Our Truth, And Theirs

A New York Times op-ed revealing the extent of the Bush administration’s extraordinary indifference to early warnings of 9/11 motivated former administration spokesman Ari Fleischer to tweet:

“Disgusting op-ed in NYT by a truther implying Bush knew of 9-11/let it happen. NYT decries lack of civility, then adds to it.”

An additional tweet reiterated the “truther” epithet and questioned why the Times was lending its pages to such a disreputable sort. Yet the author of the piece, Kurt Eichenwald, is a longtime mainstream journalist, coming from such venues as the Washington Monthly, the New York Times, and Conde Nast: he is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and the author of several best-selling books on a wide variety of subjects. Eichenwald’s forte is investigative journalism, and his book, The Informant, was made into a major motion picture. This is hardly a portrait of a marginal figure sitting in his parents’ basement spinning out elaborate conspiracy theories: to my knowledge, Eichenwald has never published anything questioning the Official Story — and his article never says the Bush administration “let it happen.”

What it does say is that recently unclassified documents show an administration pushing back hard against CIA and other intelligence assessments warning of the impending attack:

“While those documents are still not public, I have read excerpts from many of them, along with other recently declassified records, and come to an inescapable conclusion: the administration’s reaction to what Mr. Bush was told in the weeks before that infamous briefing reflected significantly more negligence than has been disclosed. In other words, the Aug. 6 document, for all of the controversy it provoked, is not nearly as shocking as the briefs that came before it.”

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