History Rewrite in NYT’s OBL Obit: ‘Intelligence Was Never Good Enough to Pull the Trigger’
The New York Times's supposedly momentous decision to omit “Mr.” from references to Osama bin Laden in its Monday obituary is apparently working to distract critics from the item's other problems. Along with Michael T. Kaufman, Kate Zernike, whose primary vocation seems to be finding racism in the Tea Party movement where none exists and otherwise smearing its participants, comes off as almost critical of how bin Laden was “elevated to the realm of evil in the American imagination once reserved for dictators like Hitler and Stalin.” Imagination (“the faculty … of forming mental images or concepts of what is not actually present to the senses”)? Babe, I don't know about you, but we didn't imagine September 11. We saw it. Others directly experienced it. Many died. Do you remember? The obit's topper for me is the (in my opinion) deliberate historical revisionism in the following passage (bolds are mine throughout this post): The C.I.A. spent much of the next three years (after attacks on two American embassies in August 1998 — Ed.) hunting Bin Laden. The goal was to capture him with recruited Afghan agents or to kill him with a precision-guided missile, according to the 2004 report of the 9/11 Commission and the memoirs of George J. Tenet, director of central intelligence from July 1997 to July 2004.
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on May 3, 2011. Filed under