Larry Beinhart - Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin

F OG F ACTS

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F OG F ACTS

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Searching for Truth in the Land
of Spin

Larry Beinhart

F OG F ACTS
S EARCHING FOR T RUTH IN THE L AND OF S PIN

Published by
Nation Books
An Imprint of Avalon Publishing Group Inc.
245 West 17th St., 11th Floor
New York, NY 10011

Copyright 2005 by Larry Beinhart

First printing October 2005

Nation Books is a co-publishing venture of the Nation Institute and Avalon Publishing Group.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 13: 978-1-56025-886-5

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Book design by Maria Elias
Distributed by Publishers Group West

To Irving Beinhart
my father

To Gillian Farrell
my wife

The fiercest partisans of truth that Ive ever met.

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T HE TRAGEDY OF 9/11 was a result of the failure to see the facts that were in front of us.

On April 1, 2001, Oklahoma State Trooper C. L. Parkins stopped one of the future hijackers, Nawaf Alhazmi, for speeding. Alhazmi had been photographed at an Al Qaeda meeting in Malaysia. He was known to the CIA as a terrorist. They suspected that he might be in the U.S. illegally. The CIA was, theoretically, looking for Alhazmi. Parkins ran Alhazmis California license through the computer and checked for warrants. Nothing came back. The CIA had not distributed the information.

Trooper Parkins wrote Alhazmi two tickets totaling $138 and let him continue his journey.

Five months later, Nawaf Alhazmi would be one of the hijackers who took over American Airlines Flight 77.

That was just one of many instances in which 9/11 hijackers might have been picked up or kept out of the country or stopped before they boarded those planes in September.

This was not just a bureaucratic failure. By contrast, the 9/11 report offered a reminder and an explanation of the one period in which the government as a whole seemed to be acting in concert to deal with terrorismthe last weeks of December, 1999, preceding the millennium. It was a time when information was not just whispered about in highly classified intelligence dailies or FBI interview memos. The information was in all major newspapers and highlighted in network television news. The result was that an alert Customs agent caught Ahmed Ressam bringing explosives across the Canadian border with the apparent intention of blowing up the Los Angeles airport. He was found to have confederates on both sides of the border.

The idea of fog facts emerged from a series of very casual conversations I had between tennis games with Robert Brill, city desk editor at the Albany Times Union. I would get to the courts full of umbrage over something that I had discovered searching the Net that had not been reported in the mainstream media.

Rob would reply, almost invariably, Oh, there was a story about that three months ago.

I would go home and do a search, and sure enough, the Times had indeed reported that Halliburton was being sued by its shareholders for the accounting practices instituted by Dick Cheney. On page 3 of the business section or something like that.

The things I was getting so worked up over were not secrets uncovered by political spies and underground agents of the next revolution. They were snippets picked up from the Wall Street Journal, CNN, and Fox News and now brought to my attention on a Web site. Even if they came from Greg Palast or Al Jazeera or the Atlantic or books by David Corn and Kevin Philips, they were all public facts. They were in print. They had been referred to, reviewed, and cross-referenced elsewhere.

Yet they seemed to be invisible.

I was working on a novel about an election like the one coming up in 2004. It seemed to me that the struggle to pull some of these facts out of the fog and make them important would be central to the real campaign. Therefore they had to be central to the campaign in the book, where it was described this way:

Fog Facts.

That is, it was not a secret. It was known. But it was not known. That is, if you asked a knowledgeable journalist, or political analyst, or historian, they knew about it. If you yourself went and checked the record, you could find it out. But if you asked the man in the street if [the] president, who loved to have his picture taken among the troops and aboard naval vessels, if you asked if he had found a way to evade service in Vietnam, they wouldnt have a clue and, unless they were against him already, they wouldnt believe it.

In the information age there is so much information that sorting and focus and giving the appropriate weight to anything has become incredibly difficult. Then some fact, or event, or factoid, mysteriously captures the worlds attention, and theres a media frenzy. Like Clinton and Lewinsky. Like O.J. Simpson. And everybody in the world knows everything about it. On the flip side are the Fog Facts, important things that nobody seems able to focus on anymore than they can focus on a single droplet in the mist.

I live in the country. Sometimes the fog is so thick that you dont even know where you are. If youre driving, the beams from your headlights just bounce back at you. Then, as you go around a corner or the elevation changes, up or down, you emerge from the fog and suddenly everything is clear and you say to yourself, ah-hah, thats where we are.

This book is a journey somewhat like that. Its not a catalog of fog facts. Nor is it a thesis. That they are caused by a single thing and this is what we should do to cure it. It touches on several issues, politics, the media, economics, the Bush administration, 9/11, and the 9/11 Report among them. A multitude of books have been written about each. Where that is the case, I saw no point in duplicating those fine efforts. Rather this is a journey in search of those moments where we come around the corner, or go down low, or rise up high, and see some particular thing or some series of events that allows us to say, Oh, thats where we are.

The standard excuse, indeed the official excuse, for having ignored the warnings is that such attacks were unimaginable:

I dont think anyone could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center.

National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, May 18, 2002

Nobody in our government, at least, and I dont think the prior government, could envision flying airplanes into buildings on such a massive scale.

President George Bush, April 18, 2002

That was not true.

Less than one year earlier, on October 24, 2000, the Pentagon had staged a mass casualty drill using the scenario of a hijacked airliner being flown into the Pentagon. Six months earlier, on March 4th, 2001, there had been a made-for-TV movie, the pilot for a Fox series called The Lone Gunmen, in which terrorists attempted to fly an airplane into the World Trade Center. In December 1994, Al Qaeda Yet these remained fog facts.