White House Press Secretary quotes from the 9/11 Commission Report and CNN reporters, anchors and writers all call her a liar. A fact cannot be a lie; an opinion cannot be the basis for you to call it a lie. Parsing words and context just to find perceived lies is no longer journalism.
August 2, 2018 — The media circled the wagons again last night, first around White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders, and then around their own. In a fit of protectionist rage CNN lashed out at the White House again for spreading ‘lies and debunked conspiracy theories’ from the podium. The network put on a full court press against Sarah, with Tweets from their reporters, two articles on their website (one by the once renown analyst Peter Bergen), and Don Lemon again breathlessly lamenting to his audience about the daily press conference. This reaction is so off-base I almost titled this article “CNN Embraces bin Laden; Rejects 9/11 Commission Report as Bunk.”
The way the media covers these White House press briefings has been a joke; no news is reported, they simply are out to catch the Administration “in lies.” While at times the circus atmosphere can be mildly entertaining, parsing words and context just to find perceived lies is no longer journalism; it is a clique that is happily relishing in their moniker as “The Enemy of the People,” or “Fake News.” Everyday the networks remind us that President Donald Trump used those phrases in the past, and they are constantly beating the drum to get us to believe that they are under attack from the White House and we the people are living in an authoritarian dictatorship.
This story began the night before where CNN’s Jim Acosta was accosted by the crowd at a President Trump rally during his live shot. The crowd in the background chanted “CNN SUCKS!” while he was on air, which is always funny when a live report goes wrong. But Jim will have you believe they wanted his head on a pike. Grow up, Jim! You yell at the Administration everyday, how does it feel?
The next day poor Jim brought up the encounter at the WH Press Briefing (I’m surprised he didn’t show up with bandages still on his ears). To which Sarah Sanders brought up an incident from 1998 about leaked classified intelligence that was reported by the Washington Times, and caused the US to lose track of Osama bin Laden (until 2001).
After some thinking, CNN reporter Jeremy Diamond decided this couldn’t possibly be true. The press would never… He came across an article in Slate from 2005 that tried to rebuke the fact that journalists might have reported sensitive compartmentalized information not meant for public dissemination.
The issue involved bin Laden’s use of a satellite telephone to communicate with his comrades in Al-Qaeda. The Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency were naturally tracking the sat phone and were able to listen to his calls, gather intelligence, and pinpoint his whereabouts within a reasonable amount of accuracy. (This was 1998 – before we could pinpoint cell phones with 100% accuracy even if there were four of them laying on the same table; this was before GPS went mainstream, and before we could fly a drone through the front door of a house.)
This tidbit came out in August of 2004 when the 9/11 Commission Report was finalized and released. Therein, the Commission revealed the leak, but not the device used. The report classified the Washington Times article as “a leak,” and even then did not say that bin Laden was using a satellite phone, either.
Fast forward to December 21, 2005, where a bored Slate reporter decided to hop on Lexis-Nexis and search for “bin Laden” and “sat phone” to see what came up. No official US government report was going to get Jack Shafer to believe that the American press sometimes prints classified information, or deigns to use confidential sources in its reporting. And Jack finds a few articles prior to 1998 that speculate that the “terrorist financier” (that’s what he was called and classified as by the Clinton Administration) bin Laden does indeed use a sat phone. And these articles were printed! Gotcha!
Jack rushes to the defense of his fellow journalist a year and a half later with his banal article and the click-baiting headline, “Don’t Blame the Washington Times,” and cites a few articles that made it to print that included sentences that bin Laden used a sat phone for communications. Ergo – you can’t blame the reporter for printing classified information because everyone in the world certainly read all the articles printed prior to that.
Except that’s not the point. The point would be that it was only after this Washington Times article was printed that UBL went dark. Ditched his phone, tightened his inner circle, communicated with his comrades infrequently and only via one person – The Courier. (Didn’t anybody see Zero Dark Thirty?)
Furthermore, the 9/11 Report cites this sentence with three (3) footnotes to back up the claim they made. They had time to change the wording and not use the term “leak.” And – let me ask a dumb question here – Did the 9/11 Commission miss all the other articles printed in the 90s about bin Laden? Did intrepid Jack Shafer discover them for the first time in 2005 a year and a half after the Report came out? Well, maybe so – he is part of the Fourth Estate after all, feverishly dredging up the truths that our government tries to hide.
We can go back and forth on this; but I don’t really want to. Suffice it to say that this was printed in the 9/11 Report, and there was a causal effect proven beyond all reasonable doubt. Proven to everybody but the free press, I should say.
For shame Sarah Sanders repeated this anecdote yesterday from the White House podium. What was she thinking! She had quoted a line from the 9/11 Report that was… a blatant lie? Really? Who among us thinks she needs to “fact-check” every sentence from the 9/11 Report? People who question government reports are called Conspiracy Theorists.
Not to mention anyone who goes against the opinion of 17 intelligence community agencies. Anyone who contradicts the Intelligence Community must be crazy, right free press? So why would Sarah do that? She’s learned not to make that mistake by watching her boss.
Oh but wait — the free press is moving the goalpost here. See the Washington Times article from 2005 – the sat phone leak has been debunked! End of story. It never happened, and if it did happen bin Laden just waited until the 1998 article to come out and become more clandestine. Not a leak – happenstance. Know your history, Sarah!
Jeremy Diamond of CNN is smalltime; not a lot of face time at the network so he has time to write cutting edge new articles like this: Sarah Sanders’ claim on Osama bin Laden’s phone use and journalists is Untrue.” Completely false. A LIE.
Diamond’s Tweet about his article gets better, “In an attempt to lay some blame on journalists for verbal attacks reporters face at rallies, @PressSec cited a long-debunked story.” And by that he means a debunked story from…the 9/11 Report? That rag? Who would believe anything they print! Sarah, you’re failing the American people by not Googling everything first!
“A long-debunked story,” I can’t get these words out of my head. If we go along with these words on their face, is CNN calling the whole 9/11 Report… a bunch of bunk? If debunked made it into the report then, can we rely on anything written in there?
And I’m hung up on how they found this one article that states an opinion by Jack Shafer and call it conspiracy theory debunking. He stated an opinion. And a fact. A fact cannot be a lie; an opinion cannot be the basis for you to call it a lie.
So it really pains me to see Peter Bergen jump into this fray with another article today. He goes further with his banal article with the treason-baiting headline, “Sarah Sanders is wrong. Bin Laden was wary of satellite phones because he wasn’t an idiot.” He’s no dummy, Sarah!
This is a disgusting level to stoop for a journalist, especially on one with Bergen’s prior credibility – he actually interviewed bin Laden back in the day once; as did John Miller for ABC. Yet today marks the end of Bergen’s credibility. After hearing a quote from the 9/11 Report by Sarah Sanders at the White House podium, Peter had heard enough. She had to be wrong, this had to be a LIE. And just for the record, Peter’s BFF is NOT an idiot, Sarah!
His whole article should have just read, “Duh, Sarah,” after the headline. But he digs in his heels – with some questionable history, I might add. I lived through the bin Laden years too, so I can critique Bergen’s article for some misuse of creative license.
Coinciding with the leak that never happened was a US military airstrike on Al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan and Sudan. What doesn’t coincide with those airstrikes is bin Laden ditching his phone forever after the strikes the night before. The airstrikes did not happen the day before the article was published.
And about those airstrikes delivered by President Bill Clinton…sort of. These were the same airstrikes that the CIA called in to the White House for authorization. Bill was too busy, and passed the call off to National Security Advisor Sandy Berger. Berger quickly ran the idea by White House Counsel. And after some back and forth upon hearing that a military action might take place without an attorney present, a team of lawyers was sent down to the CIA situation room to put the brakes on all of this.
I remember this clearly, once it became public knowledge. I remember thinking this was the first time in history that lawyers were put in charge of deciding US military airstrike. Not the President. Not the Pentagon. Not the Department of Defense, not the CIA either. The decision was made by Councils to the President.
After waiting long enough to green light the strikes, bin Laden had left the compound. And the Wag the Dog strikes failed not only in one place, but two. Both Afghanistan and Sudan were hit; that’s two different countries! This was supposed to be a signature strike on a High Value Target. We had a precise location and satellite proof that bin Laden was at the compound in Afghanistan – the human intelligence received was all for naught. And thanks to the lawyers – who were only interested in covering up yet another Bill Clinton scandal – Sudan was hit as well. There was no immediate intel related to Sudan, but, that’s what ended up happening. Oh yeah – the strikes were also the night after Bill Clinton’s deposition in a sex scandal; that was all anybody was talking about the next day, this coincidence to bump that off the front page.
What I don’t like about Bergen’s snark is he leaves out this context, and in the article tops it off with a bit of whimsy. “There’s nothing quite like surviving a barrage of US cruise missiles to get you off your electronic devices!” Yay, funny. He wasn’t even there you hack. He was neither there nor there for that matter. Not to mention how he defends bin Laden’s terrorist acumen not to use a satellite phone. Good on ya, mate!
But which is it? Did he not use his phone after the airstrikes, or after the non-leak to the press? Was it just ‘one of those things’? Was it both, or none of the above? Well that’s all too much for the 2018 free press to take, let’s just call it A LIE. Another complete and total fabrication from the White House. Don’t bother reading anything anymore people, we have Peter Bergen and CNN to cover it all.
I laugh every Sunday when I hear Brian Stelzer say on his CNN show, “How the news gets made.” And I guess he is right. When there is no news CNN will cook some up for you, stewed to perfection and made with the finest of pettiness, self-pity, and vindictiveness. We should all send our food back and stay home for dinner.
Slate Article, “Don’t Blame the Washington Times”
Page 127 of 9/11 Report cites the “leak” to the Washington Times. Slate (sic) article cites previous articles that said UBL used a “sat phone,” But it was only after the W-Times piece that UBL went dark. – BC Tweet to CNN’s Diamond, Acosta, and WH Press Secretary Sarah Sanders
