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By Zachary Roth
Partisan writers toiling away at opinion journals are entitled to partisan arguments. (New York Times Op-Ed columnist William Safire has tried to make the case that opinion, by nature, cannot be wrong, because it’s opinion.) But here at Campaign Desk, we hold commentary to the same elementary standards as reporting. In both cases, we assess the accuracy of the facts behind an argument and the fairness of the framing. So when we run across an opinion built on a selective view of the facts, our nostrils quiver.
That’s the case with a piece by Adam Kushner published on the Web site of The New Republic.
Kushner argues that the release on Saturday of the August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing “vindicates” the testimony of national security advisor Condoleezza Rice before the 9/11 commission last Thursday. But his real target is Commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste, whose “badgering, interrupting, and insulting interrogation” of Rice during her testimony will, he argues, ultimately prove damaging to Democrats. As Kushner sees it, Ben-Veniste came across as a bully who was “never interested in a straightforward assessment of the administration’s counterterrorism policy” — and the 9/11 panel has left itself open to the charge that it “was committed to embarrassing the White House from day one.”
Kushner calls Ben-Veniste’s probing “baseless,” because Ben-Veniste “knew there was nothing damning in the PDB.” “No reasonable person could have read that document in August 2001 and foreseen what would happen one month later,” he says.
First off, Kushner has erected a straw man. No one is claiming that the White House should have “foreseen what would happen” on September 11. But many do argue that, having received the August 6 memo, the administration should have reacted more aggressively. Kushner doesn’t have to agree, but he can’t dismiss that argument out of hand.
More to the point, Kushner is out on a lonely limb with his assertion that release of the memo has “vindicated” anyone, in the public’s eyes. Indeed, most major news outlets this weekend pored over Rice’s testimony and the memo’s contents and concluded that, far from vindicating Rice, the memo gave the lie to a key part of her testimony. Let’s look at how major outlets of the print press reported the memo’s declassification:
Taking an unusually confrontational tone for a news story, the usually-cautious New York Times on Saturday noted in the third paragraph of its report that the disclosure that Bin Laden supporters were planning an attack within the U.S. and sought to hijack planes “appears to contradict the White House’s repeated assertions that the briefing the president received about the Qaeda threat was ‘historical’ in nature and that the White House had little reason to suspect a Qaeda attack within American borders.”
The Washington Post treated the issue similarly. Noting that Rice had characterized the PDB as “a historical memo … not based on new threat information,” the Post declared that “while the two-page document included information dating to 1997, it also contained information that the government suspected al Qaeda was actively preparing for an attack in the United States. While it gave no information about specific targets or dates, the briefing warned that U.S. intelligence believed Bin Laden had serious plans to hit the United States.”
In a piece headed, “Brief Raises Credibility Questions,” the Los Angeles Times reported Sunday that, “Questions about the administration’s vigilance dominated Condoleeza Rice’s appearance last week before the commission investigating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. But with the release Saturday night of a classified warning delivered to President Bush one month before the attacks, questions of credibility may become a growing challenge for Rice — and the president she serves.”
And here’s the lede from Saturday’s Associated Press story, which was picked up widely: “President Bush was told more than a month before the Sept. 11 attacks that al-Qaida had reached America’s shores, had a support system in place for its operatives and that the FBI had detected suspicious activity that might involve a hijacking plot.”
The media trade publication Editor and Publisher summed it all up this morning: “Press Didn’t Buy White House Spin on 9/11 Document.”
So the twin storylines that the press focused on after the memo was de-classified were that Rice was either lying or negligently ignorant when she described the memo as “historical,” and that President Bush had more specific information on al Qaeda’s plans than had previously been known. Not Kushner. He examines the same materials and concludes that Rice is vindicated and that Ben-Veniste damaged his own and the commission’s credibility.
The fact that Kushner’s view isn’t supported by most news accounts does not, in itself, prove him wrong. But in this case, vindication occurs in the eyes of others. For Rice to be vindicated, Kushner’s view of the White House’s culpability (or lack thereof) has to be endorsed far and wide. It isn’t, which is why it’s irresponsible for him to frame his contention as if it’s accepted wisdom. And it’s either obtuse or dishonest for him to claim that the memo “vindicates” Rice, since he has to ignore the language in the memo that explicitly contradicts her testimony.
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