Sunday, July 25, 2004

David E. Sanger and Douglas Jehl  will get no turkee

I didn't know you were still allowed to write on page A1 of the NYT that the White House is lying.  I stress this, since my one blogging hit was a criticism of a sentence written by  Andrea Elliot and Douglas Jehl  

Now that the unanimous bipartisan 9-11 committee has finished arguing over what to write in their report, they are arguing over what they wrote in their report.  That is, since the report is both monstrously long and a compromise, spin is all.  Sanger and Jehl make their view very very clear.  shorter Sanger and Jehl

The White House says the CIA sold Bush a bill of goods.
"But" ...
"Mr Lehman concluded. 'He was just like all new presidents'
But"

I didn't know the NYT style sheet allowed reporters to start a sentence with But, which, given the usual standards, can, I think be interpreted as being an abreviation for "but they are clearly lying" or "but he can't possibly really believe that".

Some actual news is in the article including hints of the bitter partisan debate inside the bipartisan unanimous commission

Aug. 6 briefing of Mr. Bush.
Mr. Bush and Ms. Rice have described that briefing, which has now been made public, as "historical" in nature. But the commission report obliquely challenged that view, noting that "two C.I.A. analysts involved in preparing this briefing article believed that it represented an opportunity to communicate their view that the threat of a bin Laden attack in the United States remained both current and serious."
Those analysts were reinterviewed by some commission members just last week, as the final touches were being put on the report, in a last-minute effort to reassess the administration's performance.

So it seems that the unanimous bipartisan commission fought on that one down to the last minute, even thought the title of the briefing should have cleared up the issue.

Also I get the first hints of what Bush said (presumably with Cheney kicking his shins as hard as he could). 

Mr. Bush told the commission, the report said, that "if his advisers had told him there was a cell in the United States, they would have moved to take care of it." Three pages later the report notes that Richard A. Clarke, the former N.S.C. counterterrorism chief who is now regarded as a pariah at the White House, told Ms. Rice "at least twice that Al Qaeda sleeper cells were likely in the United States. In January 2001, Clarke forwarded a strategy paper to Rice warning that Al Qaeda had a presence in the United States."

 

Ouch, but I'm sure it would have been worse if Cheney hadn't been there to mind him.  

Now I suspect that the unanimous committee had some discussions about style and layout.  That is, I wonder why there are three pages between two statements about the topic of who was told what when about al Qaeda cells in the USA.  For some reason, the observation that Clarke told Rice is reported on page 263 under the heading "Government Response to Threats" while Bush's claims that Rice did not tell him is reported on page 260 under "The Calm Before the Storm". 

I suspect that if Sanger and Jehl had edited the report it would have read

"He [Bush] said that if his advisers had told him there
was a cell in the United States, they would have moved to take care of it. That
never happened. But Clarke mentioned to National Security Advisor Rice at least twice that al
Qaeda sleeper cells were likely in the United States."

 

Update:  You can't say that on page A1.  The story is buried.

 


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