by Will Bunch at - http://www.pnionline.com/

The NY Times, Judy Miller and 9/11: The most stunning failure yet?

Web addrss  -- http://www.pnionline.com/dnblog/attytood/archives/003394.html

Also see Chris Floyd’s take on this at -- http://www.chris-floyd.com/

Just in the last three years, we've lived through a non-stop string of controversy and scandal at the New York Times -- the Jayson Blair scandal, the various Judy Miller WMD-misinfo-and-Plame scandals, not to mention questions about the timing of its (deservedly) Pulitzer Prize-winning scoop on warrantless wiretapping, which could have been published before the 2004 presidential election.

At this point, we thought that nothing new coming out of West 43rd Street could surprise us -- until today.

Because just now, some 56 months after the fact, we are learning that both Judy Miller and her editors at the New York Times had information that foretold the 9/11 terror attacks and elected not to publish it. Reading the new story carefully, it does seem that a decision to publish the article in the summer of 2001 was not a "slam dunk,' that there were legitimate questions whether Miller's tip was enough to hang a story on. But the episode does raise a couple of other serious questions -- surely about the pre-attack ineptitude of the Bush White House, but also over the Times' handling of this explosive info both before and after 9/11.

The news comes (by way of Raw Story) from journalists Rory O'Connor and William Scott Malone, and it was published today on the Alternet web site:

Now, in an exclusive interview, [Judy] Miller reveals how the attack on the Cole spurred her reporting on Al Qaida and led her, in July 2001, to a still-anonymous top-level White House source, who shared top-secret NSA signals intelligence (SIGINT) concerning an even bigger impending Al Qaida attack, perhaps to be visited on the continental United States.

Ultimately, Miller never wrote that story either. But two months later -- on Sept. 11 -- Miller and her editor at the Times, Stephen Engelberg, both remembered and regretted the story they "didn't do."

She said that the key information about a possible al-Qaeda attack came to her on July 4 weekend:

"But I did manage to have a conversation with a source that weekend. The person told me that there was some concern about an intercept that had been picked up. The incident that had gotten everyone's attention was a conversation between two members of Al Qaida. And they had been talking to one another, supposedly expressing disappointment that the United States had not chosen to retaliate more seriously against what had happened to the Cole. And one Al Qaida operative was overheard saying to the other, 'Don't worry; we're planning something so big now that the U.S. will have to respond.'

"And I was obviously floored by that information. I thought it was a very good story: (1) the source was impeccable; (2) the information was specific, tying Al Qaida operatives to, at least, knowledge of the attack on the Cole; and (3) they were warning that something big was coming, to which the United States would have to respond. This struck me as a major page one-potential story.

Miller's editor at the time was Engelberg, one of the most respected names in the newspaper business, now a top editor at the Oregonian in Portland. He said he was tantalized by the tip but that he felt with so little specifics -- about who the alleged al-Qaeda operatives were, or the nature of any planned attack -- that there just wasn't enough there for a full-blown article. Like any good editor, he still broods over that decision years later.

"On Sept. 11th, I was standing on the platform at the 125th Street station," he remembered ruefully more than four years later. "I was with a friend, and we both saw the World Trade Center burning and saw the second one hit. 'It's Al-Qaida!' I yelled. 'We had a heads-up!' So yes, I do still have regrets."

Three points here, one about Bush and two about journalism:

1) This has been said so many time before, so we won't belabor the point, but how much more evidence do people need that the Bush White House had plenty of information about the pending 9/11 attacks, and failed to take the threat seriously? The relatively high marks that Bush gets on terrorism issues, even today, just aren't supported by the facts.

2) As for the New York Times, the decision not to publish pre-9/11 is a toss-up. But why, in God's name, was this information not published in any clear and meaningful way immediately after 9/11, on the pages of the Times itself. Doesn't anyone think that information of advance warnings of the attack in the highest levels of Washington is something that the public needed to know in those early days after the attacks?

Instead, from what we can gather, the information has dribbled out... some of it in a 2005 article in Columbia Journalism Review, and some of it today in a story on an alternative, progressive Web site. Who exactly was the Times protecting in not writing this article in September 2001, immediately after the attack, and why?

3) Another stunner from the new article: One reason that Miller wasn't able to do the additional reporting that might have added enough meat to get the al-Qaeda story in the paper pre-9/11 was because she, Engelberg, and another reporter were all busy trying to finish a book:

"At the time I also had had a book coming out. Steve, Bill Broad and I were co-authors of a book about biological terrorism. So we were working flat out on that book trying to meet our deadline. I was desperately trying to get my arms around this series that we were trying to do on Al Qaida. I was having a lot of trouble because the information was very hard to come by. There was a lot going on. I was also doing biological weapons stories and homeland security stories. And in Washington, if you don't have a sense of immediacy about something, and if you sense that there is bureaucratic resistance to a story, you tend to focus on areas of less resistance.

So this is now the third time that the timing and flow of a news article with major impact on the electorate and the American political debate was affected by journalists working on a book, and the conflict that posed with their responsibility to newspaper readers. The others are Bob Woodward's withholding of information about the CIA-Valerie Plame case he uncovered during his book research, and James Risen's warrantless wiretapping scoop, which was finally published in the Times after he finished writing a book on the same subject.

There's got to be a better system here. In theory, we think that newspaper reporters writing books is a good thing, certainly for the career of the reporter and usually for the reading public. But must the public's right-to-know be a casualty, time and time again?

13th mailing 08-29-05

No responses received except for one, a one liner. The rest were auto-replies and one echo-back.  None sent besides this mailing number 13.  If you’ve received anything else it wasn’t from me.

Since I wrote my last letter I was sure the ‘mainstream media’ of this country, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the LA Times, NPR, PBS etc. would bow to the inevitable and recognize the futility of ignoring the barrage of facts out there on the web detailing this government’s murderous crimes.  Motivated and encouraged by the enormous amount of excellent information available they would begin to investigate our nation’s leaders and what they have done to this country.

I was wrong.

I no longer find it remarkable that the U.S.’s ‘mainstream media’ still adamantly refuse to investigate the real motives behind 911. Perhaps they consider 911 a fait a’compli and therefore not worth their attention.  Perhaps they feel the deaths of those 3,500 Americans should only serve our elite’s pious exhortations of obedience to lay down our lives for an endless series of causes that have already proven to be untrue. Perhaps the U.S.  Perhaps it’s just a matter of a paycheck to them.
Perhaps the media really don't care about their reputatuions.

What I do find remarkable however, and to be quite honest, unbelievably absurd is their lack of coverage regarding our governments continued and on-going malfeasance in the “war on terror”.

Given the overwhelming evidence, the thousands of letters, e-mails, blogs and foreign newspaper articles generated every day uncovering this administration’s lies one would think sheer embarrassment or perhaps a residual sense of morality would have impelled these “institutions of the forth estate” to do their duty.  As has been the case for far to long however they have shown obedience only to their corporate obligations rather then the people, their readers and the citizens of this country, whom they are supposed to serve.

It’s almost as if they still don’t realize there’s something out there called the world wide web, that people can actually get on it, and use it to discover the truth.

Using a few of the articles I’ve collected and an old 33k dial-up modem I obtained the following web sites in less then 90 minutes.  Think of what you could do with a high-speed line and a few hours.

NOTE : I have no connection with any of the sites listed below, nor do they with me. Simply consider them as annotations supporting what I’ve written and an encouragement for you to do your own research.

Address redacted in this copy

If you are a regular viewer or reader of the ‘mainstream media’ and discover it’s the first time you’ve read about these issues, ask yourself why?

The U.S. media’s lack of coverage regarding our government’s past and current crimes is of course an important issue. It is a moral imperative to bring all the people to justice in the U.S. who helped facilitate 911, those wonderful, brilliant individuals who ‘somehow’ so ‘fortuitously’ pre-positioned themselves to make money off of it, the ones who exploited it as a reason de’ettra to launch a war on the rest of the world.

 However I am well aware that tens of millions of my fellow citizens along with the ‘mainstream’ US media would consider this belief to be a personal failing. That at best it’s simply an eccentricity for someone to feel this way, at worst it’s a sign of insanity.

But ALL of you, EVERYONE OF YOU should ask yourself this question.  Would the US’s media warn us of upcoming terrorist ‘events’?

Obviously our media would report information of an impending attack to the ‘proper’ authorities, whoever they would be.  But would our media tell us if these authorities took any action

Like our authorities, our ‘mainstream’ media has so far shown a complete and utter inability to ‘follow the money’ especially when it might lead to any of the powerful or wealthy in our society or even to foreign countries like Saudi Arabia. Would our media expose issues, evidence, preparations, unauthorized FBI, CIA or NSA leaks, or warnings, of another attack to help prevent one; if by so doing they endangered the profits of, or would cause embarrassment to, the powerful few. Or would they remain silent as they have for the last four years and let another ‘event’ take place?

And if such an ‘event’ were to happen again would our ‘mainstream” media try to salvage what little remains of their credibility as the New York Times tried to do when it printed it’s mea culpa.  An insipid apology of how they were “fooled” by our leader’s lies and falsehoods in the run-up to the Iraq war?

Or would any of them even bother?

By their silence, most of our ‘mainstream’ media have become the enablers, abettors, and facilitators of the absolute evil that has corrupted this nation.  They are as much to blame for this evil as the current administration they so obviously support.

So ask yourself this question. Given what’s gone on for the last four years, what’s more important to our wealthy elites and the media empires they operate; their money; or your lives?