Sign up for The Media Today, CJR’s daily newsletter.
Tom Shales’ Washington Post Style piece on Condoleezza Rice’s testimony before the 9/11 Commission yesterday is so far off the mark that it left us wondering whether Shales watched the event at all.
Shales writes, “Rice said, convincingly … that ‘no one could have imagined’ a plot so monstrous as crashing civilian passenger jets into the twin towers of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.”
But here’s what Rice actually said:
I was in a press conference to try and describe the Aug. 6 memo, which I’ve talked about here in the — my opening remarks and which I talked about with you in the private session. And I said at one point that this was a historical memo, that it was not based on new threat information. And I said, No one could have imagined them taking a plane, slamming it into the Pentagon — I’m paraphrasing now — into the World Trade Center using planes as missiles. As I said to you in the private session, I probably should have said, I could have not imagined. Because within two days people started to come to me and say, Oh, but there were these reports in 1998 and 1999; the intelligence community did look at information about this.
In the days leading up to her testimony, Rice’s “no one could have imagined” statement had been so thoroughly debunked that she herself felt the need to acknowledge her mistake in yesterday’s testimony. Shales must be the last person in Washington who’s still unaware that not only “could” someone have imagined a 9/11-type attack, but that several in the intelligence community had. Worse yet, he somehow interprets Rice’s rowback as a reiteration of the very statement she was retracting — and then calls it “convincing”.
Having botched his characterization of what Rice said, Shales appears positively stricken by Rice’s charms: “She probably could have done the whole thing with a teacup and saucer balanced on her head. She’s that cool.” (Elsewhere he refers, cutely, to a Fox News Channel commentator as “smarty-pants Tony Snow”, and dismisses CNN’s Anderson Cooper as the network’s “most telegenic anchor.”)
Maybe paying a little more attention to the substance of what’s said, and a little less to composing faux-clever quips would help. Or maybe it’s just that the whole notion of writing a witty take on testimony before the 9/11 commission strikes us as tone-deaf — and more than a little tacky.
–Zachary Roth
Has America ever needed a media defender more than now? Help us by joining CJR today.
