Mis-Covering Clarke

By Danny Schechter, MediaChannel.org. Posted March 29, 2004.

Please raise your hand if the name Richard Clarke rang a bell for you three weeks ago. How many of us knew who he was or what he did? And who among us can cite examples of TV stories or news commentators discussing in any detail his contention that the War on Iraq undermined the war on terror?

Yes, there were discussions of the problems with the Iraq war and the lack of priority paid to the search for Al Qaeda, but not of the direct relationship between the two as framed by Clarke.

The question now is whether any one is going to raise the issue of the media's failure to discuss these issues in detail before Richard Clarke pointed to intelligence failures and apologized to the victims' families for the government's inability to prevent the attack. More importantly, who in our media will have the courage to apologize for giving the Bush administration a soft sell and a big pass?

Insiders Only

It takes a silver haired, hawkish hardliner and Washington insider and Securo-crat to finally put some, if not all, of the 9/11 issues on the agenda. Clarke is hardly a dove. He wanted Clinton to bomb more often. His analysis of the roots of what he calls Islamic radicalism was superficial. He even expressed a wish that Fidel Castro be taken out.

More liberal critics or people who reject the Washington cold war foreign policy consensus are rarely heard or taken seriously. This is not new. It is only defectors from the right -- such as Treasury Secretary O'Neil -- that seem to be heard. Even Daniel Ellsberg, who gave us the Pentagon Papers, was seen as credible by the Beltway crowd because he'd worked for the Pentagon and Rand Corporation.

Before Clarke came forth, questions were being raised on hundreds of websites and by independent investigators and groups of 9/11 families, who were marginalized and for the most part ignored. (Take a look at 911 Citizen Watch for a sampling.) You have to be in "the club" to be taken seriously.

The irony, of course is that the hearings only took place because of the persistence of a handful of outsiders -- for example, the activist wives of 9-11 victims who lobbied for the investigation but later walked out in disgust when many of their questions were sidelined.

National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice has refused to testify in front of the commission because of a bogus separation of powers "principle." She made the same claim in an all too friendly interview on 60 Minutes on Sunday. Surprisingly, neither correspondent Ed Bradley nor other commentators have pointed out to her that this commission was appointed by the President, and not by Congress. It merely happens to hold hearings in a room on the Hill. The reference to testifying before Congress is misplaced.

Rice did offer one valid insight during the interview when she alluded to the kind of context and background that is missing in most of the media coverage. "You have to go back into the 70's and 80's," she said, to understand the challenge of terrorism. While her reading of that history is very selective, it is precisely what the 9-11 investigation and the media coverage need to consider.

Air Time for Attack Dogs

Ever since Clarke testified, the administration has cleverly changed the subject from the issues he raised to that of his own credibility. Is he a partisan? Did he write different things in a press release he issued for the White House when he worked for President Bush than in his book, which challenges the President? Tim Russert threw every criticism that has been raised at him on "Meet the Press" this weekend. Clarke held his ground.

It was like a game of ping pong, better known as 'they said/you said."

This politicizing of his testimony was aided and abetted by virtually every show on the air. He has been on 15 or more news programs and on most of them, the questions were the same, as commentator Harry Browne notes on HarryBrowne.org:

"Providing their usual support for big government, TV and press reporters repeated and discussed statements Clarke made in 2001 and 2002 -- statements that seemed to back up the charge that Clarke was an opportunistic hypocrite.

"But did you notice that every reporter showed us exactly the same statements from Clarke? Some of the apparent 'statements' weren't even complete sentences. Why did everyone who commented on Clarke's apparent flip-flop focus on exactly the same fragments?

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