Going for the Bias Gold

Reuters is apparently shooting for the Most Biased Headline trophy with its piece "Tenet: Vacationing Bush Not Told of 9/11 'Clue'." This spin is all the more likely to win the prize because it is, of course, a facile favorite of lefty talkers and scribes to make a big deal about the President's time in Crawford. How delicious, for them, if they were to find a way to enable the delusion that those vacations caused 9/11. Note that the headline even spins off from the text:

Commissioner Tim Roemer, a former Democratic congressman, asked Tenet if he had ever mentioned to Bush the arrest of Zacarias Moussaoui in mid-August 2001 after he had been detected behaving suspiciously in a Minnesota flight school.

Tenet said he had not spoken to the president at all that month, when Bush was staying at his ranch in Crawford, Texas. Nor did he bring it to the attention of other senior officials, saying it was "not appropriate."

"He's in Texas and I'm either here or on leave for some of that time," he said. "In this time period, I'm not talking to him, no."

After Moussaoui's arrest, Tenet and other top CIA officials received a briefing headed, "Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly."

It wasn't just the President, but the entire government seeing nothing wrong with pre-9/11 R&R. Even this, though, might provide fodder — were it not for a couple additional bits of information. Astute readers will have noticed that Reuters reporter Tabassum Zakaria, taking his cue from Commissioner Roemer, is careful to stick to Tenet's "mentioning" of the matter and whether he had "spoken" with the President. In this context, part of the transcript of Tenet's testimony is very interesting, mostly in the degree to which it was quickly passed by:

ROEMER: You don't see the president of the United States once in the month of August?

TENET: He's in Texas and I'm either here or on leave for some of that time, so I'm not here.

ROEMER: So who's briefing him on the PDBs?

TENET: The briefer, himself. We have a presidential briefer.

Even those citizens who insist on believing that something in Tenet's voice would have been the magic ingredient are going to have to look elsewhere for a factual basis for blame:

CIA records show that Tenet briefed the president twice in August, once in Crawford, Texas on Aug. 17, and once in Washington, on Aug. 31. A CIA analyst who accompanied Bush on his vacation briefed him approximately six days a week, Harlow said. "He momentarily forgot," Harlow said of Tenet.

ADDENDUM:
Anybody who's watched even a few moments of this charade and tried to imagine offering testimony will have to concede that it isn't exactly a conducive environment for relaxed memory recall. Literally surrounded by people, facing elevated politicians who loom over dozens of cameras, a person can certainly be forgiven for forgetting relatively routine meetings from years ago, back before the world changed.