How to Stage a Controversy

...One campaign official told the New York Times that the president was "eager" to start the debate with Massachusetts senator John Kerry, the Democratic nominee...

...Funny...

...What was surprising, however, was the Bush campaign's haphazard response to this orchestrated media firestorm...

...It's not the pictures that disturb [groups like Peaceful Tomorrows] so much as the person who is using them...

...It's a safe bet that there are thousands like Boyle, relatives of people murdered on 9/11 who supported the president during the wars against the Taliban and Saddam Hussein...

...And comment they did...

...Certainly NPR, which reported that Peaceful Tomorrows was an "officially nonpartisan" organization, thought so...

...11 in a partisan political commercial has provoked outrage from victims' families and from firefighters who say their brothers and sisters did not sacrifice and suffer for a cheap, cheesy, campaign ad...

...It's true that Karen Hughes and Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, defended the ads...

...The next day, Bush traveled to Nassau County, on Long Island, to attend the unveiling of a 9/11 memorial...

...Boyle wanted to help defend the president...

...The images of Ground Zero amounted to only a few seconds in each ad...

...They lobbied Congress for an Afghan Victims compensation fund...

...Milbank, in fact, found near unanimity among the people he interviewed at the unveiling...

...First, they were alerted that Harold Schaitberger, the general president of the International Association of Fire Fighters, was outraged at the Bush ads...

...Kelly, Potorti, and Jeff Zack, a spokesman for the International Association of Fire Fighters, are quoted in the AP dispatch on the Bush ads...

...Mehlman spoke too soon...

...And both former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani and Bernard Kerik, New York City's former police chief, went on the air to defend Bush...

...It comprised only 13 people, among them the Amundsons and Kelly Campbell, who quit her job to work full-time with Potorti...

...One was the upcoming trip to Afghanistan of a mother whose firefighter son was killed in the September 11 attacks...

...Colleen Kelly told the Voice of America, "The twisted steel and concrete visible there inside the shelter was very reminiscent of the wreckage of the World Trade Center...

...This is just the latest example of the way this president has been a divider and not a uniter," Tad Devine, a Democratic campaign strategist, said on ABC...

...Peaceful Tomorrows, not to put too fine a point on it, is a group of left-wing antiwar activists...

...It highlighted three potential stories and sources for journalists...

...In what looks like an egregious case of lazy reporting, multiple news outlets treated members of Peaceful Tomorrows as if they were nonaffiliated people-on-the-street in order to make the controversy over the Bush ads seem widespread...

...So what went wrong here...

...The IPA release on March 4 was brief—under 500 words—and little more than a list...

...Jimmy did all the work," says someone close to Boyle...

...At times the group displayed a striking naivete...

...Until, that is, Wednesday, March 10, late in the afternoon, when the campaign called to say it had found a way for Boyle to help...

...In the November election," it began, "we will have a clear choice laid before the American people...

...But obviously relevant to its political identity is that it opposed any military response to the September 11 attacks, whether in Afghanistan, Iraq, or elsewhere...

...There's no consensus around this, but for the most part 9/11 families are very sensitive to someone using images of our loved one's death for their own ends," she said...

...11, it seems appropriate that President Bush will be making his re-election bid from that city at that time in 2004...

...As is typically the case with such press releases, a helpful quote from Schait-berger was included...

...All three had lost relatives in the September 11 attacks...

...This was an exceedingly unhelpful and incomplete description...

...At the Thursday gathering, Bush shook hands with a crowd of people who had lost relatives in the terrorist attacks...

...These go out to about 7,000 journalists and television producers...

...On September 25, 2002, group members held a joint press conference with congressman—and future Democratic presidential candidate—Dennis Kucinich...

...In fact, of all the major news outlets that quoted Potorti as a 9/11 family member upset at the Bush ad campaign, only USA Today identified him as a member of Peaceful Tomorrows...

...That's because the news coverage of the official launch of George W. Bush's reelection campaign focused on the reactions to the ads of firefighters and 9/11 victims' families...

...They promote speakers and experts whose outlooks are generally of a far-left bent...

...What people ended up talking about after the Bush ads were unveiled was whether the president's campaign had "exploited" the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks by using a couple of seconds of footage from that day in two of its three advertisements...

...In January 2003, members visited Iraq...

...A former president of the Uniformed Firefighters Association, a New York affiliate of Schaitberger's IAFF, Boyle lost his son at the World Trade Center on September 11...

...It's true that the group does not officially support Democrats or Republicans...

...He contacted his congressman, Republican Peter King, in order to publicize the letter...

...When the group returned to the United States, they took part in a media blitz publicized by—guess who—the Institute for Public Accuracy...

...military action abroad, accompanied by "Victims of terrorism and war—from Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, and the Palestinian territories, the Philippines and Japan...

...Sifting through the news coverage of the controversy over Bush's ads, one finds the same individuals—Schaitberger, Potorti, and Kelly—quoted again and again...

...It came under fire in the fall of 2001 for refusing to fly an American flag outside its offices in Upper Nyack, New York...

...The same rule applied to other members of Peaceful Tomorrows...

...For example, in the March 5 Boston Globe story, Colleen Kelly is identified as the "New York area coordinator for Peaceful Tomorrows, an advocacy group formed by relatives of those killed on Sept...

...In the fall of 2002, they organized a "No More Victims Tour," in which members of the group traveled the country to protest U.S...

...They were no longer playing offense...

...Two email addresses were listed, as well as two contact numbers for Schait-berger, both in Washington, D.C., where the IAFF has its headquarters...

...11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, acknowledged that some victims' relatives found the ads appropriate...

...The simple answer is, well, they were being lazy and partisan...

...I'm disappointed but not surprised that the President would try to trade on the heroism of those firefighters in the September 11 attacks...

...11, although painful, are fundamental to that choice...

...David had moved there from California in order to pursue a master's degree in folklore...

...Perhaps the millions of unemployed Americans, veterans whose benefits have been threatened, families of dead civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq, working people who lost their pensions to corporate fraud, and 41 million Americans without health insurance can come to town and join him in celebrating the other achievements of his first term...

...He is a New Yorker and lifelong Democrat who plans to vote for Bush in November...

...President Bush is rightly offering us that choice and the images of Sept...

...When the "Walk for Healing and Peace" crossed into Manhattan, for instance, Potorti and the Amundsons led the march...

...Peaceful Tomorrows' activism took many forms...

...It is worth noting that Harold Schaitberger and other members of the International Association of Fire Fighters never said their criticism transcended partisan politics...

...After the Clinton administration began its bombing of Kosovo in March 1999, the IPA promoted the antiwar punditry of Howard Zinn, the radical historian, who claimed Clinton had "deceived" the United States into war against Slobodan Milosevic...

...There were other reasons to be skeptical of the criticism as well, which Hughes neglected to mention...

...Nonpartisan...

...The day that America began to bomb Afghanistan," Kelly told the Forum, as Christopher Cald-well reported in the November 25, 2002, issue of The Weekly Standard, "I cried...

...But the IPA's facts are often questionable (mass starvation in Afghanistan, a massacre at the Jenin refugee camp in April 2002, and so on), and their opinions are always hard-left...

...Or Ernest Strada, who told the Washington Post's Dana Milbank, at the Nassau County unveiling on March 11, "It's important that everybody in the country, led by the president, continue to remember what happened two and a half years ago...

...As the months passed, he read about various family members of 9/11 victims who were against war with the Taliban...

...There are cycles of violence that need to be broken," one member told Connie Chung...

...One of the first he was introduced to was Jimmy Boyle...

...And all were also "available to comment on the Bush advertising campaign," with their phone numbers provided...

...Funding was not a problem...

...It was sponsored by the Fellowship of Reconciliation, part of the Coalition for Peace and Justice, a collection of post-9/11 peace groups...

...The New York Times published one from David Potorti on April 28, 2003: Since the worst terrorist attack in American history, which took the life of my brother, occurred in New York on Sept...

...The group took its name from an utterance of Martin Luther King Jr.'s...

...As Potorti marched north as part of the "Walk for Healing and Peace," he got to know Amber Amundson, whose husband Craig had died on September 11, and Craig's brothers, Ryan and Barry...

...I just completely disagree" with those who thought the television ads were exploitative...

...Indeed, Peaceful Tomorrows never pretended to shrink from involvement in politics...

...Kelly Campbell, co-director of a nonpartisan group called Sept...

...How is it that so many journalists were willing to be led by the nose to write blatantly misleading stories, when the truth was so easy to ascertain...

...This makes sense...

...But no one from the Bush camp contacted Boyle...

...Indeed, reading the news coverage of the ads controversy, one finds, scattered among the quotes from Harold Schaitberger and the members of Peaceful Tomorrows, individuals who support Bush's campaign ads...

...How to Stage a Controversy Peace activists, left-wing flacks, and compliant reporters produced the flap over Bush's 9/11 ads BY MATTHEW CONTINETTI It was the week of March 4, and the Bush reelection campaign was ready to go on the offensive...

...King tried to put Boyle in touch with the Bushies...

...The march lasted several days...

...On March 12, in an interview on National Public Radio, John Kerry's campaign manager, Mary Beth Cahill, told Juan Williams about the challenges facing Democrats in the upcoming election...

...And their status as relatives of those killed on 9/11 gave them special cachet among peace activists...

...Paul Begala, the CNN pundit and former Clinton adviser, put it bluntly: "The president's use of footage from September Matthew Continetti is an editorial assistant at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...

...It was called the "Walk for Healing and Peace...

...Why the fuss over Bush's ads...

...Hughes's reason, expressed haltingly, was that "September 11 was not just a distant tragedy...

...When he heard that 9/11 families were criticizing the president's campaign ads, he wanted to speak out in Bush's defense...

...Notice that, while Campbell is identified as the codirector of Peaceful Tomorrows, Rita Lasar is quoted as if she'd been selected at random from a list of people who had lost relatives in the terror attacks...

...It's a deep hurt and sorrow that any politician, Democrat or Republican, would seek to gain advantage by using that site," she told CNN...

...He quickly wrote an "Open Letter to America," which he and 22 other family members of victims signed...

...He felt he had nothing left to lose...

...Among them is the Tides Center, which is a project of the Tides Foundation, which is a recipient of generous grants from the Heinz family endowments, one of which, at least, is chaired by Teresa Heinz, the wife of Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry...

...One stop on the "No More Victims Tour" was the European Social Forum, an annual meeting of antiglobalization groups held in 2002 in Florence, Italy...

...Cahill might as well have been talking about the Institute for Public Accuracy and the phony "controversy" it managed to generate over the Bush campaign's first round of television ads...

...We're now going to talk about the clear choice that Americans will face on November 2, 2004...

...And when the Bush administration invaded Afghanistan in October 2001, the IPA turned reporters onto similar radical ideologues who opposed the war...

...He was devastated by his brother's death...

...Others include the Ruckus Society, a radical antiglobalization group, and the Iraq Peace Fund, which provides support to such anti-Bush groups as MoveOn.org and Democracy Now...

...And the day before the ads premiered, Ken Mehlman, Bush's campaign manager, put it this way to CNN: "There's now about to be a two-way conversation...

...But the message coming from the campaign was mired in confusion, aides say...

...I was struck at how difficult it was to make the connection...

...We are incensed and hurt by what he is doing...

...Which seems to be what happened in the case of the Bush television ads...

...People like Debra Burlingame, whose brother had piloted the plane the terrorists crashed into the Pentagon...

...In fact, members of Peaceful Tomorrows are often quoted without any mention of their group affiliation...

...He sent it to various New York media outlets on Saturday, March 6. The letter was plainly heartfelt...

...It has been issuing press releases since April 8, 1998...

...On a tour of Baghdad sponsored by Saddam Hussein's government, the group from Peaceful Tomorrows was taken to a shelter where Baathists claimed 200 civilians were killed during the 1991 Gulf War...

...But David Potorti, who is the group's codirector, is identified only as someone "whose brother was killed in the attacks on New York...

...Here is an excerpt from Paul Farhi's Washington Post story on March 5, which ran under the headline "Bush Ads Using 9/11 Images Stir Anger": "The idea that President Bush would rally support around his campaign by using our loved ones in a way that is so shameful is hard for me to believe," said Rita Lasar, a New York resident whose brother, Abe Zelmanowitz, died in the North Tower of the World Trade Center...

...Devine's boss, John Kerry, told the New York Times, "There are plenty of ways to convey the threat of terror without usurping what I think is a very sensitive memory in the American consciousness...

...Peaceful Tomorrows is only one of many Tides Center projects...

...But a quick visit to several nonprofit websites shows that Peaceful Tomorrows receives money and support from a bevy of left-wing foundations...

...He sought them out via email, and, in November 2001, invited some to join him on a peace march from the Pentagon to New York City...

...Cahill explained that Democrats are up against a disreputable Republican political machine that launches "scurrilous" attacks on its political foes...

...On Friday, March 5, Karen Hughes, the Bush strategist, told the Early Show's Harry Smith, "with all due respect...

...Potorti says that the group's funding is "confidential...

...They sent representatives to Afghanistan to visit with survivors of U.S...

...It's a defining event for the future of our country...

...In 1997, living in Santa Monica, California, he joined The Oaks Project, a progressive organization devoted to organizing "people who feel disenfranchised by the two-party, big-money system...

...The uses of 9/11 images are hypocrisy at its worst...

...Potorti was no stranger to activism...

...It's an insult to use the place where my brother died in an ad," David Potorti told the AP...

...While the humanity of the 9/11 victims—their names, faces, and stories—^became better known," he wrote last year in an op-ed for New York Newsday, "our society seemed to care less and less about the traditions, histories, and humanity of other innocent victims...

...Tariq Aziz, the deputy prime minister of Baathist Iraq, said that the trip was "a very important international development" helpful to Saddam's interests...

...But most news outlets that talked to Schaitberger mentioned the fact that he is a partisan Democrat only several paragraphs below the catchy headline (usually a variation on "Firefighters Angry at New Bush Ads") if at all...

...Journalists were pointed in two directions...

...When I asked Sam Husseini, the IPA's communications director, whether the outfit was left-liberal, he told me, "I'm so far beyond labels, just give me the facts...

...Plus, the straight story—"Peace Activists, Kerry Co-chair Criticize Bush Ads"—^is a yawner...

...They are up against an "echo chamber," which their opponents create by planting rumors on the Internet, getting them picked up by talk radio, and thus launching them into the political discussion at large...

...In early 2002, with monetary support from the Fellowship for Reconciliation, he put his master's degree on hold to found September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows...

...The same people who now agitate against politicians' using September 11 for political gain played into the hands of a dictator using war ruins for political gain...

...The Fellowship of Reconciliation was controversial...

...This criticism caught the Bush campaign by surprise...

...No one should have been the least bit surprised at their reaction to the Bush-Cheney ads...

...Consider the experience of Jimmy Boyle...

...Virtually all," he wrote, "said [Bush] was welcome here and welcome to use the attacks in his campaign...

...At that moment, I denounced my government, which does not represent me...

...In his pre-9/11 days, Potorti was a frequent writer of letters to the editor...

...The same thing happens in the Associated Press's account, in which Potorti is identified as a political "independent from Cary, N.C...

...Would he...

...Or Patricia Riley, whose sister died at the World Trade Center, and who told the Associated Press, "The president has every right to point to his leadership during that time...

...By contrast, the members of Peaceful Tomorrows did say that their outrage was bipartisan...

...A few months later, they once again attended a Capitol Hill press conference, this time along with Sheila Jackson Lee, the Democratic congresswoman from Texas...

...The members of the group also wrote letters to the editor...

...Democrats seized on the controversy...

...And they had little idea how to make the case to the public that Bush had not "exploited" the terrorist attacks...

...Ditto with the invasion of Iraq in March 2003...

...It's so hard for us to believe it's not obvious to everyone that Ground Zero shouldn't be used as a backdrop for a political campaign...

...As did the Washington Post, which also called Peaceful Tomorrows "nonpartisan...

...So there was a deep connection...

...Second, the IPA press release directed reporters interested in the Bush campaign ads to Adele Welty, David Potorti, and Colleen Kelly, members of a group called September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows...

...Schaitberger and Kelly are both quoted in a Boston Globe story that ran on March 5. Schaitberger and Kelly Campbell, a spokeswoman for September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, were the sources for the Washington Post's account...

...Another was an Afghan women's rights activist's comments on International Women's Day, which took place on March 8. But the lead item was the Bush ads story, featured in the subject line of the email: "Firefighters and 9/11 Families on Bush Ads...

...Potorti is quoted in USA Today's story...

...bombing raids...

...Another, Matthew Dowd, the president's pollster, said, "We have a whole series of things we're going to correct that have been said over the last six months...

...In one, he inveighed against "righteous conservatives...

...He also met Kelly Campbell, Craig Amundson's sister-in-law, who worked at a nonprofit in San Francisco...

...The images in President Bush's campaign television ads are respectful of the memories of Sept...

...on March 4. The IPA is a five-person media clearinghouse located in the National Press Building...

...All were promoting Adele's upcoming peace mission to Afghanistan...

...They all had backgrounds in progressive activism...

...And it's a safe bet, further, that any one of those people, or any of the numerous 9/11 families groups, would have happily gone on record as having no objection to the Bush campaign's reelection ads...

...Last fall, the union was one of the first to endorse John Kerry's presidential bid...

...I suspect that the real outrage over the ads has more to do with context than content," she wrote in the Wall Street Journal last week...

...Within a few months, antiwar activism became Potor-ti's full-time job...

...When it comes to a controversy like this, you really need some fast turnaround...

...I believe the best way to honor the dead is by seeking justice through nonviolent means, not by starting new wars," said Andrew Rice, a member of Peaceful Tomorrows whose brother died at the World Trade Center...

...The Oaks Project was a creation of Ralph Nader, the consumer activist and presidential candidate...

...Potorti spent time gathering signatures for legislation nullifying parts of a utility deregulation bill...

...And soot-covered New York City firefighters roaming through the rubble of the World Trade Center were nothing new to American television...

...America was seized by "anger and intolerance"—the "very things that had led to my brother's murder...

...On September 11, 2001, the day Jim Potorti died inside the World Trade Center, his brother David was living in Cary, North Carolina...

...Neither is it anything new, of course, when a small group of people with excellent public relations skills and a political axe to grind are able to manipulate an unskeptical media...

...These people, presented as a random assortment of individuals, were angry at the president for using the attacks supposedly as a political prop...

...According to GuideStar, a website that tracks nonprofits, the group "promotes the inclusion of outlooks that usually get short shrift...

...They were playing defense...

...In another, he accused Republicans of ignoring the homeless and the unemployed...

...I would be just as outraged if any politician did this...

...Because I thought about how many hundreds of young men like my brother would be there...

...But two days later, in a CNN.com report on a press conference in New York City held by Peaceful Tomorrows and organized by the anti-Bush group MoveOn.org, Rita Lasar shows up again . . . this time, as one of the group's spokeswomen...

...But what also disturbed him was the way in which the United States responded to the terrorist attacks...

...The conference was called to protest a potential invasion of Iraq...

...It does this by issuing press releases...

...And one question about the 9/11 survivor-critics of the Bush ads that reporters failed to investigate was: Who are these people...

...For much of the controversy can be traced directly to a press release issued by the Institute for Public Accuracy, or IPA, at a little after 2:00 p.m...

...Spokesmen for the Heinz endowments are quick to say that the money they provide to the Tides Foundation and Center is directed solely towards environmental projects in western Pennsylvania...

...The group chose to fly an "earth flag" instead...

...And no story mentioned that Schaitberger is one of eight national cochairs of John Kerry's campaign...