“Democrat Implies Sept. 11 Plot”


April 20, 2002


BROOKE GLADSTONE: We're back with On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. On March 25th, Cynthia McKinney, a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Georgia made a little-heard appearance on a Pacifica radio program. Eventually a transcript of the program made its way into the hands of reporters from the Washington Post. They read, as McKinney called for hearings on why the Bush administration ignored warnings that she claimed could have prevented September 11th terrorist attacks. McKinney wondered was it because the administration and its friends would benefit financially from the inevitable military buildup? The resulting article which appeared on last Friday's Washington Post was titled Democrat Implies September 11th Administration Plot. After that, McKinney was universally denounced on cable TV; even in-house liberals like Alan Colmes on Fox and Paul Begala on CNN called McKinney's accusations irresponsible and outlandish. Her home town paper, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, wrote editorials against her and Orlando Sentinel columnist Kathleen Parker called her "a dangerous fool whose voice needs to be stifled." Knowing that McKinney's remarks would provoke outrage and maybe end her political career, as a few are suggesting, the Post had quite a story on its hands. Juliet Eilperin wrote the story. Welcome to OTM.

JULIET EILPERIN: Thanks so much.

BOB GARFIELD: Now you took a look at this transcript and you said to yourself oh, my - that is really out there. What did you say to yourself?

JULIET EILPERIN: Exactly. You say-- well I mean - [going in,] I'm familiar with Cynthia McKinney, so it's not that it w-- that it was a shock to read what she had said, but at the same time, you looked at it and said well that's, that's terribly provocative - the kind of stuff she's saying and accusing the administration of. So that was really what struck me at first.

BOB GARFIELD:Okay, now you just said "accusing the administration of." She actually doesn't explicitly accuse them of anything. She cites some facts -- that there were some advance rumblings of September 11th; that the president's father and -- the former President Bush and their circle stand to gain financially at least indirectly from the ramping up of the defense budget, but she never actually connects the dots. She simply leads you to the inference.

JULIET EILPERIN: No. Yeah, no, no that's true. I guess what I mean is that she accuses them of essentially ignoring advance warnings of the September 11th attack, and that she is fairly explicit on.

BOB GARFIELD:The headline on the story referred to a plot -that she implies a September 11th plot by the administration. You didn't say that.

JULIET EILPERIN: No.

BOB GARFIELD: But the headline did. When you picked up the paper that morning, what was your reaction.

JULIET EILPERIN: Right. I mean it's one of those difficult things. I mean I tend - once I found my story - to leave and not be involved in it. I do think that that might not have been the best choice of wording.

BOB GARFIELD: Were you troubled with the word because it was indelicate or because it, it was simply impossible to back up.

JULIET EILPERIN: It's just you, you want to be sensitive and you want to be as nuanced as you can, which is always difficult in a headline.

BOB GARFIELD: Were you satisfied that the story that you wrote supported the use of the word "plot?"

JULIET EILPERIN:Yeah, I think you could make the argument that that's what she was certainly implying. You know she took pains to say she hasn't seen evidence but maybe that's the case, so she was really kind of raising the issue rather than saying that that absolutely is what happened.

BOB GARFIELD:You compared her statements to "a web of conspiracies theories that have been floating around since September 11th." You didn't compare what she had to say for example to what is the orthodoxy of the far left. What she had to say isn't vastly different from what has appeared in The Nation, for example. Was it dismissive of you to compare her to wild conspiracy theorists as opposed to those just coming from a leftist point of view?

JULIET EILPERIN: I don't think that it was kind of irresponsible or how I did it - and I did try to point out that she's a liberal member, and I also put it in the context of interviewing other members and trying to find out if they had heard similar things, which they had. So I tried to couch it by actually saying there, there are other people who are raising this issue.

BOB GARFIELD:U.S. Congressperson Invites America to Infer a Plot at the Highest Levels of Government in the Military Industrial Complex -- why wasn't that on page one?

JULIET EILPERIN: There was a discussion of whether the story should be broader and-- whether you should have given it better play, but I also think the fact of the matter is one thing you take into account is how likely is it that there will be an investigation to what extent - you know if she had managed to convince a lot of her colleagues that this was important, and you know several of them joined her in calling for that investigation, I think that would have given the story more heft.

BOB GARFIELD: Juliet Eilperin, thank you very much.

JULIET EILPERIN: Thank you very much.

BOB GARFIELD: Juliet Eilperin covers the House of Representatives for the Washington Post. [MUSIC]