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The Media War Against the Bush Administration Ronald Kessler WASHINGTON -- After 9/11, the media criticized George Bush and the government for not having done enough to prevent the attacks. Now the mainstream media have gone on to attack everything the government has done since then to make us safer.
While legitimate criticism should be welcome, the mainstream media use an arsenal of techniques to manipulate public opinion. Those techniques include suppressing news of successes, running stories on alleged abuses without giving the full story, recycling old stories on alleged abuses and presenting them as new disclosures, and saving denials for the end of stories. The media's latest approach is to expose government secrets for the sake of exposing them, implying that because they are classified, they are wrong.
The media war began in earnest in the summer of 2003, when reporters hammered Bush for saying in his State of the Union address that the "British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Each day brought new headlines insinuating that Bush had lied. In fact, not only did the British intelligence service MI6 believe that Saddam had sought uranium from Niger, but investigations by both a British House of Commons and a Senate intelligence committee later concluded the MI6 report was well-founded.
Yet the story reporting the British House of Commons Intelligence and Security Committee's conclusion appeared in the United States as a separate story in only one paper, The Wall Street Journal. The Washington Post devoted one paragraph to the conclusion near the end of a 22-paragraph story. The New York Times, which by then had run 56 stories mentioning the infamous 16 words in Bush's State of the Union address, ran no story on the British Parliament report.
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When the 9/11 commission found no "collaborative relationship" between Iraq and al-Qaida, The Washington Post said in its lead that this conclusion challenged "one of the Bush administration's main justifications for the war in Iraq." Yet Bush had never said that Saddam and al-Qaida were working together as partners. He said there had been many contacts between them, a worrisome fact that the 9/11 commission confirmed. The Post story downplayed that there were numerous contacts by mentioning them in the fourth paragraph under the headline, "Al-Qaida-Hussein Link Is Dismissed." Taking a similar approach, the New York Times buried the mention of contacts between al-Qaida and Saddam in the eighth paragraph of its story.
When Dan Rather and CBS received bogus documents that raised questions about Bush's National Guard service, they ran them on "60 Minutes" even though their own experts had told the producers before the broadcast that they were probably fake. Yet it did not require an expert to determine that the proportional spacing used in the supposedly typewritten documents did not exist in the early 1970s when they were dated.
More recently, on June 25, The Washington Post ran as its second lead, "Warnings on WMD ‘Fabricator' Were Ignored, Ex-CIA Aide Says." According to the story, Tyler Drumheller, a CIA official in Europe, was dumbfounded when he saw a classified version of the speech Colin Powell was about to give to the United Nations citing Iraq's biological weapons factories on wheels. Drumheller claimed he had warned both George Tenet, the director of Central Intelligence, and John McLaughlin, the deputy director, that the source for that claim was a fabricator.
Buried in the eight paragraph of the story was a single line saying that Tenet "now" says he did not learn of the problems with the defector, known as Curveball, until much later. By using the word "now," the paper implied that Tenet had changed his story and was therefore being misleading. Not until near the end of the story did the reader learn that both Tenet and McLaughlin said they had no recollection of warnings Drumheller allegedly gave them in person or on the phone. The story cites no independent evidence to corroborate Drumheller's claim. Nor did the reporter ask Drumheller why, if he was so incensed, he did not send a written communication to document his concerns.
Finally, we have The New York Times to thank for exposing legitimate programs that are necessary to hunt down terrorists. To justify running the story about how the government tracks terrorists' financial transactions through SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication), Bill Keller, executive editor of the Times, said anonymous government officials expressed unspecified concerns about the program. Yet no one could cite any abuse. Later, he backtracked, saying the public should know about successes.
The fact that we have not had an attack in almost five years is due in part to the program for tracking banking transactions and the more controversial NSA program to intercept phone calls by terrorists. It's simply common sense that more terrorists know about those capabilities, the more likely they will change their methods to avoid detection.
When the media argue that the terrorists already know about the government's capabilities, they ignore the fact that the programs have caught terrorists. Riduan Isamuddin, better known as Hambali, an al-Qaida operative believed to be the mastermind behind the bombing of a Bali resort in 2002, is just one such catch. If the terrorists were aware that their calls and financial transactions could be monitored so effectively, they would not have been caught by them. And if the programs were so well known that terrorists were aware of them, as Keller argued, why were they presented as front page news?
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