The NYT, delivering ancient history as news

The NYT has long been famous for producing excellent news reports on events… a decade or so after it would have mattered. Now Philip Shenon of the NYT has produced a book that tells us the critical information that would surely have kept Bush to one term… and, since we have a free press, you can read about it– in the Sydney Morning Herald (via Raw Story)

• ” “more than 40 presidential briefings presented to Bush from January 2001 through to September 10, 2001, included references to bin Laden….”
• ” [911 Commission Chief of Staff] Zelikow made it clear to the team’s investigators that Clarke should not be believed, that his testimony would be suspect.”
• ” Repeatedly in 2001, Clarke had gone to Rice and others in the White House and pressed them to move… The threat, Clarke was arguing, was as dire as anything that he or the CIA had ever seen.”
• “[Commission historian Warren] Bass told colleagues that he gasped when he found a memo written by Clarke to Rice on September 4, 2001… in which Clarke seemed to predict what was just about to happen. … The note was terrifying in its prescience.”
• “Bass made it clear to colleagues that he believed Zelikow was interfering in his work for reasons that were overtly political – intended to shield the White House, and Rice in particular…”
• ” Much as the staff felt beaten down by Zelikow, so did the other Democratic commissioners. By the end, they had given up the fight to document the more serious failures of Bush, Rice, and others in the Administration in the months before September. Zelikow would never have permitted it. Nor, they realised, would Kean and Hamilton. “

Although the SMH is not specific on when Warren Bass discovered the Clarke memo and threatened to resign over Zelikow’s politically-motivated suppression of key facts, we know it was before July 22, 2004, when the Commission released its report… plenty of time for the American people to be informed that one of the candidates for president was a complete incompetent who was gifted only at suppressing facts that would have cost him the election. And the American people owe special thanks to Lee Hamilton– and the New York Times– for having helped him in that.