alternative hippopotamus

progressive cyberdadaism from our nation’s capital

October 9, 2006

Secret Meeting? Oh, That Secret Meeting.

by AltHippo @ 4:20 pm. Filed under propaganda

NYT:

It was the kind of shadowy, secret Washington meeting that Bob Woodward is fond of describing in detail. In his new book, “State of Denial,” he writes that on Nov. 29, 2001, a dozen policy makers, Middle East experts and members of influential policy research organizations gathered in Virginia at the request of Paul D. Wolfowitz, then the deputy secretary of defense. Their objective was to produce a report for President Bush and his cabinet outlining a strategy for dealing with Afghanistan and the Middle East in the aftermath of 9/11.

What was more unusual, Mr. Woodward reveals, was the presence of journalists at the meeting. Fareed Zakaria, the editor of Newsweek International and a Newsweek columnist, and Robert D. Kaplan, now a national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, attended the meeting and, according to Mr. Kaplan, signed confidentiality agreements not to discuss what happened.

This is a great moment for the 4th estate. No longer confined to reporting on the events of the day. They become part of the process that creates the events of the day. Wouldn’t it be more efficient to just make the cabinet secrataries defacto heads of network broadcast, and major daily print media organizations?

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3 Responses to “Secret Meeting? Oh, That Secret Meeting.”

  1. KCinDC Says:
    October 10th, 2006 at 10:00 pm

    Jim Henley had a good post about passage.

  2. KCinDC Says:
    October 10th, 2006 at 10:01 pm

    “that passage”

  3. AltHippo Says:
    October 10th, 2006 at 10:40 pm

    I had read the passage in Woodward’s book about a week ago. I was taken surprise by the text, but figured it was just one of those things I had glossed over, given events at the time. Then, I saw the NYT article.

    This is what I’d call a big deal, and probably on the same scale as Judith Miller’s embedding in a unit going after WMD.

    Zakaria can’t pretend to be an objective observer of the Iraq war if he was privately advocating for it; that he had an active (and secret) role inside the Bush administration defies every principle of journalism I’m aware of.

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