Herewith a new occasional award given to writers, columnists or pundits who deliberately distort, elide, truncate or garble quotes for ideological purposes. The first nominee for this prestigious award goes to Dana Milbank and Walter Pincus for a spectacular performance in the Washington Post yesterday:
Cheney was less forthcoming when asked about Saudi Arabia’s ties to al Qaeda and the Sept. 11 hijackers. “I don’t want to speculate,” he said, adding that Sept. 11 is “over with now, it’s done, it’s history and we can put it behind us.”
As Ramesh Ponnuru noticed, this is, er, misleading. The transcript of the show goes as follows. After Tim Russert asked Cheney about “reports that the investigation Congress did does show a link between the Saudi government and the hijackers but that it will not be released to the public,” Cheney replied:
I don’t want to speculate on that, Tim, partly because I was involved in reviewing those pages. It was the judgment of our senior intelligence officials, both CIA and FBI that that material needed to remain classified. At some point, we may be able to declassify it, but there are ongoing investigations that might be affected by that release, and for that reason, we kept it classified. The committee knows what’s in there. They helped to prepare it. So it hasn’t been kept secret from the Congress, but from the standpoint of our ongoing investigations, we needed to do that.
One of the things this points out that’s important for us to understand-so there’s this great temptation to look at these events as [discrete] events. We got hit on 9/11. So we can go and investigate it. It’s over with now. It’s done. It’s history and put it behind us.
From our perspective, trying to deal with this continuing campaign of terror, if you will, the war on terror that we’re engaged in, this is a continuing enterprise. The people that were involved in some of those activities before 9/11 are still out there. We learn more and more as we capture people, detain people, get access to records and so forth that this is a continuing enterprise and, therefore, we do need to be careful when we look at things like 9/11, the commission report from 9/11, not to jeopardize our capacity to deal with this threat going forward in the interest of putting that information that’s interesting that relates to the period of time before that. These are continuing requirements on our part, and we have to be sensitive to that.
Maybe it was the editing that did it. The New York Times refused to correct Dowd’s quote garbling. Will the Washington Post? Meanwhile, keep your eyes peeled for future Dowd Award nominations.
The Dish 