ABC left unchallenged administration's discredited claim that NSA surveillance might have identified 9-11 terrorists
SUMMARY: ABC's World News Tonight uncritically reported President Bush's discredited claim that the National Security Agency might have identified some of the 9-11 terrorists before the attacks if his warrantless domestic surveillance program had been in place.
The January 25 broadcast of ABC's World News Tonight uncritically reported President Bush's discredited claim that the National Security Agency (NSA) might have identified some of the 9-11 terrorists before the attacks if his warrantless domestic surveillance program had been in place. Bush, during a January 25 speech, became the latest member of his administration to advance this argument. However, as Media Matters for America has previously documented, the 9-11 Commission and congressional investigators found that the Bush administration knew about two of the hijackers more than one year before the attacks, but that "bureaucratic problems -- not a lack of information -- were primary reasons for the security breakdown."
This debunked claim has previously been offered by Vice President Dick Cheney and Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the deputy director of national intelligence and former head of the NSA. A January 24 Washington Post article subsequently refuted their assertions, noting:
Hayden echoed a claim earlier this month by Vice President Cheney that, if the NSA program had been in place prior to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, "it is my professional judgment that we would have detected some of the 9/11 al Qaeda operatives in the United States."
Like Cheney, however, Hayden did not mention that the NSA, CIA and FBI had significant information about two of the leading hijackers as early as January 2000 but failed to keep track of them or capitalize on the information, according to the Sept. 11 commission and others. He also did not mention NSA intercepts warning of the attacks the day before, but not translated until Sept. 12, 2001.
In contrast to ABC anchor Elizabeth Vargas, who merely repeated Bush's contention with a clip of his speech during the January 25 broadcast of World News Tonight, CBS Evening News national security correspondent David Martin devoted an entire report to the question: "Could the eavesdropping program have somehow stopped or impeded the 9-11 terrorists?" Martin pointed out that Hayden "offered no specifics" to support his claim and interviewed 9-11 commission members Tim Roemer and Bob Kerrey, who both faulted the administration's suggestion that more information might have prevented the attack.
Conservative radio host Michael Reagan also reiterated Bush's assertion on the January 25 edition of Fox News' Hannity & Colmes. Reagan repeated the Bush claim and added that the problem may also have been "Jamie Gorelick [former deputy attorney general under President Clinton]and that big wall she put up," referring to the purported "wall" between intelligence and law enforcement agencies that some claim prevented the sharing of information related to the 9-11 attacks. Media Matters has debunked the claim that Gorelick either constructed or strengthened the decades-old "wall."
From the January 25 broadcast of ABC's World News Tonight:
VARGAS: President Bush today made the most dramatic link yet between the September 11th attacks and his controversial domestic spying program. During a visit to the ultra-secret National Security Agency, the president said, had the eavesdropping program been in effect prior to 9-11, the hijackers might have been stopped.
BUSH [video clip]: We know that two of the hijackers who struck the Pentagon were inside the United States, communicating with Al Qaeda operatives overseas. But we didn't realize they were here plotting the attack, until it was too late. We must be able to connect the dots before the terrorists strike, so we can stop new attacks.
VARGAS: The president maintains he has not broken the law by authorizing eavesdropping without a warrant inside the U.S. Next month, a Senate panel will hold hearings into the program.
From the January 25 edition of Fox News' Hannity & Colmes:
REAGAN: And the president said today that, in fact, if this program had been in place prior to 9-11 -- and, remember, Jamie Gorelick and that big wall that she put up -- that in fact we might have been able to find out about 9-11 before it happened. There's no incompetence going on.
From the January 25 edition of CBS' Evening News:
BOB SCHIEFFER (host): These arguments over spying on Americans inevitably have raised the question no one can answer for sure, but it has stirred up a storm of opinions pro and con: Could the eavesdropping program have somehow stopped or impeded the 9-11 terrorists? Here's David Martin.
MARTIN: The man who ran the NSA on 9-11 has made the most powerful argument in favor of the controversial eavesdropping program.
HAYDEN [video clip]: Had this program been in effect prior to 9-11, it is my professional judgment that we would have detected some of the 9-11 Al Qaeda operatives in the United States.
MARTIN: General Michael Hayden offered no specifics, and Democratic members of the 9-11 Commission dispute it.
TIM ROEMER: Indicating that an intercepted communication would somehow identify and then stop or block parts of 9-11, I think is stretching this argument entirely too far.
MARTIN: Before the attack, the head hijacker, Mohammed Atta, exchanged e-mails with Ramsi bin al Shibh, a key Al Qaeda operative in Germany, using a simple code to discuss which targets to hit. None of those communications were intercepted, not because of legal restrictions on NSA, but because American intelligence didn't have a clue either man belonged to Al Qaeda.
BOB KERREY: They would have had to have known both -- been tracking those individuals. I'm not certain they did, under any circumstances.
MARTIN: Two of the hijackers were suspected members of Al Qaeda, but, again, the fact that the NSA did not intercept their calls had nothing to do with legal restrictions. They just slipped their CIA tail in Asia.
KERREY: We lost them. There was a breakdown in communication that, again, has nothing to do with the inability of getting an intercept permission to listen to people's communication.
MARTIN: Hayden stopped just short of saying warrantless eavesdropping could have broken up the 9-11 plot, but today, the White House claimed it might have. You can't prove any of that with what the 9-11 Commission found. David Martin, CBS News, the Pentagon.
Do these people have no shame? I notice another recurring lie has been slipped in there: "Jamie Gorelick and that big wall that she put up". That one has been refuted over and over.
Does anybody still believe this crap?
Do they believe it? Maybe, maybe not. The point is, they don't care! They don't care if it's true or not, they don't care if it's been refuted, discredited, thoroughly demolished. They just don't care.
As long as they think saying it is good for their side, they're going to keep on saying it and truth counts for nothing.
The reason clocks and time limits were introducted in chess tournaments was because people were attempting to win games not by an advantage at skill at the game but by a preponderance of "sitzfleisch," the ability to spend hours over each move until your opponent was too tired to play effectively.
The right uses a rhetorical version of the same thing. No matter how many times some talking point is shot down, they'll just keep on saying it with the idea that eventually others will get tired of the effort of having to repeatedly refute it and it will go unchallenged.
We have to be as stubborn as they are. More stubborn, actually, since it takes more energy to refute some bogus accusation than it does to make it. But we just have to keep at it.
As MMFA points out often, the professional liars keep trotting out the same old saw, no matter how many times it gets shot down. They have perfected the "on message" strategy of politics. Even if your message is a total fabrication, just keep on saying it, and enough schlubs will believe it and vote for you. I'd like to see a poll of how many Bush voters still believe that Saddam was involved in 9-11, and that WMDs were found in Iraq.
The Left has to come up with an answer to the Right's media s**tstorm, or we're headed for the dark ages.
When is the Left going to get news programs to refute all of the lies and misinformation spued out by the Right. Unfortunately most of the media is controlled by the likes of Ruppert Murdock so don't look for that to happen soon. My lawyer once told me, "We don't have to prove it's true, they have to prove it's false." This is the mindset of the right. If a lier tells his lie enough times, even he'll believe it's true.
Somebody must the Right and MM are still pushing it.
It is unfortunate that in a day of mass communications, those that take the lead in the role of delivering information to the masses, fail to do so responsibly.
On CBS News, Bob Schieffer will have an exclusive interview with President Bush -- the president's only television interview prior to the State of the Union message. It will be seen on the CBS Evening News this Friday, on Face the Nation on Sunday, and on CBSNews.com. Hopefully Bob Schieffer will hold the President's nose to the proverbial grind stone and ask questions of accountabilty, rather than provide the President a platform of readdress and redirection from what is happening on Capital Hill and his Office.
Questions that need answers: ~ How does the President feel about his Supreme Court nominee Samuel A. Alito's endorsement of Unitary Presidential Powers? ~ Is Time Magazine and The Washingtonian wrong when they say that they have seen photographs that show the President and Abramoff togeather at a White House function? ~ Is the President aware that the PR firm in charge of manageing those photographs, no longer have them in their data base, and the president of the firm admits, herself, to eraseing them? ~ Can the President explain how the NSA knows which phone calls to monitor without "fish netting" all the calls made to and from American citizens on US soil? ~ Why did the President fail to change current FISA laws, or even attempt to introduce necessary changes to those laws so in order that the NSA can conduct their International Terrorist Surveillance Program better and more throughly includeing the technology of the 21st century. ~ Was Tom Dachel wrong when he said that Congress did not grant the President authorization to wire tap? That on the evening of Sept. 12, 2001, when the White House proposed that Congress authorize the use of military force to "deter and pre-empt any future acts of terrorism or aggression against the United States." Believing the scope of this language was too broad and ill defined, Congress chose instead, on Sept. 14, to authorize "all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations or persons [the president] determines planned, authorized, committed or aided" the attacks of Sept. 11. ~ How does the President explain his Medicare Program's inability to correctly advise participants as to what drugs are or are not available to them? ~ How does the President feel about the letter presented on Jan.25, 2005, to The Speeker of the House, signed by Nancy Pelosi, Democratic Leader, Steny H. Hoyer, Democratic Whip, Henry A. Waxman, Ranking Minority Member, and the Committee on Government Reform. This letter asks The Honorable J. Dennis Hastert, to open an investigation into the role that the Alexander Strategy Group, a lobbying firm closely linked to Tom DeLay and Jack Abramoff, played in crafting the Medicare Prescription Drug Act of 2003 and the budget reconciliation bill currently pending before Congress.
In order to challenge somebody on an issue, you have to do your "homework." The reporters spend way too much time getting their make-up on, instead of doing actual work. They can't challenge what they don't know.
Simply put, the reporters are about as ignorant as the ones that listen to the filth put out by the Right.
Bush and his administration can spew out practically anything and the obedient media just repeats it. Amazing.
Seeing the ABC and CBS reports together puts it all into perspective.
Neither report is "conservative" or "liberal"; rather, the ABC report is inaccurate and incomplete, while the CBS report is comprehensive.
Ultimately, the questions still stand:
Would a "left-leaning" media produce a report like the ABC report?
Is an accurate, comprehensive report like the CBS one a sign of "liberal media bias"?
At this point, the answers are rather obvious.
Leaving aside the factiness of whether warrantless wiretaps could've prevented the attacks, this argument is also laughably illogical.
Consider: How could the executive branch have asserted a legal right to use wartime powers to avert the state of war under which they claim that authority?
If 9/11 had been prevented by the arrest of the plotters, their cases would've been handled as criminal prosecutions. How favorably would a judge look upon evidence gathered without a a warrant?
In the end, I welcome any & all chances for the White House to remind Americans how little they did in the months before 9/11/01 to keep Americans safe.
Why is the news media missing this one? How can they not see this as the anthesis of why Bush's arguments are unfounded?
If I go back in time and kill my father, poof, I no longer exisist.
Bush is, in essence, suggesting the same thing.
I will need to quote you. Thank you for enlightening me today.
While you are totally correct, this argument is way too complicated for the talking heads to tackle. Even if they did, it would be way over the heads of Bush's troglodyte base.