The moving finger. As eRobin mentions in her last comment, à propos today's lead by Eric Lichtblau and David Sanger ("Bush Was Warned of Possible Attack in U.S., Official Says"), "the shock around the blogosphere at seeing this story in the NYTimes, to say nothing of it showing up on A1, gives a hint of how far the NYTimes has fallen." (For the second time in three days, by the way, A1 has seen the phrase "Contradicts White House" in a headline, which has to be some kind of recent record.)

President Bush was told more than a month before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that supporters of Osama bin Laden planned an attack within the United States with explosives and wanted to hijack airplanes, a government official said Friday.

The warning came in a secret briefing that Mr. Bush received at his ranch in Crawford, Tex., on Aug. 6, 2001. A report by a joint Congressional committee last year alluded to a "closely held intelligence report" that month about the threat of an attack by Al Qaeda, and the official confirmed an account by The Associated Press on Friday saying that the report was in fact part of the president's briefing in Crawford.

The disclosure appears to contradict the White House's repeated assertions that the briefing the president received about the Qaeda threat was "historical" in nature and that the White House had little reason to suspect a Qaeda attack within American borders.

This isn't really news to anybody who's been paying attention: all Atrios had to do was publish a link to a 2002 WaPo article to demonstrate that. I'm more interested, myself, in how treatment of the story has shaken out in the last couple of days, through several drafts of the first draft of history.

David Stout's earliest, wildly inept, stab at running Condi Rice's testimony through the Info Chopper (only a revised version of which is available online) gave Rice absolutely every benefit of the doubt, obediently repeating her spin points about "silver bullets" and "structural problems," omitting crucial context, reporting her tone in the hearing as "calm, businesslike," "cool" and "unwavering." It was practically a parody of the worst of the suckup political reporting that's appeared in A1 in the last year. By the next day, Philip Shenon's straight-news lead had decided that the real story was going to be the August 6 PDB; Shenon smelled blood in the water:

Members of the commission, who have been allowed to read the August 2001 report but have not been allowed until today to discuss most of its contents, joined unanimously on Thursday in calling for the entire document to be declassified and made available to the public.

In response, the White House said it was hurriedly trying to declassify the report, and White House aides said it could be made public as early as Friday, an extraordinary reversal by the White House given its insistence a year ago that the contents of the President's Daily Brief were so highly classified that they could not be released even to the commission.

The White House appeared eager to release the entire Aug. 6 report to stem possibly damaging speculation about its contents ...

And Sanger's news analysis had decided that Condi's tone ("unapologetic," in Shenon's account) wasn't so much about her strength of character as about her characteristic (and BushCo-standard) unwillingness to concede any ground at all to criticism: "By the end of the three hours, her tone was so emphatic and unemotional that she may have created as many new debates about the administration's reaction as she settled old ones."

Lichtblau and Sanger repeat that narrative turn today:

The charges and countercharges [surrounding Rice's testimony] underscored the political challenge that the investigation into the Sept. 11 attacks has become for President Bush as he mounts his re-election bid. The White House sought this week to defuse the situation by allowing Ms. Rice to testify before the Sept. 11 commission after months of resistance. But her appearance served to raise new questions about the administration's efforts to deter an attack.

In this case, though, they're much more interested in leveraging the "new questions" line to pre-write the script for the coming week, which, with testimony scheduled from John Ashcroft, Louis Freeh (former FBI Director), Thomas Pickard (former Acting Director) and Robert Mueller (current Director) is going to be all about the FBI and the DoJ. And the fingers are already starting to fly:

Also on Friday, the White House offered evidence that the Federal Bureau of Investigation received instructions more than two months before the Sept. 11 attacks to increase its scrutiny of terrorist suspects inside the United States. But it is unclear what action, if any, the bureau took in response.

The disclosure appeared to signal an effort by the White House to distance itself from the F.B.I. in the debate over whether the Bush administration did enough in the summer of 2001 to deter a possible terrorist attack in the United States in the face of increased warnings.

[snip]

The finger-pointing will probably increase next week when numerous current and former senior law enforcement officials, including Attorney General John Ashcroft, testify before the Sept. 11 commission. In an unusual pre-emptive strike, Mr. Ashcroft's chief spokesman on Friday accused some Democrats on the commission of having "political axes to grind" in attacking the attorney general, who oversees the F.B.I., and unfairly blaming him for law enforcement failures.

[really big snip]

Offering a detailed preview of Mr. Ashcroft's testimony next week, [spokesman Mark Corallo] said the attorney general was briefed repeatedly by the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. on threats posed by Al Qaeda and was told that the threats were directed at targets overseas. "He was not briefed that there was any threat to the United States," Mr. Corallo said. "He kept asking if there was any action he needed to take, and he was constantly told no, you're doing everything you need to do."

Aside from the fact that all this looks like it'll be loads of "Who, me?" fun—reading through Times coverage of the last few days, the drift of things seems increasingly apparent. Past whatever damage the Administration has or hasn't yet suffered with the populace, I think that they've just about exhausted their remaining stock of goodwill among the mainstream press corps. It's not just a matter of having shown weakness: what starts to come through is the sense that the press is rounding into a consensus (shades of the late-phase Clinton impeachment dance!) about the need for 9/11 contrition (and thank you, Richard Clarke), one whose obverse is disdain for the constant shifting of blame among these bozos. This isn't going to end, implies the Times, until somebody in office steps up and takes responsibility for something—and the reckoning may already have been postponed so long that there'll be no winning the press back when and if it happens.

posted by michael  1:49:19 PM  
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