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Five Sept. 11 Suspects to Face Trial in New York

The Obama administration has announced it will try 9-11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other 9-11 Gitmo detainees in a civilian federal court in New York, allowing them the protections of the U.S. Constitution even though they are not U.S. citizens.

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Four Radical Chinese Muslims Transferred to Bermuda

Four Chinese Uighers (radical Chinese Muslims) were recently transferred to Bermuda. Do you think it's a good idea to release Gitmo detainees to idyllic vacation retreats?

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July 11, 2008

New York Times’ Agenda-Driven Story – Where’s the Media Outrage?

Colonel Kenneth Allard (US Army, ret.)

One of the best things about living in San Antonio is that there is absolutely no social pressure to read the New York Times. In April, this happy fact was an unexpected consolation after the Times named me in a front-page story as one of the retired military analysts who were given special briefings and privileged access to the war zones in return for spouting the preferred Pentagon version of events.

At first there were anxious calls from the San Antonio Express-News front office, which naturally assumed that any Times story represented all-seeing truth. But I was subsequently allowed to defend my record in a pair of columns. Public editor Bob Richter, noting my consistent critiques of Donald Rumsfeld, pronounced me ethically ‘clean.' Gratifying of course: but what was really hard to understand was why other media observers hadn't pounced on key failings of the Times story.

After a decade as an NBC News military analyst, I wrote an inside history of Rumsfeld's Pentagon PR program in my book Warheads, published almost two years before the Times article appeared. That was strike one: the Times scoop was simply not a scoop. But strike two was another ethical lapse by their reporter. Although he had conducted lengthy personal interviews with me about the book's major insights, he never once mentioned its existence in a story of almost 8,000 words. That fact alone might have prejudiced an undergraduate term paper in any college with enough self-respect to enforce an honor code.

Strike three took longer because the lengthy Times article was a one-day sensation. Journalism.org noted that that "there was virtually no mainstream media follow-up to the Times expose," which ranked just ahead of stories about the legal fees incurred by Sen. Larry Craig's bathroom bust. Some of the strongest criticism came from the unlikeliest of sources when liberal activist Ariana Huffington termed the Times piece selective and misleading. "If the NYT is going to imply that people carried water for the Pentagon, they damn well better prove it. In my evaluation, they did not...(a particularly egregious offense against) military men who have gone to the front lines for their country."

The third strike was delivered not by journalists but by their Democrat allies on Capitol Hill. Referencing the Times story, Sens. Hillary Clinton and Frank Lautenberg called for action by the Pentagon Inspector General. On May 2nd, Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro went even further, criticizing the IG for not taking pre-emptive action to halt an "unethical and potentially illegal propaganda campaign aimed at deliberately misleading the American public." Her letter was co-signed by such prominent congressional Democrats as Barney Frank, Robert Wexler and Judas Iscariot.

Congressman Ike Skelton, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, and a Capitol Hill veteran long enough to know better, wasted little time launching his own investigation, harrumphing that "The story does not reflect well on the Pentagon, the military analysts in question or on the media organizations that employ them." Sorry, Congressman, but that was too specific. Could you try to be more general?

The Pentagon quickly announced another investigation together with the termination of the Warheads program. Soon thereafter, my colleagues and I noticed phone calls not being returned and key sources - some of them old friends - suddenly going silent. The chilling effect of these investigations has already affected the way this column is researched and written. None of which may matter very much.

But it is high time that the journalistic fraternity started policing its own ranks to hold in contempt institutional agendas thinly disguised as "objective" reporting. High time as well that the so-called mainstream media began examining the outrageous possibility that the Warheads were coolly singled out for retribution and humiliation as the most visible supporters of the war (though many of us were prominent critics) - even if there was Democrat-journalistic collusion in an election year to inject personal slander into debate about the war.

Which by the way, we're winning - although you are far more likely to read about that in the London Times than in its wretched New York counterpart.

Family Security Matters Contributing Editor Col. (Ret) Ken Allard is a former NBC military analyst, the author of Warheads, and a columnist with the San Antonio Express-News. E-mail him at Warheads6@aol.com.

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