Has the White House agreed to follow the 9/11 commission’s recommendation and declassify the much-discussed Aug. 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States”?
According to an Associated Press bulletin of 3:51 a.m., the answer is an unequivocal yes. CNN, meanwhile, isn’t so sure: Its story, filed at 12:39 this afternoon, is headlined “Key White House memo may be declassified.” (Italics ours.) And Fox News? “The White House,” it says, “is 80 percent of the way” there.
Yes. Well. Umm.
While we’re impressed with Fox’s uncanny ability to minutely quantify how close the White House has come to declassification, it struck us as odd that an outcome most news outlets see as merely a possibility was reported by the AP as ironclad fact. It appears AP is working off the words of National Security Council spokesman Sean McCormack, who it quotes: “We have every intention to declassify it.”
While that seems pretty clear, it appears the quote may have been lifted from a longer statement, one that put it in the relevant context. Here’s what CNN reports McCormack saying:
We are actively looking at the declassification process right now to determine the possibilities of making the August 6 PDB available … We have every hope that it will be declassified, every intention to declassify at this time.
Seems like a bit less of a sure thing, doesn’t it? As CNN explains, the White House “must consult with intelligence and other agencies” to “ensure sources and methods would not be compromised.” As of now, there is no guarantee that the document will be declassified.
And that’s as far as the story should have gone. The AP violated one of its fundamental tenets: Get it first, but get it right. The wire service beat its peers out of the gate by a country mile on this one — but then it fell flat on its face.
–Brian Montopoli
Brian Montopoli is a writer at CJR Daily.