Shell game. Another 9/11 obituary: this one, though, announces the death of some information the Times wants to bury.

On Wednesday, in the wake of George Tenet's 9/11 commission testimony, the WaPo's Dana Priest led a story from the commission ("Panel Says Bush Saw Repeated Warnings") with news about the titles and content of PDBs that Dubya was given well in advance of the infamous Aug. 6 briefing:

By the time a CIA briefer gave President Bush the Aug. 6, 2001, President's Daily Brief headlined "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US," the president had seen a stream of alarming reports on al Qaeda's intentions. So had Vice President Cheney and Bush's top national security team, according to newly declassified information released yesterday by the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

In April and May 2001, for example, the intelligence community headlined some of those reports "Bin Laden planning multiple operations," "Bin Laden network's plans advancing" and "Bin Laden threats are real."

The intelligence included reports of a hostage plot against Americans. It noted that operatives might choose to hijack an aircraft or storm a U.S. embassy. Without knowing when, where or how the terrorists would strike, the CIA "consistently described the upcoming attacks as occurring on a catastrophic level, indicating that they would cause the world to be in turmoil," according to one of two staff reports released by the panel yesterday. ...

The information offers the most detailed account to date of the warnings the intelligence community gave top Bush administration officials, and it provides the context in which a CIA briefer put together a memo on Osama bin Laden's activities in the Aug. 6 brief for Bush.

Today, the Times deigns to take (as far as I can tell its first) note of this information. From the way David Johnston and Jim Dwyer's off-lead article starts ("Pre-9/11 Files Show Warnings Were More Dire and Persistent"), you might even think it was going to be treated as news:

After three weeks of extraordinary public hearings and a dozen detailed reports, the lengthy documentary record makes clear that predictions of an attack by Al Qaeda had been communicated directly to the highest levels of the government.

The threat reports were more clear, urgent and persistent than was previously known. Some focused on Al Qaeda's plans to use commercial aircraft as weapons. Others stated that Osama bin Laden was intent on striking on United States soil. Many were passed to the Federal Aviation Administration.

While some of the intelligence went back years, other warnings — including one that Al Qaeda seemed interested in hijacking a plane inside this country — had been delivered to the president on Aug. 6, 2001, just a month before the attacks.

You would, however, be wrong. It requires in fact another 35 paragraphs (in this 46-graf-long opus) before the one sad, solitary graf in which Johnston and Dwyer acknowledge those rather damning PDB titles. Thirty-five paragraphs of slogging through more of what seems Johnston's trademark numbing accumulation of this-and-that detail about intelligence lapses and failures of bureaucratic command, recycled through a listless chronology that starts, as always, with the Clinton administration. Narrative and intellectual focus neither required nor permitted. The notion that the article is going to discuss Presidential leadership and its failures—as suggested in the article's lead, and in another graf midway through the piece, which mentions the commission finding that "in the first eight months of the Bush administration ... the president received far more information, much of it dire in tone and detailed in content, than had been generally understood"—the writers raise the idea solely to swamp it in the miasma of their summary approach.

Which seems the point. I have to think that Johnston—who has perpetrated this sort of thing before, at least three times that I can recall since Richard Clarke's testimony blew up all over Dubya's smirking mug—is doing precisely what the Times wants him to do with this story. The editorial direction the paper consistently follows with respect to the work of the 9/11 commission seems to have two principles: (1) produce the appearance of journalistic energy, while in reality doing nothing at all to put the paper in front of the story; (2) let Bush off the hook as far as possible by burying his Administration's 9/11 failures in gestures of balance and comprehensiveness. Specifically, that latter aim requires that the summary review focus equally on Bush- and Clinton-era "failures," with the material always presented chronologically (so that consideration of any failings of the current Administration are generally withheld until the back half of the article); that the question of leadership be whisked off the table, vanished in various layers of bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo; and that the line adopted be some version of "there's enough blame to go around"—thus pre-empting any specific or urgent critique of what Bush's team did or didn't manage to do. (While a full accounting of 9/11 of course requires consideration of the Clinton record, isn't it a bit more pressing that we focus on the actions of the sitting President, the man who occupied the White House on 9/11 and who is currently up for re-selection in November?)

There's so much wrong with today's report, in large scope and in incidentals, that I'll need another post or two to get to the salient features. Just wanted to point out now the kind of shell game the Times seems content to play with the most important public-policy story of our generation.

posted by michael  3:47:07 PM  
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