Instantly Discredited NYT Hit Piece Claims Bush Was Aware of Impending Bin Laden Attacks, Did Nothing

It would appear that the Times has embraced a borderline form of Truther-ism.

In what must be Chapter 48,204 of The New York Times' unceasing war on George W. Bush, a propagandist named "Kurt Eichenwald" -- if that is his real name -- recycles the ludicrous claim that the 43rd President ignored plain warnings about the 9/11 attacks.

...11 years later, new details of the attack on the World Trade Center continue to emerge from the government's vault of classified documents and the journalists who've gained access. This year, the reporter with the jaw-dropping scoop is Kurt Eichenwald, a former Timesman and present contributing editor at Vanity Fair.

After reading more than one tweet with the simple instructions "Read this," we clicked on the link to Eichenwald's powerful op-ed, due to be published in The New York Times on September 11. In it, Eichenwald goes into teeth-grinding detail about how the Bush administration had even more advance notice about Osama Bin Laden's attack than we previously realized. You should read it, too.

With the infamous August 6 White House briefing as a focal point, Eichenwald walks through the months and years [Ed: Remember, Bush has been President for all of half a year when these events occurred] of warnings leading up to the September 11 attacks. Some of these are events and reports that remain classified, but Eichenwald says he's "read excerpts from many of them, along with other recently declassified records, and come to an inescapable conclusion: the administration's reaction to what Mr. Bush was told in the weeks before that infamous briefing reflected significantly more negligence than has been disclosed."

Eichenturd's source for the article: "An intelligence official and a member of the Bush administration."

Which, of course, means a single person who could be an entry-level staffer... or a more senior one holding a grudge. In other words, following the template of prior Times hit pieces, it's one anonymous person. Kind of like the one anonymous person who told me Eichenwald likes to wear women's underwear.

As commenter Hokma reminds us:

Eichenwald was demolished on the Joe Scarborough Show by former New York Governor George Pataki who ripped him to shreds and Eichenwald had no where to go trying to defend his book...

Here are [the] facts. Bin Laden should have been dead or captured before Bush was President.

Indeed. Remember Bill Clinton's National Security Adviser, Sandy Berger?

Yes, that's the same fun-loving Sandy Berger who stole and destroyed classified documents related to the 9/11 investigation.

While the NYT's Truthers are busy investigating how Halliburton imploded WTC 7, Richard Miniter discloses the real reason Berger risked a prison sentence to steal the 9/11 documents.

My informed sources suggest that what Berger destroyed were copies of the Millennium After-Action Review, a binder-sized report prepared by Richard Clarke in 2000—a year and half before the 9-11 attacks. The review made a series of recommendations for a tougher stance against bin Laden and terrorism. There are 13 or more copies of this report. But only one contains hand-written notes by President Bill Clinton. Apparently, in the margin beside the recommendations, Bill Clinton wrote NO, NO, NO next to many of the tougher policy proposals. You can see why Clinton might be happy to see these records vanish down the memory hole... So Berger was stuffing in pants and socks and later shredding the evidence that President Clinton did not want to take a tougher line on bin Laden, following the 1998 attack on two U.S. embassies that killed 224 people (including 12 American diplomats). [Now Hillary] makes Berger one of her top three foreign policy advisers... and I have a few questions: Did she bring him aboard to reward him for his criminal destruction of classified material? Or did she sign him up because of his stellar record in fighting bin Laden in the late 1990s?

If Miniter's sources are correct -- and, from the looks of things, they are -- it's easy to determine why Berger took the risks he did.

Bill Clinton's legacy and Hillary Clinton's 2008 hopes for the presidency rested on Berger's ability to purge the National Archives of the incriminating material.

And the Times wouldn't lift a finger investigating any of these outrages.

They were too busy inventing extramarital affairs for John McCain and weapons-grade-stupid hit jobs like the "Al Qaqaa" fable.