Muddled, inept, tendentious summary of Richard Clarke's testimony before the 9/11 commission from Philip Shenon and Richard W. Stevenson (with the assistance of the Dread Bumiller) on A1 today. (This after Shenon, writing with Eric Schmitt yesterday, seemed to have things well in hand. Don't know exactly what that says about Shenon, or about Stevenson.)

President Bush's former counterterrorism chief, Richard A. Clarke, testified on Wednesday to the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks that the Bush administration had largely ignored the threat from Al Qaeda prior to the attacks. That prompted members of the commission to divide along sharply partisan lines as they questioned Mr. Clarke.

As Republican members openly questioned Mr. Clarke's truthfulness and Democrats defended an official who helped direct the nation's counterterrorism strategy for nearly a decade, Mr. Clarke testified that the Bush administration had not treated counterterrorism as an "urgent issue" before the Sept. 11 attacks.

"Ex-Bush Aide Says Threat of Qaeda Was Not Priority"

If you think those lead grafs suggest that the writers find equal gravity in Clarke's charges and in the more-or-less non-event of the commissioners "dividing along sharply partisan lines" in questioning Clarke—well, you'd be wrong, because the article is much more interested in Republican attacks on Clarke than on what the former counterterrorism adviser actually had to say himself.

The piece's third graf shows us a "hushed Senate hearing room" as the scene for Clarke's remarkable opening admission of failure ("Your government failed you. Those entrusted with protecting you failed you. And I failed you"), quoted in the fourth graf. After that? Cue the crickets. After the fourth graf, Shenon and Stevenson basically never again allow Clarke to occupy center stage.

They are kind enough to bring George Tenet, the "drama" of whose testimony was overshadowed by Clarke, out of the shadows: the article devotes four grafs to quoting his testimony, which the authors call "generally supportive of the Bush administration." After that it's on to "another furious round of denunciations from the White House," said denunciation repeated (as always) without context or critique, and then seven grafs follow retailing (Reagan Navy Secretary) John Lehman's discussion of Clarke's "credibility problem" and Clarke's rejoinder, the exchange excerpted to suggest a certain degree of weaseling on the witness's part:

Without detailing [Clarke's previous] classified testimony, Mr. Lehman said that there was "real inconsistency between what your promoters are putting out and what you yourself said" to the panel.

"I'd hate to see you shoved aside during a presidential campaign as an active partisan selling a book," he said.

Mr. Clarke insisted that he was telling the truth in his book and that he had told the truth to the commission. But he said that in 15 hours of private testimony to the panel, he was not asked about the American invasion of Iraq, an issue that he said framed his harsh criticism of the Bush administration.

"No one asked me what I thought about the president's invasion of Iraq," he said. "The reason that I am strident in my criticism of the president of the United States is that by invading Iraq — something I was not asked by the commission — but by invading Iraq, the president of the United States has greatly undermined the war on terrorism."

Throw in Jim Thompson waving the GOP-ballyhooed (and Fox-provided, though Shenon and Schmitt ignore that telling little detail) Clarke press backgrounder from 2002 for two paragraphs (nothing about Clarke's response to that, by the way), and three grafs that focus on Democrats defending Clarke's credibility, and you've got just under half the article devoted to what apparently remains, on A1 anyway, the issue of issues: just how much can you trust a nutball that criticizes Dear Leader?

In the Bizarro World of A1, it's not even imaginable that the day's events could justify a headline like the one over Fred Kaplan's piece in Slate: "Richard Clarke KOs the Bushies." Kaplan does what Shenon and Stevenson wouldn't stoop to: he offers a full account of the Republican commissioners' attacks and takes full measure of Clarke's entire success in repelling them. In the WaPo, vividly though in a more circumspect straight-news tone, Dana Milbank ("Clarke Stays Cool as Partisanship Heats Up") does the same.

posted by michael  4:23:46 PM  
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Ordinarily I don't like to post pointers to other things without some (horrible business-speak alert!) value-add on my part—guess today is the exception. I'd have written myself about Liz Bumiller's he-said-she-said piece covering—and tanking on—Dick Cheney's ridiculous assertion to Rush Limbaugh that Richard Clarke was "out of the loop" on counterterrorism: and I'm glad I didn't, because Brad DeLong has done a (out-of-place Britishism alert!) smashing job on it himself, so much better than I would've. He got Bumiller on the phone to ask her why she was such a bad journalist:

So I called Bumiller, and asked her why she had made it into a "she said, he said" article rather than into a Cheney-said-something-so-bizarre-that-nobody-else-will-endorse-it article. Her replies seemed, to put it politely, incoherent. The reasons that she didn't stack five contradictory quotes from five different sources against Cheney--and so make him look like the liar or idiot that he is (as Dana Milbank would probably have done)--appear to be that she "doesn't write opinion," that "the news was Rice contradicting what Cheney had said to Rush Limbaugh," and that she "only had 300 words." My assertion that whether Clarke was out-of-the-loop or was the loop itself is a matter of fact, and that a reporter has a duty to ascertain and to report to her readers such matters of fact, did not meet with a response.

Brad, Brad, you get so much love for this! Just wish I could make Radio trackback work to let you know.

posted by michael  12:59:32 PM  
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Raines pours. The late, largely unlamented (except by himself) Howell Raines has a feature coming in the May Atlantic Monthly on his tenure as Times executive editor. (The Atlantic website excerpts it here.) This is obviously in the nature of a homework assignment for me; as soon as the issue's on the newstands (or earlier—the piece is apparently available online now to subscribers) I'll see what I can glean from it, from my perspective as an interested lay reader of the paper. For reference now: Eric Boehlert in Salon ("Burning down his master's house") is mostly focused on what Raines suggests about institutional mediocrity in the Times' newsroom; Slate's Fred Kaplan ("The Autobiography of Howell Raines") is more concerned with Raines himself as a figure of "bitter, conceited" cluelessness. Romenesko features a letter from Jim McGrath of the Albany Times taking Raines to task for his suggestion that the Newspaper Guild was responsible for gumming up the works in his efforts to revamp the NYT staff—I expect there'll be a lot more discussion there over the next little while.


posted by michael  11:37:46 AM  
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