Matt Margolis Blog
There's No "Gotchya!" For Newsday's Pinkerton
By Matt Margolis
James Pinkteron wrote a piece for Newsday where he leads with the following question:
If you knew that President Franklin D. Roosevelt had received a memo a month before Pearl Harbor entitled, “Japanese Determined to Attack the United States in the Pacific,” and that he had done nothing about that information, would that knowledge change your perception of FDR as a wise war leader?
This question frames the rest of his column with the idea that this is a very damning comparison. Now, FDR didn’t receive any memo, but the implication Pinkerton is trying make is not equal.
From the made up title of the hypotheticla FDR PDB, “Japanese Determined to Attack the United States in the Pacific,” one would only come to the conclusion, based our knowledge of the history of WWII, that such a memo would be implying Pearl Harbor specifically, or at the very least, imply a more specific threat than the August 6, 2001 PDB had suggested.
As Captain Ed at Blogs For Bush describes the Augst 6, 2001 PDB:
…no planes flying into buildings, just a suggestion that bin Laden may have planned a hijacking to free Omar abd al-Rahman, who currently resides in a federal prison for the first World Trade Center bombing. It describes 70 “ongoing” FBI investigations related to bin Laden.
What in God’s name in this report gave any specific warning that coordinated hijackings would turn planes into guided missiles? Nothing. There is absolutely nothing in this PDB that could have prevented 9/11, and Ben-Veniste and Kerrey knew it – because they had already read it. Why did Ben-Veniste and Kerrey demand its declassification? Because they thought they wouldn’t get it, and wanted to suggest that the Bush administration was covering up something.
9-11 has been referred to as our generations Pearl Harbor. Knowing this, Pinkerton is obviously trying to suggest that the memo’s contents imply a threat with the same specificity as is implied in the hypothetical FDR PDB, “Japanese Determined to Attack the United States in the Pacific.”
I find it intersting Pinkerton didn’t use the title “Japanese Determined to Attack the United States” to make his point. The recently declassified PDB was not titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike The United States in New York and Washington D.C.” or some other variation of equivalent specificity.
Pinkerton, has framed the content of the PDB memo with his own biases, and immediate gives the readers an unequal hypothetical scenario in order to imply to readers that Pearl Harbor couldn’t have been prevented, but 9-11 could have, solely from the content of the August 6, 2001 PDB memo.
Of course, reading the memo by itself paints a very different picture than the one Pinkerton gives his readers.
Not that I’m suggesting Pinkerton is biased or anything… |
