Jun 10, 2002

Kurtz on Holy War Inc.

Nearly a month before Sept. 11, terrorism analyst Peter Bergen told a New York Times reporter that he should write about an al Qaeda propaganda videotape that Bergen had obtained. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright 2002 The Washington Post The Washington Post June 10, 2002, Monday, Final Edition Correction Appended SECTION: STYLE; Pg. C01 LENGTH: 1411 words HEADLINE: The News That Didn't Fit To Print; In the N.Y. Times, No Room for Terror BYLINE: Howard Kurtz, Washington Post Staff Writer BODY: Nearly a month before Sept. 11, terrorism analyst Peter Bergen told a New York Times reporter that he should write about an al Qaeda propaganda videotape that Bergen had obtained. "I think there is a major story to be told," he wrote to Times reporter John Burns, "wrapping around the new bin Laden videotape and the various threats against U.S. facilities in the past months which can paint both a compelling picture of the bin Laden organization today, and responsibly suggest that an al Qaeda attack is in the works. . . . Clearly, al Qaeda was and is planning something." Burns, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, wrote an article that appeared on the Times's Web site Sept. 8. But Burns's prescient piece about Osama bin Laden never appeared in the newspaper, and the Times quickly expunged it from the electronic archives. Burns says from London that the piece was held for space reasons. "There was never any substantive problem with the story," he says. "It was, of course, unfortunate that it worked out in the way it did. If the events of September 11 had not been of such catastrophic magnitude, I might have been a lot more chagrined than I was. My personal disappointment became utterly irrelevant. It would be pretty self-indulgent of me to say I was denied a journalistic coup because of this." Bergen, who recounts the episode in the paperback edition of his book "Holy War, Inc.," says the Times's decision to hold the story (in which he was quoted) "is symptomatic of many American institutions' failure to fully appreciate the scope of the threat posed by al Qaeda." Bernard Gwertzman, editor of Nytimes.com, calls the incident "a bad screw-up." He says the Burns piece was scheduled for publication Sept. 9, a Sunday, and that the Web site routinely posts such stories on Saturday afternoon. After Times editors held the story late Saturday, Gwertzman says, "the paper called the next day and complained, and my day producer just pulled the story. The resulting problem was that people who'd seen the story then tried to search for it, and because it was expunged from our system, you couldn't find it." He says the Web site "probably shouldn't have pulled it off." Snippets of the al Qaeda videotape had been shown on CNN, where Bergen is a terrorism consultant, and Reuters had carried a story. Reading the piece now is downright eerie. Burns described the "fire-and-brimstone" declarations of bin Laden, who "declares his purpose -- killing Americans and Jews -- more starkly than ever. Proudly, he salutes the suicide bombing of the American destroyer Cole . . . and promises more attacks. . . . "With his mockery of American power, Mr. bin Laden seems to be almost taunting the United States. Although F.B.I. investigators believe he was behind the World Trade Center bombing in 1993 . . . two bombings in Saudi Arabia . . . and the bombings of two American embassies in east Africa . . . the United States has found no way, so far, of containing him." Burns used some of the passages in a larger story about al Qaeda -- which ran on Sept. 12.
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