Posted on 04/05/2004 10:27:19 AM PDT by fight_truth_decay
A Washington Post insider, over the weekend on the syndicated Inside Washington show, discounted the relevance of a Thursday front page Washington Post story, about how a speech on threats in the world that National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice was scheduled to deliver on September 11, 2001, focused "largely on missile defense, not terrorism from Islamic radicals." Colbert King, a liberal who is the Deputy Editor of the Washington Post's editorial page and a weekly op-ed page columnist, demurred from defending the article. "I cannot with a straight face," he admitted. He acknowledged: "It was not the strongest story, although it got a lot of play."
Indeed it did get a lot of play with all of the networks picking up on it.
"Top Focus Before 9/11 Wasn't on Terrorism," read the top of the front page story in the April 1 Washington Post. The subhead for the article by Robin Wright, who recently jumped to the Post from the Los Angeles Times: "Rice Speech Cited Missile Defense."
For Wright's article:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A40697-2004Mar31.html
On Inside Washington, a show carried by many PBS stations and which is aired by, and produced at, Gannett's station in Washington, DC, WUSA-TV, a CBS affiliate, this exchange took place during the program taped on Friday:
Host Gordon Peterson: "According to the Washington Post, the speech Condoleezza Rice was scheduled to deliver on September 11th had to do with missile defense and not terrorism."
Columnist Charles Krauthammer: "You want to get me started on this story as well? That is the cheapest shot that I can imagine."
Colbert King, Washington Post editorial writer: "I must rise to Robin Wright's defense who wrote that."
Krauthammer: "Go ahead and I'll rebut it."
King: "Okay. It goes this way [waves hand toward Krauthammer as if giving up]. And then go. [pause, starts to laugh] I can't. I really can't. It was not the strongest story, although it got a lot of play."
Peterson: "What are you doing, rebutting your own argument?"
King: "Yeah. I cannot with a straight face make this case. I resign from the Washington Post!"
CUT
Producers for the networks, however, couldn't resist the cheap shot at Rice. Amongst the April 1 items treating the Post story as relevant:
-- ABC's Good Morning America. News reader Robin Roberts announced: "On the day of the 9/11 attacks, Condoleezza Rice was reportedly set to give a speech on security that made no mention of al Qaeda or Osama Bin Laden. According to the Washington Post, the National Security Advisor's speech focused instead on missile defense."
-- CBS Evening News. John Roberts intoned: "The key question facing Condoleezza Rice next Thursday is whether the White House saw al-Qaida as an urgent threat prior to the attacks on America. If a major security speech Rice was to have given on September 11th is any indication, the prime focus of the administration was missile defense, not terrorism. In speech after speech that year President Bush never publicly mentioned al-Qaida or bin Laden, declaring the most urgent threat came from rogue states like North Korea."
-- NBC Nightly News. Anchor Brian Williams: "Also tonight, the White House is disputing new published reports that Dr. Rice was more concerned with missile defense than terrorism in the months before 9/11 based on a speech she was supposed to deliver that very same day, a speech the White House will not release. We get more now from NBC's David Gregory at the White House."
Gregory: "On September 11th, 2001, Condoleezza Rice was scheduled to deliver a major address on the threats facing the United States. After the attacks of that morning, the speech was postponed as Rice was holed up in a White House bunker managing the crisis. But her remarks, portions of which were obtained by the Washington Post, reveal the administration's thinking about terrorism before 9/11. As the Post reports and White House officials confirm, the speech's focus, quote, 'was largely on missile defense, not terrorism from Islamic radicals.'"
Nor can the Washington Post tell you how they "know" that the leaked Democratic Party memos from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence were written by a staffer instead of a Senator. Not that such a lack of confirmation stopped them from publishing said tale...
Whatever, I don't even try to say anything intelligent about these Bush-bashing partisan media types - they are not worth it.
The zeal present in the smear, tar & feather campaign to run her outta town is unequalled to anyone.
Rice being black, female, an accomplished intellectual, unemotional, composed consservative, makes her out to be the anti-Hillary I guess?
Just why they insist on kicking her 24/7 with anything that can be made up to sound damaging is so frustrating.
Back in May of 2002, David Gregory asked President Bush a question about French protestors, in French, in France, in an attempt to paint Bush as being uneducated and unpopular.What Gregory missed was that Bush was there in France on his way to sign the largest nuclear arms reduction treaty (with Putin) in world history...and was being protested by ANTI-NUCLEAR ACTIVISTS, of all people!
It was the anti-nuclear activists, not Bush, who were uneducated, as demonstrated by whom and when they chose to protest.
But no one wrote all of that irony onto paper and faxed it to Gregory, who certainly doesn't have the intelligence to figure out such things on his own...so off goes little David asking President Bush about being unpopular, rather than getting the real story of the anti-nuclear activists in France protesting AGAINST nuclear arms cuts.
"When did you stop beating your wife?"
Each senator has a staff costing millions. You don't think they spread around all that green only to be caught themselves do you?
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