Could the New York Times Have Prevented 9/11?
This article is adapted from Judy, the seventh episode of Slow Burns fifth season. In 2001, Stephen Engelberg was the investigations editor for the New York Times. One of his reporters was a Times veteran named Judith Miller. Maybe a couple of weeks after July 4, 2001, Judy came to my desk, Engelberg said. She said, Ive got an amazing story. Weve got to go to go fast. This is really astounding stuff.  What she had did sound amazing: an intercept of a conversation between two members of al-Qaida. Advertisement  The first guy says something along the lines of, its really a shame the United States did not retaliate for the attack on the USS Cole, which was an American ship that had been attacked by a sort of suicide-bombing dinghy, Engelberg said. And then the second guy says, well, dont worry, were planning something so big theyre going to have to retaliate.  Advertisement  Advertisement  Miller had been covering Islamic extremism for years, and it seemed like she might have a huge scoopplans by known terrorists to launch a major attack against the United States. Engelberg was interested. But first, he needed to know where the story came from. Who are these two guys? Engelberg asked. Or are they just two guys talking?  Advertisement  Miller didnt have those answers but said shed try to find out. She came back and told Engelberg that she couldnt get any more detail. The story never ran. Two months later, al-Qaida hijacked four planes and killed 3,000 people. After 9/11, we both at some point caught our breath and talked about this and sort of thought, wow, what if we had done the story? Engelberg said. Were they really onto this thing or was it just a coincidence?  There are two ways to think about the decision to spike that story. The first: This is exactly how journalism is supposed to work. An aggressive reporter got a tantalizing bit of information. A careful editor pushed back to make sure it was properly sourced. It turned out the story just wasnt there. So the New York Times didnt publish it. The papers journalistic standards were upheld. Advertisement  Advertisement  The second way to think about it: the New York Times could have had one of the biggest scoops in historyif theyd pushed harder to get it. Or, maybe, if theyd gone to press with something that wasnt a hundred percent buttoned up. You can even imagine a scenario where the paper prints the story and helps prevent the 9/11 attacks. Journalists have to balance two competing ideas: Get the biggest story you can, before the competition does. But also, make sure that what youre publishing is true. Sometimes they end up being cautious, and big news never makes it into the paper. Sometimes theyre aggressiveand that can cause its own set of problems. Advertisement  In the run-up to the Iraq War, almost no one was more aggressive than Judith Miller. If you read the New York Times in 2002 and 2003, you probably believed the Iraqis had weapons of mass destruction. In the year before the invasion of Iraq, the media mostly backed the administrations narrative about WMD, even when the evidence was thin. Why did I believe the people I believed? Miller said. Because these people, by and largenot all of them, but most of themhad been the very same people who were warning us about al-Qaida and 9/11. I had every reason to believe them because they had been right before. I got it wrong. Listen to Episode 7 of Slow Burn: The Road to the Iraq War on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.