Spinning at The Post

Last updated on: March 24, 2004 at 10:33 am by Fred Clark

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Spinning at The Post 2004-03-24T10:33:01-05:00 Fred Clark

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Our paper decided to go with The Washington Post's account of yesterday's testimony before the Sept. 11 commission, from reporters Dan Eggen and John Mintz.

In addition to recounting the day's testimony by the current and most recent secretaries of Defense and State, much of the report offered what I guess is supposed to be a summary of the commission's "Staff Statement No. 6: The Military."

There were some rather odd sections of Eggens and Mintz's report. Consider this, from the seventh graf:

The reports also appear to confirm some of the key criticisms made by Richard A. Clarke, the former counterterrorism coordinator for Clinton and Bush, in a book released Monday that has revived the bitter debate over the government's war on terror.

Since Clarke's appearance on 60 Minutes and the release of his book, it has certainly "revived … bitter debate," but the focus of that debate has been what the U.S. government did and didn't do before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The "war on terror" has been a response to those attacks. The debate over Clarke's statements has not been over the WOT, but over the events that preceded and precipitated it.

It's hard to know here whether Eggen and Mintz just haven't been reading the news since Sunday, and so don't know what all the debate over Clarke's book is about, or whether they just forgot when the war on terror started. (One would think the latter was easy to remember — Sept. 11, 2001, is a memorable date — but an appalling number of journalists have been getting this wrong. Witness the number of stories this month about the one-year anniversary of the "war on terror.")

In discussing the findings of the commission's staff statement, E&M scramble the chronology again. They discuss Clinton-era plans to target bin Laden "between December 1998 and July 1999" without mentioning the August 1998 cruise missile strikes that set the context for those following scenarios. E&M don't actually mention the August strikes — 60-70 tomahawk missiles destroying two training camps and killing some 30 al-Qaida terrorists — at all except as in a vague, fleeting introductory clause to a paragraph on another subject: "A month after the Clinton administration launched missile strikes …"

Sometimes as stories on the wire get updated first references can be cut accidentally. You'll find revisions of stories with pronouns that have no antecedent, or with a person referred to on first reference only as "Smith." Since none of what Eggen and Mintz had to say about the Clinton-era efforts against al-Qaida makes any sense without the context of that August '98 attack, I figured something similar must've happened here.

But no. The omission is in every version of the article. Odd.

So did The Post screw up, or was this spin? I dunno, but the following sure seems like intentional spin.

In 1998, E&M write, "counterterrrorism officials within the Pentagon" proposed "a more aggressive … posture" in an eight-point memo. Here's what happened, according to E&M:

The eight-point proposal went nowhere, in part because senior officials thought the plan was too aggressive, investigators found.

The implication of "senior officials" is that Pres. Clinton — or perhaps Richard Cohen, or maybe even that turncoat Richard Clarke — personally shot down this master plan that would have saved the West.

Compare that with the actual report of those investigators:

The Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict, Allen Holmes, brought the paper to Undersecretary Slocombe’s chief deputy, Jan Lodal. The paper did not go further. Its lead author recalls being told by Holmes that Lodal thought it was too aggressive. Holmes cannot recall what was said, and Lodal cannot remember the episode or the paper at all.

Ah, so by "senior officials" (plural), Eggens and Mintz are referring to the chief deputy of an undersecretary. And the source of the praise for this disregarded memo? The memo's author.

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