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Times Watch for
April 7, 2004
"Preventable" 9-11 Puts Rice on the Spot?
David Sanger and Philip Shenon's Wednesday story on Condi Rice's upcoming 9-11 testimony portrays White House grappling over the tone Rice should take in her remarks. The Times once again puts Rice on the spot: "But [Rice's] statement...is also an effort to counter the contention of the panel's leaders, Thomas H. Kean and Lee H. Hamilton, that the attacks were probably preventable based on the intelligence available in the summer of 2001."
Yet as Times Watch noted on Monday, Kean and Hamilton didn't pin the blame on the Bush Administration, or Rice. Kean's list of "preventables" went all the way back to when Osama bin Laden went to Afghanistan--in 1996, the Clinton era.
They also revert to old Times' mistakes: "Last summer, Ms. Rice blamed the director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet, for failing to read a draft of Mr. Bush's 2003 state of the union speech, in which he reported-- incorrectly--that Saddam Hussein had tried to buy uranium in Niger."
As Times Watch readers know (and even the Times has corrected in the past) Bush never mentioned Niger in his State of the Union. Yet the canard keeps cropping up in Times reporting and editorials.
For the rest of Sanger and Shenon on Condoleezza Rice, click here.
• Richard Clarke | Corrections | Niger | Condoleezza Rice | David Sanger | Terrorism | Uranium
Bin Laden Capture Would Be No Boost For Bush?
Campaign reporter Adam Nagourney files "In Campaign 2004, the Crystal Ball is Fuzzy." Sunday Week in Review, making the banal point that the best-laid plans of political campaigns are hostage to real-world events: "It is hard to remember a presidential campaign with so many potentially critical and unpredictable events on the horizon, poised to rewrite the story line of the race within a news cycle."
Nagourney also raises the Bush-exploiting-terror issue: "And a week before the third anniversary of the attacks the Republicans will nominate Mr. Bush just a few miles north of Ground Zero in New York, bringing a renewed examination of the attack, this time in a supercharged political context that will no doubt again raise the question of whether the White House is exploiting a tragedy for political gain."
He also tries to tamp down in advance any boost Bush may get from a hypothetical capture of bin Laden: "But after Mr. Hussein was captured on Dec. 13, Mr. Bush enjoyed a spike of voter approval that barely lasted through the New Year. And what if the capture of Mr. bin Laden brings with it disclosures that the United States had missed opportunities to seize him earlier, a finding that might lend some heft to Mr. Clarke's criticisms. Mr. Clarke said that Mr. Bush's focus on Iraq diverted him from hunting down Mr. bin Laden. Along those lines, Republicans and Democrats are alert to the possibility that Al Qaeda would respond to the capture of Mr. bin Laden with an attack to show that it was not dependent on him, an event that certainly would blunt the significance of his apprehension."
Hmm. For someone arguing the utter unpredictability of future events, Nagourney certainly seems to have thought long and hard about how a bin Laden capture wouldn't help Bush much. Is Nagourney sitting on a scoop?
For the rest of Nagourney, click here.
• George W. Bush | Campaign 2004 | Saddam Hussein | Osama Bin Laden | Terrorism
Kerry-McCain, Media Dream Team
Adam Nagourney's "A Quick and Quiet Search to Fill the Democratic Ticket" is another example of the media's continued longing to see John McCain in the spotlight.
Campaign reporter Nagourney reports Sunday on Kerry's VP hunt, and it doesn't take long for the media's favorite Republican McCain to show up: "Democrats close to Mr. Kerry, including some advisers, said Senator John S. McCain, Republican of Arizona, remained a highly alluring choice. One adviser said that choice would almost guarantee Mr. Kerry's election. Mr. McCain, who like Mr. Kerry is a Vietnam veteran, has said he does not want to cross party lines to join a Kerry ticket, though some of Mr. Kerry's aides held out the hope of a personal entreaty by Mr. Kerry, outside Mr. Johnson's network."
After running through a list of actual Democrats like Bill Richardson and Sen. John Edwards, Nagourney returns to the media's beloved maverick: "Although Mr. McCain has repeatedly said he would not be Mr. Kerry's running mate, he has also repeatedly offered warm words about Mr. Kerry and tart comments about Mr. Bush, whom he challenged for the 2000 nomination. Last week, Mr. McCain told The Boston Herald that the Republican Party 'has gone astray' on issues that deal with the environment and minority groups and that the Democratic Party was 'a fine party.'"
Democratic Sen. Zell Miller is another senator who bucks his party. In fact, Miller has gone farther than McCain by actually endorsing the rival party's presidential candidate. Yet for some reason the Times isn't obsessing over the pro-Bush Miller.
For the rest of Nagourney on Kerry's VP hunt, click here.
• Campaign 2004 | Sen. John Kerry | Sen. John McCain | Sen. Zell Miller | Adam Nagourney
Frank Rich uses his Sunday Arts & Leisure space to contrast Richard Clarke's 9-11 "apology" with Bush's light-hearted performance at the annual dinner of the Radio and Television News Correspondents Association: "A nation of viewers that had watched a public servant mourn the unnecessary loss of American life on 9/11 now saw the president make light of the rationale that necessitated the sacrifice of an additional 500-plus Americans (so far) in the war fought in 9/11's name."
Never mind that presidential joking on such occasions, even on serious matters, is hardly unusual. As Jacob Laskin notes for The American Spectator, Clinton at a 1997 White House Correspondents' dinner said: "The bad news is that our only child is going off to college. The good news is, it opens up another bedroom," making light of allegations Clinton was using the Lincoln Bedroom to raise campaign funds.
Rich grimly soldiers on, accusing the Bush administration of exploiting 9-11: "Whether it's TV ads that invoke the ruins and corpses of the World Trade Center to sell the Bush-Cheney campaign or a short-lived effort by MBNA (coincidentally or not, the biggest Bush contributor in 2000) to market a 'Spirit of America' MasterCard picturing the ground zero firemen hoisting the flag, power and money are at stake, not just our security."
For the rest of Rich, click here.
• Campaign 2004 | George W. Bush | Frank Rich | WMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction)
Elisabeth Bumiller filed a Week in Review piece on the upcoming 9-11 testimony of National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and sets the bar for Rice sky-high. The portentous headline: "Bush's Credibility Now Rests on Her Shoulders."
Bumiller's Sunday article is no less overheated: "It is not a cliché to say that on Thursday, when Ms. Rice publicly testifies to the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks, she will have to turn in a show-stopping performance as the woman on whose shoulders the credibility of the Bush administration now rests….Some commission members who were enraged when Ms. Rice talked to every television and cable network but not to them, are considering confronting her with segments of her many interviews asserting that the White House was acting forcefully against Al Qaeda--and then asking her to explain how when much of the documentation shows otherwise. The commission will also ask Ms. Rice about contradictions between her public statements and those of other administration officials….Ms. Rice's critics say she has spent so much time being the president's friend and adviser that she lost sight of a critical element of her job: to manage the administration's foreign policy. Commission members are certain to question her about her management style, and how attentive she really was to Mr. Clarke's pre-9/11 warnings about the possibility of a catastrophic terrorist attack."
For the rest of Bumiller's profile of Rice, click here.
• Elisabeth Bumiller | Condoleezza Rice | Terrorism
E-mail TimesWatch Director, Clay Waters, with TimesWatch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org