In a Newsweek Web-exclusive column, Richard Wolffe attempts to make the case that John Kerry’s campaign has reacted skillfully to the charges leveled against the Bush administration by former counterterrorism advisor Richard Clarke. But along the way Wolffe undermines his argument by allowing himself to be used by a Kerry adviser to pass on an anonymous and unsupported attack on the president.
Buried near the bottom of Wolffe’s column is the following paragraph:
Now that the White House has agreed to let Rice testify, you might think Kerry had missed a golden opportunity. Yet Kerry has again planted the seeds of the credibility question — his signature attack on the Bush administration, and a classic move for a former prosecutor. Adapting a Jimmy Carter line, Kerry only hinted at the 9/11 dispute as he stood beside Dean last week: “I as president will tell you the truth and will never take this nation to war with false information,” he said. In private his aides have gone much further, attacking the president’s foot-dragging approach to the 9/11 commission. Their thinly-veiled criticism is that Bush has something to hide about the run-up to the attacks. “There is a question about whether the administration really wants to get to the bottom of why 9/11 happened,” said one senior Kerry adviser and foreign policy veteran. “9/11 shouldn’t have happened. It should have been prevented. Every member of the previous administration has been open and accessible to the commission because it’s not a partisan issue.”
First of all: 9/11 “should have been prevented”? According to whom?
As anyone with a pulse knows, there are legitimate questions about the Bush administration’s handling of the threat of terrorism before 9/11. That’s one of the reasons why the 9/11 commission exists. And just yesterday, the commission’s chairmen, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, both told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that the attacks could have been prevented.
But saying that they could have been prevented is very different from saying they should have, as the Kerry adviser does. As Hamilton explained, “There are a lot of ifs; you can string together a whole bunch of ifs, and if things had broken right in all kinds of different ways . . . and frankly if you’d had a little luck, it probably could have been prevented.”
In short, we’ve yet to see conclusive proof that the Bush administration reasonably “should” have been expected to prevent the attacks, as the anonymous Kerry adviser contends. But you won’t find that qualifier anywhere in Wolffe’s column.
Reporters should use anonymous sources when there’s information of compelling importance to readers that can’t be provided any other way. But the Kerry adviser’s charge isn’t informative, it’s simply a provocative opinion unsupported by either evidence or argument.
The Kerry campaign knows it needs to damage the president’s standing on national security issues, and that’s what quotes like these are intended to do. But reporters who give either campaign carte blanche to make controversial attacks like this anonymously, and without qualification — especially on an issue as politically sensitive as 9/11 — aren’t serving the reader.
–Zachary Roth
Zachary Roth is a contributing editor to The Washington Monthly. He also has written for The Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, Slate, Salon, The Daily Beast, and Talking Points Memo, among other outlets.