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Times Watch for
March 29, 2004
NYT Provides Platform for
"Dick Clarke's American Grandstand"
More Clarke on Monday morning. Eric Lichtblau's lead story, "President Asked Aide To Explore Iraq Link To 9/11," claims: "Analysts say Mr. Clarke's charges could do significant political damage to a president who has built his foreign policy record largely around the campaign against terrorism. Republican leaders have responded in force, suggesting that Mr. Clarke's testimony last week was at odds with the closed testimony he gave before the joint Congressional panel in 2002 and that he may have lied in one or both appearances."
Lichtblau then dismisses the Republican claim by citing Democrats: "But intelligence officials familiar with his classified briefing said they were aware of no obvious contradictions. Mr. Ben-Veniste said he thought Mr. Clarke's earlier testimony should be declassified to resolve any dispute, but he added that 'it is not my recollection that there were any notable or substantive differences in testimony.' Mr. Clarke's Congressional testimony, given while he was still at the White House, put a more 'positive spin' on the administration's counterterrorism efforts, just as he did in a 2002 press briefing that was released last week, said a senior Democratic Congressional aide who spoke on condition of anonymity. But factually, it did not appear to contradict what Mr. Clarke told the Sept. 11 commission last week, the aide said. Mr. Clarke's assessment last week is also generally consistent with journalistic and Congressional accounts of the early Bush administration's approach to terrorism."
Lichtblau leaves out what Clarke actually said in that 2002 press briefing, in a line that's certainly inconsistent with the new Clarke: "There was no plan on al Qaida that was passed from the Clinton administration to the Bush administration." Clarke also noted how Bush changed the Clinton administration terror tactics "from one of rollback of al-Qaeda over the course of five years, which it had been, to a new strategy that called for the rapid elimination of al-Qaeda.
In fact, a Nexis search indicates the Times has yet to quote Clarke's contradictory 2002 comments in any of its news stories (though columnist David Brooks writes about Clarke's change of heart in his Saturday column).
As National Review editor Rich Lowry notes: "There is no way to square what [Clarke] said in August 2002 with the actual book he has written, because it is such a totalist critique of the Bush administration that leaves out or skates over important facts he recounted in 2002. The Clarke who said in 2002 that nothing important had moved in U.S. counterterrorism policy since the end of 1998 simply cannot be squared with the Clarke of 'Against All Enemies.'"
For the rest of Lichtblau on Clarke, click here.
Richard Clarke | Eric Lichtblau | Terrorism
David Johnston and Adam Nagourney's "New Focus on Bush's Actions Before 9/11," paints Richard Clarke's testimony at the 9-11 hearings as confirming the Bush administration's worst fears: "The White House had long hoped to avoid just such a discussion of Mr. Bush's actions before the hijackings, fearing it would draw attention to the first months of his presidency rather than the period after Sept. 11 when he took military action against Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. The White House had opposed the creation of the independent commission and for many months cooperated reluctantly with the panel. White House fears were realized this week when Richard A. Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism coordinator, depicted the first months of the Bush presidency as a time of indecision and inaction on terrorism. Many of the preliminary findings of the commission supported the picture Mr. Clarke outlined in his new book, 'Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror,' published by Free Press."
The cheerleading for Clinton's anti-terror efforts continue in the Sunday story: "Instead, the evidence suggests that Mr. Bush allowed the terrorism issue to drift down the list of White House priorities from the relatively high importance given it by President Bill Clinton's national security aides. For the most part, Mr. Bush advisers told the commission that they continued the operational activities of their predecessors."
Yet as National Review's Rich Lowry points out, Clarke himself writes that a Middle East peace agreement was more important to Clinton than retaliating for the attack against the bombing of the USS Cole, a terror attack in Yemen that killed 17 U.S. sailors.
For the rest of Johnston and Nagourney on Clarke, click here.
Richard Clarke | David Johnston | Adam Nagourney | Terrorism
Tom Friedman's Bipartisan Fantasy
In his Sunday column, "Awaking To A Dream," a mostly liberal wish list, Thomas Friedman joins the media's John McCain bandwagon, describing a Kerry-McCain ticket as a dream come true: "Most of all, I want to wake up and read that John Kerry just asked John McCain to be his vice president, because if Mr. Kerry wins he intends not to waste his four years avoiding America's hardest problems--health care, deficits, energy, education--but to tackle them, and that can only be done with a bipartisan spirit and bipartisan team."
For more of Friedman's fantasies, click here.
Columnists | Thomas Friedman
Still Harassing Katherine Harris
Monday's lead editorial, "When the Umpires Take Sides," casts a stock liberal villain in a suspicious light: "When Katherine Harris had to decide which candidate won Florida in 2000, many people were disturbed to learn she was both the state's top elections official and co-chairwoman of the Florida Bush-Cheney campaign. This year, that kind of unhealthy injection of partisanship into the administration of a presidential election could happen again."
The Times again puts out misleading information on Harris' role in the election: "Many of the decisions secretaries of state make have the potential to change an election's results. Purging voting rolls too aggressively, as Ms. Harris did in 2000, can change the party breakdown of the electorate. Not purging voters who are ineligible can, too."
But as a correction to a Salon story noted: " it was incorrectly stated that Florida's Secretary of State Katherine Harris hired a company, ChoicePoint, to create a voter 'purge' list. The company was hired in 1998 before Harris was elected to her post."
For the full editorial, click here.
Campaign 2000 | Elections | Florida | Gaffes | Katherine Harris
Labeling Bias Not "Left Behind"
Conservative beat reporter David Kirkpatrick returns with a preview of the newest book in the popular "Left Behind" series of apocalyptic Christian end-time novels. The scoop is in the headline to Monday's story: "In 12th Book of Best-Selling Series, Jesus Returns."
While it's a nice novelty to see conservative and avowedly Christian culture featured on the front page of the Times, Kirkpatrick could have done a better job identifying the liberal politics of the books' main critic.
Kirkpatrick writes: "Some theologians call the novels a dangerous distortion of Scripture. In an interview, Joseph C. Hough Jr., president of Union Theological Seminary in New York, warned that the novels' preoccupation with the suffering that many evangelical Christians foresee for unbelievers 'leads people to think that Christianity is about cosmic fire insurance.' Dr. Hough argues that the novels misconstrue Revelation to mean that there are only two sides to every question, God's and the Devil's. 'It's the same sort of vision of the world that is reflected in some of our recent presidential administrations, that there is the world of good and the world of evil, like 'the axis of evil' and 'the evil empire,' ' he said. 'The enemies of America are the enemies of God. It is very dangerous, because it leads you to do things in the expectation that everyone who is against you is evil.'"
The gratuitous Reagan and Bush-bashing was probably enough of a clue as to Hough's ideology, but Kirkpatrick could have pointed out Hough's obvious left-wing politics, on display in October when he told fellow liberal and television ubiquity Bill Moyers: "The growing gap between the rich and the poor which has become almost obscene by anybody's standards, and the stated intentional policy of bankrupting the government so that in the future there'll be no money for anything the federal government would decide to do."
For the full story on the newest "Left Behind" book, click here.
Books | Conservatives | Tim LaHaye | David Kirkpatrick | Labeling Bias | Religion
Sharon "Bent On More Violence"?
Neil MacFarquhar's Monday story on an aborted Arab-nation summit in Tunisia passes along this anti-Israel propaganda line painting Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon as bloodthirsty: "The Jordanians and the Palestinians presented a joint proposal to try to reinvigorate the Arab-Israeli peace negotiations despite Israel's killing last week of Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the spiritual leader of Hamas. Syria and Lebanon objected, arguing that Arab public opinion would not abide such an overture to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel at a time when he seemed bent on more violence." By contrast, Hamas, an actual terror group that truly is "bent on more violence," against Israeli civilians, was left unlabeled in the story.
For the rest of MacFarquhar's story, click here.
Hamas | Israel | Ariel Sharon | Terrorism
E-mail TimesWatch Director, Clay Waters, with TimesWatch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org