Some Outlets Distort and Exaggerate Meaning of August 2001 Memo --4/12/2004

1. Some Outlets Distort and Exaggerate Meaning of August 2001 Memo
Some outlets over the weekend hyped the meaning of the August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB), suggesting it contained a warning specific enough for President George W. Bush to act on. ABC anchor Claire Shipman breathlessly announced that "a classified anti-terrorism report told President Bush, before September 11th, that al-Qaeda wanted to carry out attacks inside the U.S." On CNN's Capital Gang, Al Hunt declared: "It shatters what was a very forceful appearance by Dr. Rice." Later, CNN news anchor Carol Lin insisted "it reads like a laundry list of red flags" before she quizzed 9-11 Commission member James Thompson about why it didn't prompt immediate action. Sunday's Washington Post story led with this very distorted sentence: "President Bush was warned a month before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that the FBI had information that terrorists might be preparing for a hijacking in the United States and might be targeting a building in Lower Manhattan."

2. NBC's Myers Points Out Clinton and Media Underestimated Threat
The Newsweek poll finding that 60 percent believe the Bush administration "underestimated the terrorist threat" before September 11th got a lot of media attention over the weekend, but on Meet the Press, NBC's Lisa Myers cut through the bias of the poll which asked only about Bush as she suggested that "if you did that poll and you substituted 'Clinton administration,' 'FBI,' 'CIA' or 'the media,' you would get much the same findings."

3. CyberAlert Bias Flashback to May '02: "Bush Knew" Attack Coming
CyberAlert Bias Flashback: "Bush Knew." In May of 2002, the networks hyped and exaggerated reports on how the CIA had supposedly warned President Bush about potential terrorist hijackings. CNN's Judy Woodruff: "President Bush knew that al Qaeda was planning to hijack a U.S. airliner." Both ABC's Charlie Gibson and NBC's Katie Couric provocatively asked: "What did the President know and when did he know it?" Gibson cast doubt on whether Bush was really surprised: "It also calls into question what happened when Andy Card...that morning went and whispered in the President's ear...Was the President really surprised?"

4. Unlike CBS News, FNC Reports Bush-Rice Bounce in a CBS Poll
FNC offered a more complete report on a CBS News poll than did the CBS Evening News. On Friday's CBS Evening News, Dan Rather noted how "a CBS News poll taken after Condoleezza Rice testified before the 9/11 Commission yesterday, finds two out of three say they believe administration officials are hiding something." But over on FNC moments earlier, anchor Jim Angle cited how the CBS News poll found that the number who say the Bush administration could have done more had fallen 9 points from a week earlier and, he added, "25 percent say the Bush administration was, in fact, paying enough attention to the terrorist threat before 9/11, up from 18 percent last week."

5. CNN Gives Over Most of Rice Highlight Time to Attacks on Her
In her own words, or merely re-airing Democratic attacks? Thursday night's NewsNight with Aaron Brown on CNN included a five minute segment that Brown promised would reveal "in her own words...what Dr. Rice said in some of the more contentious moments" of her appearance before the 9/11 Commission that morning. But the MRC's Ken Shepherd discovered that Rice's actual comments amounted to just 2 minutes and 28 seconds of the segment, less than half of it.

6. Media Feature Bush-Bashing 9/11 Families, Exclude Bush Backers
The media on Thursday and Friday provided an imbalanced forum to a very small number of 9-11 families who have an anti-Bush political agenda, with the same few family members appearing again and again in story after story and interview after interview. Several belong to groups with a political agenda, such as September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows and Voices of September 11th, affiliations which were not noted by the networks or in a Reuters story which featured four critics of Bush, but not one backer. Before an interview segment on Friday's Good Morning America with two Bush-bashing 9-11 activists, ABC's Robin Roberts acknowledged that "there are those who support the President" and proceeded to give Debra Burlingame a three-second soundbite. A World News Tonight story featured six anti-Bush family members up against one Bush defender.

Some Outlets Distort and Exaggerate Meaning
of August 2001 Memo

Some outlets over the weekend hyped the meaning of the August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB) memo which was publicly released Saturday afternoon, suggesting it contained a warning specific enough for President George W. Bush to act on, thus leading the White House to keep it secret for so long. ABC anchor Claire Shipman breathlessly announced that "a classified anti-terrorism report told President Bush, before September 11th, that al-Qaeda wanted to carry out attacks inside the U.S." Though PDB's are never released, Shipman suggested the White House went out of its way to keep this one secret: "It's something the administration wanted to keep out of public view."

On CNN's Capital Gang on Saturday night, the Wall Street Journal's Al Hunt declared: "It shatters what was a very forceful appearance by Dr. Rice." Later, on CNN's 10pm EDT hour of news, anchor Carol Lin insisted "it reads like a laundry list of red flags" before she quizzed 9-11 Commission member James Thompson about why it didn't prompt immediate action.

On Sunday, though the memo only talked about the possibility of plane hijackings, not of flying them into buildings, the subhead on a front page Washington Post story suggested Bush learned more than he did: "Aug. 6 Report to President Warned of Hijacking." Reporters Dana Milbank and Walter Pincus opened their April 11 story with a very misleading sentence: "President Bush was warned a month before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that the FBI had information that terrorists might be preparing for a hijacking in the United States and might be targeting a building in Lower Manhattan."

Not until four paragraphs later did the Post duo acknowledge that the "targeting of a building in lower Manhattan" had nothing to do with what actually occurred on September 11, noting how "officials said the photographing of the federal buildings was later judged to be 'tourist activity,'" by some Yeminis.

Now, further rundowns of the items quoted above:

-- ABC's World News Tonight/Saturday. Anchor Claire Shipman teased at the top of the April 10 broadcast: "On World News Tonight this Saturday, a classified anti-terrorism report told President Bush, before September 11th, that al-Qaeda wanted to carry out attacks inside the U.S."

She set up the lead story: "The White House, under pressure, has released portions of a classified anti-terrorism document given to the President shortly before September 11th. It's something the administration wanted to keep out of public view."

-- CNN's Capital Gang. Moderator Mark Shields asked: "Al Hunt, what is the impact, at the end of this tumultuous week, of the released presidential memo?"
Al Hunt, Executive Washington Editor of the Wall Street Journal, contended: "It shatters what was a very forceful appearance by Dr. Rice. You recall she said of that daily presidential briefing on August the 6th, 2001, that it was vague, that it was really an historical document. Well, what was released today -- and it was -- they only redacted, apparently, the names of sources. It not only is headlined, as we learned a couple days ago, that 'Bin Laden determined to strike in U.S.,' but it went on to say that intelligence sources were talking about bin Laden hijacking an airplane and there was a lot of suspicious activity in New York. That's not vague and historical. Could it have, could it have been prevented? Who knows? But her -- the impression she left on Thursday was clearly misleading on that score and a number of other scores, Mark."

-- CNN Saturday Night, CNN's 10pm EDT hour-long newscast. Anchor Carol Lin asserted: "A two page report on the threat al-Qaeda posed to America. The President got it just one month before the 9/11 attacks. Now at first, it reads like a laundry list of red flags. Al-Qaeda, recruiting and plotting attacks in the United States. The White House declassified that document tonight."

Interviewing 9/11 Commission member James Thompson about it, after he argued there wasn't much to the memo, Lin countered: "Even though the evidence seems circumstantial that Osama bin Laden specifically says that he wants to attack in the United States, that young Muslims were being recruited in New York, that bin Laden specifically mentioned Washington, D.C., that the FBI had 70 separate investigations on al-Qaeda related activities here in the United States, that did not add up to what you witnessed on 9/11, as we all did?"
Thompson, standing outside on a city street somewhere, answered: "No, because the first four of those possibilities were three years old. And the fact that the FBI was conducting 70 full field investigations by al-Qaeda activities would have reassured me, not startled me or frightened me, if I were the President of the United States. I would have assumed that things were going forward, but all the other things in the PDB released tonight relate to things that were three years old. And even some of the things in the PDB we learned subsequently didn't pan out.
"For example, the PDB talks about suspicious activity in New York with people surveilling federal buildings. Well, the FBI found those people. They happened to be two Yemeni citizens. They were tourists. And the FBI questioned and released them. And they had nothing to do with September 11. In fact, nothing in the PDB report tonight has anything to do with September 11."

Answering another question, Thompson maintained: "So I think out of all the PDBs that we have, and we have many more than this one, and of the 2.5 million pages of pages of documents that we have, and the thousand witnesses that we've heard, with more to come, this is not something that would have triggered anything in anybody's mind from the president of the United States on down, about the possibility of September 11."
Lin responded: "Then Governor, given the outcome, I mean when you see the memo, and you in hindsight you know what happened, what went wrong then? I mean, these were all red flags that did ultimately, whether they were true at the time or not added up."
Thompson repeated his point with which Lin disagreed: "Nothing in the PDB is a red flag, but we know from other evidence that there were reports at FBI field offices about suspicions of people taking flight training, for example. And there's no doubt that mistakes were made in not transmitting information that FBI field offices had up to the head of the FBI..."

-- Washington Post front page, April 11. The headline: "Declassified Memo Said Al Qaeda Was in U.S." The subhead: "Aug. 6 Report to President Warned of Hijacking." An excerpt from the top of the story by Dana Milbank and Walter Pincus in Crawford, Texas:

President Bush was warned a month before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that the FBI had information that terrorists might be preparing for a hijacking in the United States and might be targeting a building in Lower Manhattan.

The information was included in a written Aug. 6, 2001, briefing to Bush that was declassified Saturday night by the White House in response to a request from the independent commission probing the Sept. 11 attacks.

The short article, titled "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US," also included information that the FBI had "70 full field investigations" underway in the United States that were believed related to Osama bin Laden, and that a caller to the U.S. Embassy in the United Arab Emirates in May 2001 said a group of bin Laden supporters was in the United States planning attacks with explosives.

The document, citing a foreign intelligence service whose identity was redacted, said bin Laden told followers he wanted to "retaliate in Washington" for the United States' 1998 missile attack on his facilities in Afghanistan.

In a conference call Saturday with reporters, administration officials who insisted on anonymity said there was no evidence that either the call to the U.S. Embassy in the UAE or the surveillance of federal buildings in New York by Yemenis was related to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The officials said the photographing of the federal buildings was later judged to be "tourist activity," but they did not say whether that judgment was made before or after the attacks.

The White House originally resisted releasing the article, part of the President's Daily Brief, or PDB, citing the sensitivity of intelligence information. It characterized the document as a historical summary with little current information on which the president could have acted.

In her testimony to the 9/11 commission on Thursday, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said, "this was a historical memo....It was not based on new threat information."

While the two-page document included information dating to 1997, it also contained information that the government suspected al Qaeda was actively preparing for an attack in the United States. While it gave no information about specific targets or dates, the briefing warned that U.S. intelligence believed bin Laden had serious plans to hit the United States....

END of Excerpt

For the Post story in full: www.washingtonpost.com

NBC's Myers Points Out Clinton and Media
Underestimated Threat

The Newsweek poll finding that 60 percent believe the Bush administration "underestimated the terrorist threat" before September 11th got a lot of media attention over the weekend, but on Meet the Press, NBC's Lisa Myers cut through the bias of the poll which asked only about Bush as she suggested that "if you did that poll and you substituted 'Clinton administration,' 'FBI,' 'CIA' or 'the media,' you would get much the same findings."

During the roundtable segment on the April 11 Meet the Press, Tim Russert raised the Newsweek numbers: "Newsweek asked: Did the Bush administration, in effect, take terrorist threats seriously before 9/11 and here's the numbers. 'Took terrorist threats seriously,' all 23; 'underestimated threat,' 60. And you break it down by party. Even 41 percent of Republicans think the administration underestimated the threat; 76 percent of Democrats; 60 percent of independents. Lisa Myers, what do those numbers show you?"
Myers replied: "Well, it shows you think, I think, that American people have a pretty good take on things. I think the Bush administration clearly underestimated the threat. I mean, it's obvious or we would have done more prior to 9/11. The Clinton administration underestimated the threat. I think if you did that poll and you substituted 'Clinton administration,' 'FBI,' 'CIA' or 'the media,' you would get much the same findings. Everyone underestimated the threat.
"I think politically what is far more dangerous to the President is what's going on now in Iraq and how he has handled the terrorist threat since 9/11, the whole issue of whether Iraq was a war of choice or a war of necessity. And I think that that will play much larger in the election than the arguments, which are gonna continue, about whether he did enough prior to 9/11. I don't think anyone has made a compelling case that anything, that the Bush administration could have done anything during its time that would have prevented 9/11."

Yet most media coverage of the past few weeks assumes Bush is really to blame for allowing 9/11 to occur.

CyberAlert Bias Flashback to May '02:
"Bush Knew" Attack Coming

CyberAlert Bias Flashback: "Bush Knew." In May of 2002, the networks hyped and exaggerated reports on how the CIA had supposedly warned President Bush about potential terrorist hijackings.

-- May 16, 2002 CyberAlert: At 6:30pm EDT on Wednesday CBS News first reported that the CIA Director "warned" President Bush "in the weeks before 9/11 that an attack by Osama bin Laden could involve the hijacking of U.S. aircraft." Putting the story into the context of how the intelligence community failed to pursue strong hints of an attack before they happened, David Martin lamented: "That apparently is as close as U.S. intelligence came to alerting the President to an airliner attack."
But three-and-a-half hours later, after the AP put out a story with confirmation from White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, CNN's Judy Woodruff turned the disclosure from symbolic of how little U.S. officials knew into a definitive statement about how "President Bush knew that al Qaeda was planning to hijack a U.S. airliner." See: www.mediaresearch.org

-- May 16, 2002 CyberAlert Extra: The ABC, CBS and CNN morning shows treated the disclosure, that the CIA had told President Bush some vague information about how al Qaeda might be looking to hijack a plane, as a scandalous cover-up. Both ABC's Charlie Gibson and NBC's Katie Couric provocatively asked: "What did the President know and when did he know it?" Gibson cast doubt on whether Bush was really surprised: "It also calls into question what happened when Andy Card...that morning went and whispered in the President's ear...Was the President really surprised?" Couric suggested Bush could have stopped the attacks, as she asserted that the news is "raising more questions about whether the attack on America could have been prevented." See: www.mediaresearch.org

-- May 17, 2002 CyberAlert: NBC's Tom Brokaw demanded: "What did the President know and when did he know it in the days before 9/11?" CBS's Dan Rather painted a White House somehow backtracking out of a cover-up as they "spent this day trying to explain what President Bush knew about terror threats" and "why the President never shared what he knew with the public." ABC's Peter Jennings portrayed widespread concern around the nation: "All over the country today people are wondering whether the White House knew more about the possibility the country would be attacked by Osama bin Laden's terrorists." See: www.mediaresearch.org

-- May 17, 2002 CyberAlert Extra: Friday morning Bryant Gumbel set up Dick Gephardt: "What did the President know and when did he know it has a familiar ring to it. To your mind, what are the questions that are upper-most?" NBC's Katie Couric talked about "warnings President Bush received" and how "the controversy over what could have been done to prevent the attacks of September 11th intensifies." ABC featured a victims' representative who said they were all "very angry" about not being warned. But, in a sign some rationality is creeping into coverage, ABC and NBC moved on to the problems with information flow amongst government agencies. See: www.mediaresearch.org

Unlike CBS News, FNC Reports Bush-Rice
Bounce in a CBS Poll

FNC offered a more complete report on a CBS News poll than did the CBS Evening News. On Friday's CBS Evening News, Dan Rather noted how "a CBS News poll taken after Condoleezza Rice testified before the 9/11 Commission yesterday, finds two out of three say they believe administration officials are hiding something." But over on FNC moments earlier, anchor Jim Angle cited how the CBS News poll found that the number who say the Bush administration could have done more had fallen 9 points from a week earlier and, he added, "25 percent say the Bush administration was, in fact, paying enough attention to the terrorist threat before 9/11, up from 18 percent last week."

Rather read this short item on the April 9 CBS Evening News, as taken down by the MRC's Brad Wilmouth:
"A new poll indicates most Americans believe the Bush administration is not telling all it knows about what it knew before 9/11. A CBS News poll taken after Condoleezza Rice testified before the 9/11 Commission yesterday, finds two out of three say they believe administration officials are hiding something. Still, the number who believe the administration did all it could to prevent 9/11 has risen 10 points in the past week up to 32 percent."

On screen, viewers saw:
"Are Bush administration officials hiding something?
Yes: 66%"

And:
"Did Bush administration do all it could to prevent 9/11?
"Last week: 22%
This week: 32%"

Over on FNC's Special Report with Brit Hume, in the "Grapevine" segment at just past 6:30pm EDT, regular Friday anchor Jim Angle relayed:
"National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice's testimony to the 9/11 Commission yesterday appears to have reassured some people about the administration's handling of warnings about terrorist attacks. A new poll taken after the testimony shows that 32 percent of Americans now say the Bush administration did all it could to prevent 9/11. That's up 10 points from a week earlier. Nearly twice as many say the administration could have done more, but that is down from last week. ["Could have done more," 60 percent "no," last week at 69 percent] In addition, 25 percent say the Bush administration was, in fact, paying enough attention to the terrorist threat before 9/11, up from 18 percent last week. Overall, a majority of Americans say they have a favorable view of Dr. Rice."

For the CBS News.com posting of the poll results: www.cbsnews.com

CNN Gives Over Most of Rice Highlight
Time to Attacks on Her

In her own words, or merely re-airing Democratic attacks? Thursday night's NewsNight with Aaron Brown on CNN included a five minute segment that Brown promised would reveal "in her own words...what Dr. Rice said in some of the more contentious moments" of her appearance before the 9/11 Commission that morning. But the MRC's Ken Shepherd discovered that Rice's actual comments amounted to just 2 minutes and 28 seconds of the segment, less than half of the segment.

Nearly all of the remainder highlighted the lengthy and adversarial questions to Rice from the most blatantly partisan Democrats on the panel, former Watergate prosecutor Richard Ben-Veniste and former Clinton Justice Department official Jamie Gorelick.

Setting up the segment, Brown recounted: "Condoleezza Rice testified for three hours this morning, 30 minutes longer than scheduled. In the hours since, many people have weighed in on what was said and what was not. It's the 9/11 Commission's job to decide officially what all the testimony means within the context of all their other work. As we said earlier, the questioning was tough at times today. Here in her own words is what Dr. Rice said in some of the more contentious moments."

What followed was: a short excerpt from Rice's opening statement; the hostile exchange with Ben-Veniste, complete with his rude cutting off of her answers; a long question from Gorelick that accused the FBI of being "feckless" (an excerpt that did not even include Rice's response); former Democratic Senator Bob Kerrey's gripe about how he disliked the "swatting at flies" analogy Rice had used; and former Democratic congressman Tim Roemer's demand to know why before September 11, "Why doesn't the President ask to meet with Dick Clarke?"

Only after the clip of Roemer did NewsNight viewers get their first chance to hear one of Rice's extended answers, which was followed by a second, concluding comment from her. No questions from Republicans were included in the clips, although NewsNight showed former GOP Governor Tom Kean administering the oath to Rice and former Governor Jim Thompson thanking her at the end of her testimony.

Media Feature Bush-Bashing 9/11 Families,
Exclude Bush Backers

The media on Thursday and Friday provided an imbalanced forum to a very small number of 9-11 families who have an anti-Bush political agenda, with the same few family members appearing again and again in story after story and interview after interview. Several belong to groups with a political agenda, such as September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows and Voices of September 11th, affiliations which were not noted by the networks or in a Reuters story which featured four critics of Bush, but not one backer.

Some of the family members made ludicrous points which were never challenged. On ABC's Good Morning America, Mary Fetchet lamented how only "if the airports were communicating with the buildings, then my son would be alive today." On CBS's Early Show, Terry McGovern claimed that if her mother had known about the vague warnings a month before the attack "she would have stopped going to work at the World Trade Center."

Before an interview segment on Friday's Good Morning America with two Bush-bashing 9-11 activists, ABC's Robin Roberts acknowledged that "there are those who support the President" and proceeded to give Debra Burlingame a three-second soundbite which was nothing more than a sentence clause.

After featuring four Bush-bashers on Thursday morning, on Friday NBC's Today brought two of them back, the very politically active Kristen Breitweiser along with Patty Casazza, and balanced them with one person with some pro-Bush views, Debra Burlingame.

On Thursday night, following Condoleezza Rice's testimony, CBS centered a story around one 9-11 family member upset at Rice and ABC delivered a story by Linda Douglass about how "eighty families came to Capitol Hill hoping to pressure the government for more answers. Many came away disappointed." She featured six Bush and Rice-bashers to just one Bush supporter.

Peter Jennings introduced that April 8 World News Tonight story: "There were quite a number of family members of those who died on 9/11 at the hearing today. Here's ABC's Linda Douglass."
Linda Douglass: "Eighty families came to Capitol Hill hoping to pressure the government for more answers. Many came away disappointed."
Judith Reiss, mother of 9/11 Victim: "All of us want to hear, 'We made a mistake.'"
Stephen Gerhardt, brother of 9/11 Victim: "Nobody has yet said that. Nobody has been that blatant, that said, 'You know what? We screwed up.'"
Douglass: "Several were stunned to learn the title of the classified briefing President Bush received one month before the attacks. It was called, 'Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States.'"
Anne MacRae, mother of 9/11 Victim: "I had not known the name of that briefing before."
Douglass: "How did you feel when you heard the title?"
MacRae: "I was horrified."
Douglass: "They urged the White House to make that briefing public."
Patricia Casazza, wife of 9/11 Victim: "Much of the information they had could be declassified. It's years old."
Helga Gerhardt, mother of 9/11 Victim: "I can understand that they have to keep certain information classified, but for us it is so important to get answer because that's all we have left."
Douglass: "Debra Burlingame, who lost her brother, disagrees."
Debra Burlingame, sister of 9/11 Victim: "When the President says that he has national security concerns, I believe him."
Douglass: "Several family members applauded when Democrats were tough on Rice. When it was over, Rice hugged widow Rosemary Dillard. It did not help."
Rosemary Dillard, wife of 9/11 Victim: "I think some things we got the truth, I think some things we got the spin."
Douglass concluded: "Some of the family members made it clear they will not be satisfied until someone is held accountable for what happened on September 11th. Linda Douglass, ABC News, Capitol Hill."

The next morning on GMA, the MRC's Jessica Anderson noticed, Robin Roberts set up an April 9 interview segment: "There were many 9/11 families sitting in on the hearings. In a moment, we're going to hear from some who have been critical of the Bush administration, but there are those who support the President, such as Debra Burlingame, who lost her brother."
Debra Burlingame: "When the President says that he has national security concerns-"
The clip was cut off, as the control room accidentally switched to a shot of Dan Bartlett. But instead of saying anything more about Burlingame's point, Roberts moved to the anti-Bush guests: "Joining us are two of the leaders of the 9/11 families committee that pressed for these hearings....So what did you think about Dr. Rice's testimony?"
Beverly Eckert, widow of WTC victim: "Well, she was very well prepared, she was very well rehearsed. I wasn't disappointed in her testimony, really, because I didn't expect much. I think it was just another example of a Washington bureaucrat defending their actions rather than acknowledging they might have made some mistakes."

Roberts soon cued up her other guest: "We saw that Dr. Rice went into the audience and was talking to many of the families. Mary, did you have an encounter with Dr. Rice?"
Mary Fetchet, son killed on 9/11: "Well, I did talk with her and I guess I was struck with her testimony, and not only was she unwilling to take responsibility for her role as National Security Adviser and protecting our American public, but she was very evasive, I think, in general. She was not able to answer specific questions about what she had talked with specifically to President Bush and what she had talked to, with George Tenet. And as Beverly said, if protocols had been put in place -- and I'm talking about the simplest of protocols -- when she was well aware that these government agencies weren't communicating, I think it was her job to make sure they were, that she was unwilling to really have principal meetings, she didn't see an importance in that. So when I approached her I said to her that my son was murdered on September 11th with three [sic] other innocent citizens, and I felt that if she had put the simplest of protocols in place, if the airports were communicating with the buildings, then my son would be alive today."
Roberts: "Right, Mary. I know you wanted to say that to her and you did. Mary and Beverly, never enough time. Thank you very much for coming in this morning."

"Some 9/11 Families Angered by No Apology from Rice," announced the headline over a Thursday afternoon Reuters dispatch which recounted the views only of four liberal political activist family members with an anti-Bush agenda, an agenda and set of affiliations not mentioned by Reuters. An excerpt from the April 8 story by David Morgan in Washington, DC:

Some relatives of Sept. 11 victims responded in anger on Thursday to what they described as the White House's failure to accept responsibility for the 2001 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people....

"No one wants to take any responsibility. Three thousand people died, and all they want to talk about is structural problems," Bob McIlvaine of Oreland, Pennsylvania, whose son died in New York's World Trade Center.

"They should be ashamed of themselves," he said.

Many 9/11 relatives said the general public should have been warned about the potential for attack during the summer of 2001, when intelligence officials were said to have detected a surge in communications between suspicious operatives....

"I am angry at the lack of accepting accountability -- that's what the President should have done, accepted responsibility," said Beverly Eckert of Stamford, Connecticut, whose husband Sean died at the World Trade Center.

"Instead, it's been outwardly directed, not just at the terrorists but at previous administrations."

Added New Jersey widow Patty Casazza: "I think it made her look incompetent in her position."

Clarke began his testimony by apologizing to victims and their families for government failings that allowed the attacks to occur.

Carie Lemack, whose mother also died in the attack on New York's World Trade Center towers, told CNN Rice should have admitted errors were made.

"We did not hear that today. I'm hoping we are going to hear that because it is clear that 3,000 people don't just get murdered. There were mistakes made and we need to fix them to make sure Americans are safer."...

END of Excerpt

For the Reuters story in full: story.news.yahoo.com

A photo caption, on the Web site for September 11 Families for a Peaceful Tomorrows, lists some of those quoted by Reuters and others as part of the group: "Members Adele Welty, Rita Lasar and Bob McIlvaine prepare for march to the Capitol." See: www.peacefultomorrows.org

For the home page of the group with which Breitweiser is also quite active: www.peacefultomorrows.org

Beverly Eckert, another family member popular with the media, is a founder of Voices of September 11th. Their home page: www.voicesofsept11.org

# Karen Hughes is scheduled to appear tonight on Comedy Central's Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

-- Brent Baker