Recently, researching a Nation piece (9/11 in a Movie-Made World) on the response to the attacks of 2001, I read the New York Times (as well as other newspapers) for September 12-19, five years ago. What struck me was how much of the grim world now so familiar to us managed to make it on stage and take an initial bow in those first days.

You wouldn’t have recognized some of the players, however, without a scorecard that hadn’t yet been issued. Here’s just one striking example. On September 15, 2001, James Risen wrote a front-page Times piece, headlined, “Lawmakers See Need to Loosen Rules on C.I.A.” It was all about letting the dogs of covert warfare loose on our world. He reported on the almost instant urge, not only in the Bush administration but in Congress, to nullify the Watergate-era ban on assassinating foreign leaders as well as the sudden importance of hiring “unsavory foreign agents,” or as Democratic Senator Bob Graham put it (through his press spokesman), “[W]e are not going to find the kinds of spies we need in monasteries.” This would, of course, turn out to be part of the Cheney program to defenestrate Vietnam/Watergate-era “reforms” that even modestly empowered Congress and create an unfettered commander-in-chief presidency.

Only when you leave the front page and make your way deep into Risen’s piece, do things get truly eerie, though. In May 2004, the public learned that, one lazy August day in 2001 in Crawford, Texas, the CIA had given George Bush a one-page presidential daily briefing or PDB that was entitled “Bin Laden determined to strike in US.” (The White House finally declassified the document under pressure from the 9/11 Commission.)

In the Risen article, however, was this tiny passage:

“Intelligence officials defended the performance of the C.I.A. They emphasized that while the agency had failed to provide a precise warning of the attack, it had issued repeated warnings — one as recently as August — that the terrorism suspect Osama bin Laden and his network were seeking to attack the domestic United States.'”

In other words, only a few days after the 9/11 attacks, someone — assumedly in the CIA and knowledgeable — had already leaked the dirty truth. Talk about a hidden history of our world in (almost) plain sight!