911 Report Exposes NYT Hypocrisy
I’ve been glancing through the 585-page report just drafted by the 911 Commission. My first reaction is a feeling of tremendous respect for the Commissioners and the Herculean, uncomfortable, but necessary task they have undertaken and now concluded.
A second positive is that the Report is written in plain English. The text steers clear of the bureaucratic jargon that typifies government reports; as a result, factual accounts and the conclusions derived therefrom are presented clearly and can be easily considered.
And third – though I admit that a closer reading of the entire document is necessary before this assertion can be wholly accepted – the Commissioners were aware of and attempted to avoid the pitfall of wallowing in “20/20 hindsight,” a pastime enjoyed by the media in the post-911 era. In a remarkably candid passage on page 339, the Commission spells out this concern in detail:
In composing this narrative, we have tried to remember that we write with the benefit and the handicap of hindsight. Hindsight can sometimes see the past clearly—with 20/20 vision. But the path of what happened is so brightly lit that it places everything else more deeply into shadow. Commenting on Pearl Harbor, Roberta Wohlstetter found it “much easier after the event to sort the relevant from the irrelevant signals. After the event, of course, a signal is always crystal clear; we can now see what disaster it was signaling since the disaster has occurred. But before the event it is obscure and pregnant with conflicting meanings.”The media would do well to bear in mind this caution of the Commission. Indeed, the Commission itself notes (343) that
As time passes, more documents become available, and the bare facts of what happened become still clearer. Yet the picture of how those things happened becomes harder to reimagine, as that past world, with its preoccupations and uncertainty, recedes and the remaining memories of it become colored by what happened and what was written about it later. With that caution in mind, we asked ourselves, before we judged others, whether the insights that seem apparent now would really have been meaningful at the time, given the limits of what people then could reasonably have known or done.It is hard now to recapture the conventional wisdom before 9/11. For example, a New York Times article in April 1999 sought to debunk claims that Bin Ladin was a terrorist leader, with the headline “U.S. Hard Put to Find Proof Bin Laden Directed Attacks.”The Commission’s reference to this headline is telling, but it does not adequately convey the depth of the NYT’s downplaying of the terrorist threat posed by Bin Laden. A more complete picture can be derived from the text of the article to which the headline was affixed. Two sentences in particular stand out:
In their war against Mr. bin Laden, American officials portray him as the world's most dangerous terrorist. But reporters for The New York Times and the PBS program "Frontline," working in cooperation, have found him to be less a commander of terrorists than an inspiration for them.Interesting, no? Some two-and-a-half years before Bin Laden commanded the most horrific terrorist attack on US soil – the New York Times “found him [Bin Laden] to be less a commander of terrorists than an inspiration for them.” To add insult to injury, we now know – from interrogation of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (p149 in Report) – that it was during this exact time period, “late 1998 or early 1999” that “Bin Ladin…finally decided to give KSM the green light for the 911 operation.”
One would expect that the Times, having themselves been duped and having rejected the accurate portrait of Bin Ladin by “American officials” as “the world’s most dangerous terrorist,” would avoid assigning blame based on 20/20 hindsight – or, at the very least, would acknowledge that the paper, too, had fallen prey to the exact failures it so high-mindedly pointed out concerning the government’s pre-911 record.
Of course, the Times did the opposite. In a blistering editorial that appeared in May of 2002, the Times lamented - among other things - the mounting evidence of “monumental ineptitude and bureaucratic bumbling by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Immigration and Naturalization Service and other federal agencies…”
Throughout the piece, the Times editors are aghast at how badly the federal government was fooled. It was necessary to “determine why Washington failed to recognize that Osama bin Laden was on the hunt in America last summer.” The paper’s view is adequately summed up(though less caustically) in the second paragraph of the editorial:
“The entire national security and law enforcement apparatus underestimated the possibility that the bin Laden network might strike targets in the United States, and various agencies either failed to detect or mishandled warning signs.”Seriously. Where could they have gotten that idea that bin Ladin wasn’t much of terrorist threat?
