Kurt Eichenwald

On the 11th anniversary of 9-11, there was not a single mention of the attacks on the front page of the New York Times. In fact, there were just two local news stories related to the attacks in the entire Tuesday edition, one on delays in opening the site museum, the other on how some towns in New Jersey were scaling back annual memorial ceremonies. (The paper did put another threat to New York City on the front page: "New York Is Lagging as Seas And Risks, Rise, Critics Warn.")

The only other 9-11 coverage, as Mark Finkelstein noted on Newsbusters this morning, was "The Deafness Before the Storm," an op-ed by Kurt Eichenwald, a former Times reporter with a book out on the aftermath of the attacks ("500 Days"), blaming former President George W. Bush for ignoring warnings that Osama bin Laden was readying an attack on the United States.

Eight weeks before the presidential election, Tuesday's CBS This Morning marked the 11th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks by helping Vanity Fair's Kurt Eichenwald forward his accusation that the Bush administration ignored warnings about a possible terrorist strike as early as May 2001. Eichenwald claimed that "the CIA did a spectacular job...the White House and others said, well, they didn't tell us enough. No, they told them everything they needed to know to go on a full alert, and the White House didn't do it."

The morning show also helped the former New York Times reporter promote his new Bush-bashing book, where he hinted at the supposed religious extremism of the former President during the lead-up to the Iraq war: "He [Bush] mentioned something called Gog and Magog, which is very central to the Book of Revelation...[former French president] Chirac didn't know what he was talking about...they went off and got a biblical expert...who then looked at this and said, the President's a fanatic."

For the New York Times, what better way to observe the 11th anniversary of 9-11 than by exploiting it for political purposes and seeking to blame George W. Bush?

The Times chose to publish on its op-ed page today a column by Kurt Eichenwald, a former Times reporter now with Vanity Fair, entitled "The Deafness Before the Storm."  Its gruel is thin when it comes to actually assembling a case of any real Bush-administration negligence.  And that is the best evidence that Eichenwald and the Times were not motivated by any sincere desire to review the historical record with the goal of preventing future lapses.  Rather, this is cheap political exploitation and finger-pointing at its basest. More after the jump.

How do you increase readership at a business magazine? Assume your readers are criminals.

Written by Caroline Waxler, Conde-Nast’s Portfolio magazine has been running a regular ‘How To’ sort of article called the “C.E.O. Survival Guide”, which assumes from the get-go that businessmen and women will ultimately get themselves into trouble—namely criminal activity:

“Just as you got a better house, car, and private plane than the next guy, you’re likely to get a better jail cell too. It’s one of the perks of stealing from shareholders rather than from a 7-Eleven clerk, so make the best of it.”