Ahh, we are finally getting to my favorite Washington Question, "What did he know and when did he know it?" Howard Kurtz has some fun:
washingtonpost.com
A Hostile Press Corps Turns on Bush
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 17, 2002; 8:30 AM
The press is playing its all-time favorite game: What did the president know and when did he know it?
The town just loves to trot out Howard Baker's Watergate-era question when there's a hint of official negligence, wrongdoing, coverup or just plain bungling.
It was the same drumbeat with Reagan on trading arms for hostages, with Clinton on illegal fundraising and testifying about Monica. Now it's Bush's turn.
In a single day, the capital's media climate has been transformed.
Reporters pounded Ari Fleischer and Condoleezza Rice at briefings yesterday, skepticism and even indignation in their voices, as they demanded detailed explanations. It was, in short, far different from the tone of flag-bedecked networks after the Sept. 11 attacks, when President Bush, riding a wave of popularity and patriotism, was treated with deference by the media. Indeed, the administration likely never faced a more hostile press corps than yesterday.
After Fleischer said Bush had received only vague warnings from intelligence agencies about possible hijackings last summer, ABC correspondent Terry Moran asked: "Why didn't he level with the American people about what he knew?"
Moments later, Moran said: "These questions were asked after September 11th of the president, of the vice president, of you, yourself. And no one in the White House said, yes, the information had come in that al Qaeda was planning hijackings."
Four hours later, Ron Fournier of the Associated Press asked Rice: "Shouldn't the American public have known these facts before they got on planes in the summer and fall of last year?"
In an interview, Fleischer said: "This will be a test to see whether the press sensationalizes or informs. Aggressive questioning is what the press does for a living. Leaping to conclusions is what you hope they won't do for a living."
Fleischer yesterday called New York Post Editor Col Allen to complain about the tabloid's headline: "9/11 bombshell: BUSH KNEW." Smaller type below says: "Prez was warned of possible hijackings before terror attacks." Fleischer called the headline "irresponsible" and "a poster child for bad journalism."
Allen defended his front page, saying: "I reject the notion that the headline suggests that Bush knew about 9/11. . . . '9/11 bombshell' was there to tell people this was a story about terror."
Journalists thrive on such stories because there are dozens of threads on which to pull: what did the CIA know, what did the FBI know, who saw which memo, what was Congress told, why was there no follow-up, were the airlines notified, who will testify, what documents will be subpoenaed. Congressional hearings and rhetorical outrage could fuel weeks of damaging headlines.
From the moment CBS News broke the story Wednesday night that Bush had received an intelligence warning, the media had the one element that was missing from recent accounts of FBI memos about suspicious Middle Eastern men at flight schools: a link to the Oval Office. This produced a journalistic eruption.
Damage control specialists say politicians fare better when they release bad or embarrassing information themselves rather than waiting for it to leak ? a technique often used by the Clinton White House. But the question permeating the news briefings was whether last summer's intelligence warning was specific enough to have been made public ? even after the tragedy.
Although some critics have accused news organizations of going soft on the White House after Sept. 11, yesterday's reporting bristled with intensity.
"Journalists have been waiting for a chance to be their old, aggressive, hard-nosed selves," said Robert Lichter of the Center for Media and Public Affairs. But "just because you don't release classified information doesn't mean you're trying to hide it or cover it up."
But on a purely political level, hasn't this crew learned anything from recent history? Doesn't the way this news leaked made it look like the administration has something to hide, when it was simply a case of investigators not being aggressive enough about an alarming but somewhat vague warning?
On cable shows last night, the debate was already transformed into: How dare the Democrats attack the White House? Will this affect the 2002 elections? On "Crossfire," former Al Gore chieftain Tony Coelho accused Bob Novak of challenging his patriotism; Novak denied it. On Fox, Alan Colmes accused Republican Rep. Dana Rohrbacher of blaming the attacks on Clinton (the congressman even brought up Lewinsky).
One final note: the breast-beating media were also asleep at the switch. In December 1998, Time reported: "Intelligence sources tell TIME they have evidence that bin Laden may be planning his boldest move yet--a strike on Washington or possibly New York City in an eye-for-an-eye retaliation. 'We've hit his headquarters, now he hits ours,' says a State Department aide."
Where was the press frenzy then?
On to the morning papers, where the New York Times finds an administration squarely on the defensive:
"Confronting a political uproar over its disclosure that President Bush was cautioned last August that Osama bin Laden may have been planning a hijacking, the White House said today that the assessment was in a C.I.A. report that was not based on specific intelligence that terrorists were planning the Sept. 11 attacks.
"In a detailed briefing this afternoon, Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser, said the government had received numerous reports of terrorist threats last summer, but she emphasized that the information seemed general and pointed toward potential attacks overseas.
"In addition, Ms. Rice said that the briefing Mr. Bush received from the C.I.A. on Aug. 6 did not mention a July memorandum from an F.B.I. agent in Phoenix who had warned that Middle Eastern men connected to Mr. bin Laden might be receiving flight training in the United States. . . .
"Her comments to reporters this afternoon came amid a rising chorus of criticism among Democrats in Congress who questioned what government officials knew before the attacks and why the administration had withheld for eight months the information about Mr. Bush's C.I.A. briefing."
The Los Angeles Times leads with the Howard Baker cliche: "Suddenly, President Bush is confronting questions that bedeviled one of his predecessors: What did the president know and when did he know it? . . .
"In public, administration officials emphasized that the briefing Bush received Aug. 6 at his ranch was neither specific nor unusual, given long-standing concerns about hijackings. Any effort to paint the president as ignoring public safety would quickly be seen as partisan, they said.
"However, the officials and their allies acknowledged privately that they were well aware of the potential political damage, and they scurried to control it. 'It looks like somebody was asleep at the switch; this is a fundamental matter for the Bush presidency,' said one Republican with ties to the White House."
The Washington Post sees a dent in W.'s halo: "The aura of invincibility that President Bush has enjoyed since Sept. 11 received a sharp jolt with the revelation that he had been told that Osama bin Laden's followers might try to hijack American airplanes.
"Lawmakers demanded answers from the White House and threatened to launch expanded probes into whether the government did enough to protect American lives. Democrats shed their reticence about attacking the popular president. Some of the families of those who died in the attacks said the government had let them down. . . .
"Although Bush avoided public remarks on the subject, his aides sought to quiet the controversy. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld pleaded Bush's case on Rush Limbaugh's radio show, Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) took to the Senate floor, and Vice President Cheney's office called television networks to say he would use a political speech in New York City last night to address the issue."
The Washington Times, as it usually does, leads with the White House's defense:
"Vice President Richard B. Cheney yesterday warned congressional Democrats against trying to score political points by making 'incendiary' assertions about what the White House knew about terrorist threats before the September 11 attacks."
The revelations aren't over yet. "Adding more fuel to the fire, NBC reported last night that two days before Sept. 11, Bush was given a 'detailed war plan' to dismantle bin Laden's al Qaeda network," says the New York Post.
"NBC reported that Bush was given a national security directive to sign for a plan that was 'pretty much' the same as the one the United States followed after the attacks. The plan included asking other countries to cooperate and share intelligence, disruption of al Qaeda cells using covert actions, the freezing of al Qaeda bank accounts and stopping its money-laundering operations."
The Boston Globe focuses on the inevitable investigation: "Congressional Democrats yesterday demanded that the Bush administration turn over documents showing what warnings it had last summer of a possible terrorist hijacking and called for a new investigation of what the White House knew and when.
"'I'm gravely concerned,' said Senate majority leader Thomas A. Daschle, Democrat of South Dakota. 'Why did it take eight months for us to receive this information? And secondly, what specific actions were taken by the White House in response?'"
It all depends on the meaning of the word warning. "In isolation," says USA Today, "the few terse lines in the loose-leaf briefing book Bush read at his Crawford ranch Aug. 6 might not prove anything. The White House spent much of the day Thursday struggling, amid a flurry of second-guessing, to show how one vague warning fell far short of the kind of specific alert that could have thwarted the terror of Sept. 11.
"But word of the Bush briefing follows a series of disclosures indicating that the government had substantial information pointing to a coming assault."
Salon's Joe Conason comes out firing: "Incompetence, rather than conspiracy, remains the most plausible explanation for the Bush administration's failure to prevent the terrorist atrocities of Sept. 11, 2001. But 'conspiracy' is beginning to look like a plausible description of the administration's effort to conceal its tragic errors.
"For the first time in eight months, angry citizens are asking why they have suddenly learned what George W. Bush knew all along. . . . Evidently Bush and his associates wanted to ensure that nobody else connected the dots, because they point directly to the White House."
Another Salon headline: "What did they lie about, and when did they lie about it?"
Marshall Wittmann is tough on the White House in his Bull Moose column:
"The Moose expresses his outrage over the photograph that is being hawked to GOP contributors of the President speaking with Vice President Cheney on 9/11. The reason the Moose is apoplectic is that this is not a photo of the President telephoning CIA Director Tenet asking for his resignation!
"Today's revelation that the president was briefed before 9/11 on potential hijackings raises several questions. Why didn't we learn of this earlier? What did the President know and when did he know it? Who leaked the story and what was their agenda? Why has no one (specifically, the CIA director) been held accountable?
"The only way these questions can be answered is through an independent commission. It is remarkable that Congress has not moved legislation on this matter. Maybe, the president can launch such a commission. Not a moment too soon before his administration's own credibility is questioned."
Josh Marshall is a bit more restrained: "I guess you could say that these pre-9/11 warning stories are amounting to something of a bad press day for the Bush White House. I have to confess, though, that I have an unhelpful tendency to want to defend the administration rather than go on the attack. (Don't get me wrong. I'm going to try to overcome it. And I'm sure I'll be able to. I'm just letting you know where I am right now.)
"The one thing I'm quite happy about is that this will take a good bit of the bloom off that pro-Bush, anti-Clinton war-on-terrorism swagger. . . . I will say this: these new revelations make the administration's efforts to quash an investigation (Cheney's call to Daschle, etc.) look EXTREMELY cynical ('if we have any investigation, the terrorists will have won!') . . .
"These jokers deserve lots of criticism for sitting on this info for like eight months or so. But let's look closely at just what they knew, how many other things they were hearing at the same time, how much reason there was for these threats to stand out from the myriad of other ones that routinely get included in the president's intel briefing."
InstaPundit's Glenn Reynolds says the unthinkable was actually quite thinkable:
"I've flown into New York many times, and never looked down without noticing how close those buildings were and how easily a plane could crash into them. (And who hasn't played Flight Simulator and done that?). . . .
"The FBI knew there were suspicious people in flight school, and was told by Moussaoui's flight instructor, as part of his extensive lobbying efforts (!) to get the FBI interested in the case, that a loaded airliner was a fearsome weapon. And they had similar, if not quite as explicit, warnings from people at the Phoenix flight school.
"Crashing a plane into a building (the Capitol) is in a . . . Tom Clancy novel for chrissakes!
"Now, the dangers of Monday-morning quarterbacking are real. It might be that the FBI couldn't have stopped these guys no matter what. But if they really couldn't imagine anyone doing anything like crashing a plane into the World Trade Center, then we should fire them and hire someone a little more, um, imaginative.
"And for not doing that, Ashcroft is definitely to blame."
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Surely the Wall Street Journal must be boosting Bush? Nah.
"It's said our current President is fond of nicknames. If he doesn't start tightening the federal purse strings, he might end up with a new one himself: Lyndon Baines Bush.
"When President Bush unveiled his Fiscal 2003 budget in February, we were happy to see he wasn't following LBJ's path of buying both guns and butter. He proposed an overall spending increase of 3.7%, and the President's budget director told Washington it would have to choose among spending priorities; his own focus would be the military and homeland defense.
"But the past few months have begun to look more like LBJ redux. With November elections near, Congress is engaged in a spending free-for-all, and the White House seems reluctant to stop it."
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And on a lighter note, under the taunting headline "Anne Robinson: Americans Are Dumb," London's Daily Mirror reports:
"Anne Robinson, the flame-haired quiz show dominatrix, is not impressed. The Weakest Link is to be shelved in the United States as a result of declining audience figures and Anne, who has made no secret of her contempt for American intellect, is taking no prisoners.
"America, You are the Weakest Link, Goodbye! 'On one US show I asked a young soap star how many minutes there were in half an hour,' Anne says, wearily. 'And she said 60.'
"Nor is she much impressed by their leader. 'I saw George Bush at a benefit concert actually waving at Stevie Wonder,' she says, incredulously. 'Someone had to tell him "he can't see you".' Anne wanted to mention the incident on a US chat show but, post- September 11, criticising Dubya was deemed unpatriotic.
"'Suddenly, you couldn't say anything about him,' she says. 'Before September 11, I remember asking on TV if Bush knew where Europe was. Then suddenly, you had to act as if he was Einstein.'"
Yo Anne: Maybe we're smart enough to have grown tired of your fatuous act. |
