We Had a Heads-up

AlterNet has an exclusive interview with former NYTimes reporter Judith Miller, The 9/11 Story That Got Away (via Attytood), where she reveals:

In 2001, an anonymous White House source leaked top-secret NSA intelligence to reporter Judith Miller that Al Qaida was planning a major attack on the United States. But the story never made it into the paper.

As Joe Strupp of Editor & Publisher says, Miller and 'NYT' Had a 9/11 Warning Tip:

Judith Miller, the embattled former reporter for The New York Times who spent 85 days in jail last year for refusing to reveal a source and ultimately left the paper after a dispute, has another new twist to her Times tenure.

In an interview with the Web site Alternet.org, Miller now claims she had advance intelligence information leaked to her months before the Sept. 11 attacks indicating Al Qaeda was planning a major attack on the United States.

Posted today, the story contends that Miller was sparked by the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole to increase her reporting of al-Qaida. She says that ultimately led, in July 2001, "to a still-anonymous top-level White House source who shared top-secret NSA signals intelligence (SIGINT) concerning an even bigger impending al-Qaida attack, perhaps to be visited on the continental United States.

"Ultimately, Miller never wrote that story," the Alternet piece continues. "But two months later -- on Sept. 11 -- Miller and her editor at the Times, Stephen Engelberg, both remembered and regretted the story they didn't do."

Or, as Shaun Mullen of Kiko' House put it, in A 9/11 Bombshell (Or: Miss Miller Regrets):

Disgraced former New York Times reporter Judith Miller now says the National Security Agency had specific information that Al Qaeda was planning to hit a high-priority target in the U.S., but decided not to go with the story -- something she says she now very much regrets.

Indeed.

Putting this surprising revelation in context, The NY Times, Judy Miller and 9/11: The most stunning failure yet?, Will Bunch of Attytood makes the apt observation:

Because just now, some 56 months after the fact, we are learning that both Judy Miller and her editors at the New York Times had information that foretold the 9/11 terror attacks and elected not to publish it. Reading the new story carefully, it does seem that a decision to publish the article in the summer of 2001 was not a "slam dunk,' that there were legitimate questions whether Miller's tip was enough to hang a story on. But the episode does raise a couple of other serious questions -- surely about the pre-attack ineptitude of the Bush White House, but also over the Times' handling of this explosive info both before and after 9/11.

It is yet another example of the devolution of journalism. The importance of providing news and information to the public has somehow been subsumed by the importance of placating government, which no doubt was involved in the decision not to publish the news after the fact. Bunch notes:

As for the New York Times, the decision not to publish pre-9/11 is a toss-up. But why, in God's name, was this information not published in any clear and meaningful way immediately after 9/11, on the pages of the Times itself. Doesn't anyone think that information of advance warnings of the attack in the highest levels of Washington is something that the public needed to know in those early days after the attacks?

Instead, from what we can gather, the information has dribbled out... some of it in a 2005 article in Columbia Journalism Review, and some of it today in a story on an alternative, progressive Web site. Who exactly was the Times protecting in not writing this article in September 2001, immediately after the attack, and why?

The foreknowledge of the Bush Administration is another point that didn't (and still hasn't) gotten much press. Bunch notes:

This has been said so many time before, so we won't belabor the point, but how much more evidence do people need that the Bush White House had plenty of information about the pending 9/11 attacks, and failed to take the threat seriously? The relatively high marks that Bush gets on terrorism issues, even today, just aren't supported by the facts.

The Existentialist Cowboy also has a very good post, Bush's biggest fraud: the phony war on terrorism!, exploring the propaganda from the Administration on this issue, as well as the larger "war on terror" campaign.

Tags: Politics, News and Media, Journalism