TODAY the New York Times expressed its opinion about Richard Clarke and the 9/11 commission. In an editorial this morning, the paper hunkered down to the tough job of assigning blame for underestimating the threat of terrorism. It will be little surprise in whose direction the gray finger points. “There are still plenty of questions to be answered about what happened, particularly about the apparent lack of urgency in the Bush administration’s antiterrorism efforts before 9/11,” the paper declares. The Times goes on to note that “there was at least no question about the Clinton administration’s commitment to combat terrorism . . .”
Not so the Bush administration. “The real impression gleaned from the hearings is not that the Bush administration was indifferent to the threat of terror, but that its officials had trouble fully understanding it.”
PERHAPS THIS IS SO. But a story from the November / December 2001 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review suggests that the New York Times is at least as guilty of the charge they level against the Bush administration.
In his remarkable report, Harold Evans tells of the Blue Ribbon committee chaired by Gary Hart and Warren Rudman. The United States Commission on National Security was created in a joint effort by President Clinton and Newt Gingrich. In its first public statement in September 1999, the committee warned that “Americans will likely die on American soil, possibly in large numbers.”
On January 31, 2001, they issued their final report, a 150-page document which called for the creation of a Homeland Security Department and greater investment human intelligence, among other measures, and warned that America was not prepared for “a weapon of mass destruction in a high-rise building.”
Evans reports that the committee held a large press conference when their final report was released, complete with press kits and an executive summary of the sizable document. Yet by and large, the media ignored it. The most astonishing piece of Evans’s story comes from one of the committee members, Gen. Chuck Boyd. Evans writes:
This reporter seemed to be representative of the general thinking at the Times, continues Evans:
Today the editors of the New York Times praise Richard Clarke for “accepting responsibility” in not paying more attention to the terrorism which led to September 11. Perhaps it is too much to ask that they do the same.
Jonathan V. Last is online editor of The Weekly Standard.
