Why is the New York Times defending Bush's September 11 cover-up? By
Barry Grey 22 May 2002
Two revelations that emerged in the mass media last week threaten to
topple the entire edifice of lies that has been used to justify the Bush
administration's policy of open-ended war and political repression. The
first is the fact that Bush was briefed weeks before September 11 that
Al Qaeda was preparing to hijack US commercial jets. The second is that
the administration had already drafted a detailed plan for a global "war
on terrorism" which included an attack on Afghanistan -- the very plan
Bush implemented in the aftermath of the hijack-bombings in New York and
Washington.
This is only a small sample of critical information that has been
concealed by the government and the press. The facts have been covered
up because the official story of September 11 has been crucial in
justifying all of the sweeping measures enacted by the government since
that day. The Bush administration has declared the events of September
11 a watershed in world history, necessitating US military intervention
all over the world and a radical restructuring of the political system
at home, giving semi-dictatorial powers to the executive branch and
gutting constitutionally guaranteed civil liberties.
Once the official version of September 11 is called into question, the
political and moral legitimacy of everything the government has done
over the past eight months collapses. What then emerges is not merely
some "failure of intelligence," but rather the existence of a conspiracy
organized at the highest levels of the state.
Were a serious investigation to be conducted, it would rapidly reveal
that the Bush administration failed to prevent the terrorist attacks
because it had already elaborated plans for war and internal reaction
long advocated by the most right-wing sections of the ruling elite, and
was looking for a suitable provocation to justify their implementation.
That is why after more than eight months there has been no
investigation, and the government has responded so vitriolically to
growing calls for a public inquiry -- issuing threats to silence its
critics and lurid warnings of new terror attacks to divert and disorient
the public.
The response of leading organs of the US media to last week's
revelations has been aimed precisely at preventing a serious
investigation. Among those sections of the American media that have
echoed the threats and sophistries of the White House and sprung to its
defense, the most significant from a political standpoint is the New
York Times.
The "newspaper of record," for decades the principal press
representative of liberal public opinion, has published three major
commentaries since the news broke last week of the August 6 CIA
briefing. All of them echo the White House propaganda line, employing
the Times' inimitable combination of cynicism and dishonesty.
The thrust of the Times' commentaries is twofold: first, the newspaper
trivializes the controversy over what the Bush administration knew prior
to September 11, reducing it to the small change of partisan maneuvering
in advance of the November congressional elections; second, it frames
the entire issue as a technical and organizational failure of the US
intelligence apparatus, ignoring and excluding the more fundamental
political issues.
On May 17 the Times published an editorial entitled "The Blame Game."
Its main theme is that the furor over Bush's concealment of the August 6
briefing is little more than a partisan squabble, blown out of
proportion by Democrats seeking political gain at the White House's
expense.
The Times does not address the question of the Bush administration's
opposition, from day one, to an investigation of the September 11
attacks. It seeks to evade the sticky issue of Bush's failure to reveal
his August 6 CIA briefing with the injunction: "The White House should
long ago have told the country about the briefing Mr. Bush received last
August..." But why didn't it? This is a road the Times does not choose
to go down.
The Times' conclusion -- which again tracks the administration line --
is that a general, abstract acknowledgment of a governmental failure of
intelligence and security is permissible, so long as no specific blame
is placed on any leading figure in the Bush administration. We must,
according to the Times, at all costs avoid the "blame game."
Why? Any serious investigation of a disaster -- whether it be the
explosion of the Challenger or what has been proclaimed the greatest
intelligence failure in US history -- must, as one of its aims,
determine who is to blame, and, where appropriate, those so named must
be censured, removed from office, or even criminally prosecuted.
Anything short of this is not an investigation. It is a whitewash.
Two days after the appearance of this editorial, the Sunday Times, in
its Week in Review section, took another shot at providing political
cover for the Bush administration. This was a column by its senior
political analyst, R.W. Apple, Jr., entitled "Gotcha! One Cheer for
Politics as Usual." Again, the Times tries to reduce the question of
government culpability in the September 11 tragedy to partisan
back-biting. This is how Apple describes the previous days' controversy:
"...Democrats and reporters sensed an opportunity -- the first of Mr.
Bush's administration -- to polish up their gotcha politics and gotcha
journalism." He continues: "It was pure gotcha: The determination to
seize on a previously hidden personal or political foul-up, the more of
a doozie the better, to change the public perception of a leader."
The aversion of Apple and the Times to "gotcha politics" is of recent
vintage. During the year-long political witch-hunt against Bill Clinton
mounted by the Republican right and headed by Independent Counsel
Kenneth Starr -- which culminated in the first-ever impeachment of an
elected president -- the New York Times consistently backed Starr
against his critics. It defended all of the efforts to pollute public
opinion with salacious gossip and endorsed Starr's pornographic report
on the Lewinsky affair, which included the most intimate details of
Clinton's private life. The Times played an indispensable role in the
attempted political coup, providing a cloak of legitimacy to the
conspiracy to undermine the Clinton White House and ultimately bring it
down.
In his zeal to defend Bush, Apple makes an assertion that is
demonstrably false. "Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security
adviser," he writes, "made an earnest case that the information Mr. Bush
had received was general and that it pointed more toward the possibility
of attacks abroad than at home, and no one came forward with anything to
contradict that." In fact, the previous day's Washington Post (May 18)
carried a front-page article co-authored by Bob Woodward with the
headline "Aug. Memo Focused on Attacks in US." The article exposed
Rice's characterization of the August 6 memo as a lie, noting that the
memo carried the headline, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US." The
Post cited "senior administration officials" as saying the CIA briefing
paper "was primarily focused on recounting al Qaeda's past efforts to
attack and infiltrate the United States."
While claiming to support the people's right to know about the actions
and character of the president, Apple is careful to make a significant
qualification. "[T]he nation needs to know all it can legitimately learn
about the person in the Oval Office" he writes (emphasis added). What is
the meaning of this caveat, "legitimately"? What are its parameters?
Apple does not say.
In the end, Apple alludes to the political conceptions that underlie the
impulse on the part of himself and his newspaper to shield the Bush
administration. They are profoundly anti-democratic and reactionary. He
complains that "full-throated debate about such matters comes with
costs: to national unity, to confidence in the electoral process and to
respect for leaders in general." He returns to this theme in his
conclusion: "We shall soon discover, in all likelihood, what mistakes
the White House made and how it sought to cover them up, as all White
Houses do. The question is, will we feel at the end that the price in
unity and, perhaps, dignity, was worth paying to find these things out
in wartime?"
In other words, the democratic accountability of the government to the
people, and the people's right to know the truth, must be subordinated
to the war aims of the American ruling class and the stability of the
existing social and political system. Apple would far more readily see
the establishment of an authoritarian government than a social and
political challenge to the status quo from an angered and aroused
public.
On May 21 the Times published another editorial, entitled "Distractions
and Diversions." Once again echoing the Bush administration, the
newspaper declares that "what really matters" is "preventing another
assault by Osama bin Laden and his followers." This means, according to
the newspaper, focusing not on what the Bush administration knew and
what political motives underlay its actions both before and after
September 11, but rather on technical and organizational weaknesses of
American intelligence agencies. "It doesn?t take a PhD in government to
recognize," the editorial declares, "that the real subject for
discussion should be the government's chronic failure to assemble,
review and act on information about potential terrorist plots."
This manner of posing the issue is a diversion, calculated to thwart
public demands for an investigation and conceal the far-right political
agenda and conspiratorial methods at the core of the Bush
administration's actions. If the central issue were merely a technical
question of "assembling and reviewing" information, the Times would not
hesitate to press for a full and open investigation.
Moreover, the Times' presentation begs the more serious question: why
did the Bush administration not act on the information that it had? The
United States spends tens of billions a year to maintain the most
extensive intelligence apparatus on the planet, employing a network of
spy satellites and highly sophisticated electronic eavesdropping
devices. It coordinates with spy organizations all over the world,
including the Israeli Mossad, and has informants firmly planted in Al
Qaeda and every other terrorist group.
As the government admits, it was receiving warnings for years of plans
by bin Laden and others to attack targets in the US. It had specific
knowledge of previous attempts to use hijacked planes as flying bombs.
It is undeniable that on September 11 suspected Al Qaeda terrorists, who
were being tracked by the FBI, the CIA and other agencies, were allowed
to board four commercial airplanes, and no jets were scrambled to
intercept them until after they had hit their targets. There is no
innocent explanation for these facts.
There are historical analogies to September 11 -- dramatic events that
were seized on by governments to implement a radical and predetermined
shift in national policy. Hitler had his Reichstag Fire. Closer to home,
Lyndon Johnson had his Gulf of Tonkin incident, the 1964 Vietnamese
"attack" on US ships that became the pretext for a massive military
escalation and undeclared war in Southeast Asia. Subsequent
investigations proved that the entire incident was fabricated. The fact
that the Vietnam War was launched on the basis of a lie was critical to
an understanding of its imperialist character.
The far-reaching character of the measures implemented by the government
since September 11 lends even greater urgency to an exposure of the lies
surrounding that event. It is critical that the government be called to
account. It must be forced to make a full disclosure of its actions
before and after the events of last September, and explain why it failed
to prevent the single most deadly attack on American civilians in US
history.
As the Times' opposition to such an inquiry demonstrates, no section of
the political or media establishment, the "liberals" and Democrats no
less than the Republican right, can be entrusted with such a task. The
exposure of the political conspiracy at the heart of September 11 is
indissolubly bound up with the independent political mobilization of the
working class in defense of its democratic rights.
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