the trucks more likely contained equipment for weather balloons.”

The Times management and other critics of the reporting by Ms. Miller and her colleagues seem to give Saddam the benefit of the doubt. Certain things just don’t add up. If Salman Pak was really a counterterrorism training camp, what were Egyptians doing there? Couldn’t Egypt get counterterrorism training from America? And with Saddam claiming that U.N. sanctions were starving his people, did he really need to spend money on mobile weather balloon trucks? Was Zarqawi’s block of cyanide salt for electroplating jewelry? Was the sarin shell accidentally waylaid? Did the biological weapons scientist just decide to take some work home with him at night?

The kind of information Ms. Miller and her colleagues were bringing in strikes us as highly newsworthy. It’s hard to imagine that after September 11 many Americans would be willing to stake their safety on the notion that Saddam’s forces and foreign fighters running around a passenger plane fuselage were engaged in “counter-terrorism” training. Or on the idea that Saddam’s trucks with chemical tanks were used to inflate “weather balloons.”Imagine how a newspaper would look if it buried that information — the sarin, the cyanide salt, the mobile labs, the plane fuselage, the botulinum — and an attack took place. It would be a journalistic and a national security error far worse than anything of which Ms. Miller or the Times have been accused.