Commission of Omission
Last week, the 9/11 Commission, issued several reports relating to their findings thus far.
The media coverage of these reports was swift, harsh, and during the first day of release - nearly all wrong.
The headlines blared that there were no links between al Qaeda and Iraq. Stories that should have been factual in content editorialized that the Bush Administration lied and even Democratic Party candidate John Kerry jumped on the bandwagon that said that the US should not have gone to war in Iraq and that the Commission found no links was proof that the Administration hyped the claims in order to go to war.
Now, I had seen those headlines and was clearly interested in reading about these findings, but instead of reading those articles first, I went directly to the reports.
Read those staff statements, and find a specific statement that disputes what the Adminstration has been saying about Iraq and al Qaeda. Nowhere does it dispute the Administration's finding that al Qaeda and Iraq worked together. The only thing that the Commission states is that it could not find evidence of Iraq and al Qaeda working together on the specific issue of the 9/11 plot.
That's a huge difference. The media conflated the two separate and distinct questions of whether Iraq and al Qaeda worked together with the question of whether they worked together on the 9/11 plot.
Instead of reporting that the Commission could not find links with regard to the 9/11 plot despite finding them working together at other points, the media simply omitted the fact and stated that they had not worked together.
Now, who is to blame for this whole situation? Is it the media's fault for falsely reporting the situation? Absolutely.
They spun the story in order to fit their predetermined worldview, which automatically assumes that the Administration was wrong, and did not have the links it said it did.
However, the Commission is also at fault here. For starters, the Commission's Commissioners should have had better oversight over the individuals responsible for putting togther the staff papers, including what kind of press releases that they could put out. The media was working with individuals involved with the Commission, who clearly were pursuing a political agenda, when the purpose of the Commission was to obtain the information necessary to figure out how to prevent future attacks from occurring - finding faults with the system in place on 9/11 and what actually worked on the morning of the 11th.
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