...Judy Miller tells Rory O'Connor and William Scott Malone about the story she'll regret for the rest of her life -- the fact that an anonymous White House source told her in July 2001 that an NSA intelligence report predicted a large al Qaeda attack, possibly on the continental United States...

but condi said noone could have predicted 9-11. are you saying judy miller is calling her a liar? maybe if judy miller had mentioned this in, say, september of 2001, i might have been interested in what she had to say.
- dave 5-18-2006 7:34 pm

what does this say about the wsj?
- bill 5-18-2006 8:18 pm

this sounds familiar. i was going to mention she was probably too busy flogging her wmd book but i would have been slightly off base. she was still busy taking dictation.

1) This has been said so many time before, so we won't belabor the point, but how much more evidence do people need that the Bush White House had plenty of information about the pending 9/11 attacks, and failed to take the threat seriously? The relatively high marks that Bush gets on terrorism issues, even today, just aren't supported by the facts.

2) As for the New York Times, the decision not to publish pre-9/11 is a toss-up. But why, in God's name, was this information not published in any clear and meaningful way immediately after 9/11, on the pages of the Times itself. Doesn't anyone think that information of advance warnings of the attack in the highest levels of Washington is something that the public needed to know in those early days after the attacks?

Instead, from what we can gather, the information has dribbled out... some of it in a 2005 article in Columbia Journalism Review, and some of it today in a story on an alternative, progressive Web site. Who exactly was the Times protecting in not writing this article in September 2001, immediately after the attack, and why?

3) Another stunner from the new article: One reason that Miller wasn't able to do the additional reporting that might have added enough meat to get the al-Qaeda story in the paper pre-9/11 was because she, Engelberg, and another reporter were all busy trying to finish a book: