If we're going to play the 9/11 blame-game...

[Guest Cerebus]

Good article from the New Republic and it makes sense imo.

 

On June 25, 2001, one of those infamous warnings rattled down the wire. Aides to Osama bin Laden were promising attacks against United States interests "in the coming weeks." Officials handled the threat in a way that now sounds familiar: They ignored it. But unlike other similarly discarded warnings, this one isn't currently under investigation by the 9/11 Commission. That's because it didn't appear in a CIA memo or a Presidents' Daily Brief. It was a story on the Associated Press wire, datelined Kabul and attributed to a Dubai-based cable channel. And the officials who didn't pay attention weren't spooks; they were foreign editors, who must have seen the story as thinly sourced and terribly obscure. The three big, agenda-setting national papers--The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times--all passed on the story.

 

The 9/11 Commission's work has forced Americans to think about their government's decisions in the months and years leading up to 9/11. But if it is legitimate to scrutinize the work of politicians and policymakers in hindsight, then it is also legitimate to ask similar questions of America's biggest, smartest intelligence agency: the media itself. It was the press, after all, that--unlike the CIA--managed to get its employees into Afghanistan before 9/11. These were not-so-secret agents like ABC's John Miller, who caught wind of bin Laden's designs in 1998, simply by asking the terrorist leader what he was planning. "If the present injustice continues with the wave of national consciousness," bin Laden replied, "it will inevitably move the battle to American soil. ... This is my message to the American people."

 

You don't need a security clearance to indulge in media hindsight. A backwards glance through the lens of Nexis reveals a combination of sparse coverage of the Al Qaeda threat and poor play for stories that discussed it. Between January 19, 2001--the day George W. Bush was inaugurated--and September 10, 2001, "Al Qaeda " was mentioned in just 33 New York Times stories. Most of them came during coverage of the Lower Manhattan trial of the African embassy bombers, and most ran deep inside the paper's Metro Section. The name "bin Laden" was mentioned about six times as often as his group, but only five stories mentioning "Al Qaeda" or "bin Laden" appeared on the public's version of the Presidents' Daily Brief--the front page of The New York Times.

 

Much of the Times's coverage of this trial is riveting in retrospect--and reveals nearly as much about Al Qaeda as you're likely to read in any newspaper today. Some of it, though, looks a bit quaint in hindsight. "Before the embassy bombings trial, Osama bin Laden loomed large in the American psyche, a villain of unimaginable evil and sophisticated reach," one story began. However, it continued, we now know that "Al Qaeda was at times slipshod, torn by inner strife, betrayal, greed and the banalities of life that one might find in any office."

 

The Washington Post also offered a steady trickle of coverage inside the paper. Ninety-five stories between Bush's inauguration and 9/11 mentioned bin Laden or his group. (By contrast, 423 stories mentioned the summer's TV-news fixation: sharks.) But only six stories directly addressing the threat made it to the daylight of the front page, and none focused on potential attacks inside America.

 

The Los Angeles Times, which may have been spooked by the planned New Year's Eve attack on Los Angeles International Airport in 2000, offers a glimpse of what more alarmist coverage would have looked like. Its scariest story simply led with a warning in open court from terrorist Ahmed Ressam that "guerrillas trained in Bin Laden's war camps planned to strike elsewhere in the United States." The paper put stories focused on Al Qaeda on the front page eleven times. As for USA Today, its readers heard of Al Qaeda just once--in a story by Jack Kelley warning of "e-jihad."

 

The press, like the president, can't say it wasn't warned. "Osama bin Laden and his global network of lieutenants and associates remain the most immediate and serious threat," George Tenet, he of the burning hair, told a Senate committee February 7. The AP led with the news, but The New York Times headlined its story the next day, "C.I.A. Chief Sees Russia Trying to Revive Its Challenge to U.S.," and got to Al Qaeda in the seventh paragraph. The Washington Post carried the story--on A16.

 

This isn't to say that there wasn't outstanding, and brave, reporting on Al Qaeda by journalists at all three major papers. The New York Times's Judith Miller--who has since been accused of over-hyping the threat posed by Saddam Hussein--was one of the few journalists to correctly hype the threat from bin Laden. She filed a vivid portrait from Afghanistan of young killers-in-training in one installment of a hefty, three-part series on terrorism that ran the week before Bush's inauguration. The piece ran on the front page. But in that regard, it was very much an exception to the rule.

 

Why did this happen? For one thing, Americans' appetite for foreign news was, before 9/11, famously small. In addition, reporters hadn't yet learned how to cover the terrorism beat. Now, for example, there's a new genre--the security story--in which small changes in everything from airport procedures to radiation screening at border crossings are treated as important news. But at the root of both these explanations is the same cause the 9/11 Commission keeps bumping up against: September 11 hadn't happened yet.

 

In the end, the media's failure, like the government's failure, is a reminder that hindsight is perfect but foresight is not. How you view these failures depends on how you view retroactive criticism. If you believe (as, for instance, TNR's Gregg Easterbrook has argued) that the Commission's blame-game rests on a fallacy of hindsight, then you would presumably excuse the press its failure to pay adequate attention to Al Qaeda. But if you believe that government officials can be faulted for failing to put the pieces of 9/11 together in advance--and judging by their coverage of the Commission's hearings, many liberal pundits see things this way--then you have to hold the media responsible for failing to put the pieces together as well.

 

Yes, government officials had access to information journalists didn't have. And yes, their jobs are to protect U.S. citizens. But journalists, too, know what's going on in the world; sometimes they know what's going on in the world better than government officials. No one, of course, would argue that journalists could have single-handedly stopped the attacks--only that a determined campaign to keep Al Qaeda on Page 1 of The New York Times or The Washington Post might have pushed policymakers to take the threat more seriously. The worst that would have happened? Well, it couldn't have seemed nuttier than the Times's drumbeat of Augusta National Golf Club stories. So blame Bush and Clinton and Rice and Freeh and Ashcroft. But if you do, blame us too.

[kkktookmybabyaway 0]

Eh, and if the media would have been pumping up terrorist threats, we all would have, at the time, been whining about them trumping up charges just to get us paranoid.

 

I just posted because a thread that gets no-sold is just sad...

[Guest MikeSC]

Eh, and if the media would have been pumping up terrorist threats, we all would have, at the time, been whining about them trumping up charges just to get us paranoid.

 

I just posted because a thread that gets no-sold is just sad...

Way to be a friend, kkk.

 

Again, if Bush did anything to stop the 9/11 attacks, he'd be pilloried for stampling on liberties and for being anti-Arab.

-=Mike

[Ripper 0]

I blame white people, kittens and bunnies for 9-11.

 

One of the three are behind everything.

[Guest MikeSC]

I blame white people, kittens and bunnies for 9-11.

 

One of the three are behind everything.

Well, when I took in my stray back in 2001, it WAS really dusty and it smelled funny.

 

And it WAS in October.

 

Man, I'm harboring a terrorist kitty --- that REALLY likes scratching posts.

-=Mike

[kkktookmybabyaway 0]

My three kids launch weapons of mass destruction in their litterboxes. Wish I had some UN Inspectors to clean/change those boxes every Thursday night...

[Highland 0]

Eh, and if the media would have been pumping up terrorist threats, we all would have, at the time, been whining about them trumping up charges just to get us paranoid.

 

I just posted because a thread that gets no-sold is just sad...

Way to be a friend, kkk.

 

Again, if Bush did anything to stop the 9/11 attacks, he'd be pilloried for stampling on liberties and for being anti-Arab.

-=Mike

Too true.

[Guest MikeSC]

Well, not really the topic of this --- but I don't feel like finding a different 9/11 Commission topic ---

 

BUT UPDATE TIME:

 

During their meeting with Bush, Commissioners Bob Kerrey and Lee Hamilton LEFT EARLY due to other arrangements.

 

And people take this commission seriously?

-=Mike

[kkktookmybabyaway 0]

Heh. I did the same thing with the "anti-Bush thread"

 

So now the new gripe will soon be "Quit posting similar stories in multiple threads" instead of "Quit posting every little news bit that bashes Democrats..."

[Jorge Gorgeous 0]