Top White House officials, including President Bush and Vice President Cheney, have been on speaking tours lately promoting progress in Iraq.  Earlier this week, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld delivered a speech at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in which he criticized the news media's coverage of the war, claiming it emphasized negative stories, and said Iraqis themselves are more optimistic about their country.

The speeches and the administration's policies have drawn sharp criticism, as well as support.  Richard Miniter, terrorism journalist and author of Disinformation: 22 Media Myths that Undermine the War on Terror, offered the following comment on President Bush's recent speech on Iraq delivered at the U.S. Naval Academy:  "Withdrawing on an artificial deadline would endanger the American people, harm our military, and make the Middle East less stable."

Recently, Mr. Miniter joined CFIF Senior Vice President & Corporate Counsel Renee Giachino to discuss his latest book and the media's coverage of the War on Terror.  What follows are excerpts from the interview that aired on "Your Turn:  Meeting Nonsense with Common Sense" on WEBY 1330 AM, Northwest Florida's Talk Radio.

GIACHINO:  If you are like me, it is hard to pick up a newspaper or turn on your television without being bombarded with news about the war.  Unfortunately, many of the things that I read and hear are conflicting; it's hard to make heads or tails of the news - "Bush is saying this; no he said that."  In fact, just today, there was a sensational story about President Bush threatening to bomb Al Jazeera and some are now saying that that story was planted to generate sympathy for the terrorist channel.

My next guest is very familiar with all of the disinformation that is out there.  He is the author of the recently released book titled Disinformation:  22 Media Myths that Undermine the War on Terror.  He has been published in virtually every major U.S. newspaper, including The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and The Christian Science Monitor.  He is the author of two New York Times bestsellers:  Losing bin Laden:  How Bill Clinton's Failures Unleashed Global Terror and Shadow War:  The Untold Story of How America Is Winning the War on Terror.

He joins us this afternoon to talk about the book that I just mentioned:  Disinformation:  22 Media Myths That Undermine the War on Terror.

Please welcome Mr. Richard Miniter.

Mr. Miniter, thank you so much for joining us.

MINITER:  Thank you for having me on.

GIACHINO:  Mr. Miniter, before we turn to your latest book, I want to set this up by talking about your previous books, because in some ways these books really are a series on what has happened and what is happening in the War on Terror.  Can you first please tell us the basic premise of the book Losing bin Laden?

MINITER:  Losing bin Laden is a history of America and bin Laden prior to the 9-11 attacks.  Basically I started off with a simple question on the morning after September 11^th which was how did we get here?  How did it happen that we were attacked?  What was known about Al Qaeda?  When did they begin to threaten us?  Did they attack us before?

And I discovered the very first time bin Laden attempted to kill Americans was December 29, 1992, just after Bill Clinton had won election and just before he had been sworn in.  There was an attempt to bomb two towers housing U.S. marines in Yemen, looking a bit like the World Trade Center, actually.

Of course, the second attack that was carried out by bin Laden against the United States was the World Trade Center in 1993 with a car bomb.  So I sort of go through the history of that and the Clinton Administration and Al Qaeda's moves to attack America and assassinate the President and to assassinate the Pope and the moves by the U.S. in response.  There were various arrests and various methods of sharing intelligence and working together to prevent a major series of attacks on the Millennium night in 1999.  There was going to be about a dozen attacks across America and those were prevented under the Clinton Administration. 

So it's a history, basically, but it reads like a thriller.

GIACHINO:  Then that takes you to the second book.  In the second book you write about the untold story of how America is winning the war on terror.  Are we still winning it?

MINITER:  I think on balance we are.  I don't think that everything is going right but I think it is going a lot better than you'd realize just from watching the evening news.

Having spent time on the ground in Iraq, and across the Middle East and in North Africa and Southeast Asia, I have seen a lot of what our military intelligence people are up to.  And I have seen the results of the various operations and I think it is far more impressive than people realize.

First of all, the news does not like to report what did not happen - such as Al Qaeda was planning an attack to sink U.S. warships in the Strait of Gibraltar, that's the little piece of water between Spain and Morocco.  Thanks to some interrogation at Guantanamo, they got some clues and they began working sources in Morocco - both the CIA and Moroccan intelligence -- and eventually they arrested the guys who were just days away from a major attack.

I also talk in Shadow War about how it turned out that Al Qaeda had assembled a small fleet of ships, about 15 ships, mostly cargo vessels that were used to transport terrorists and bombs and how the U.S. Navy developed a special task force to go after this fleet and one-by-one picked off every single one of these ships in harbors around the world.

So there is a lot more going on in the War on Terror than I think people realize.  Here is a snapshot that really sums it up:  more than 5,000 Al Qaeda have been killed or captured in 102 different countries since 9-11.  That is a lot.  It shows you how global it is - it is more than just Iraq and Afghanistan.  It shows you that our effort is truly global.  And 5,000 is a significant number because the global population of Al Qaeda is supposed to be about 15,000 on 9-11.  That means that we wiped out about 1/3 of their forces which is a lot more than the average American gets.

GIACHINO:  So some of it is not just that the media gives out disinformation or misinformation, it's like you said, sometimes they do not give out any information at all.  In your latest book Disinformation you write about some of the things that our government can do to improve the situation of disinformation and some of it is to make more readily available to the public and the media some documentation and information that they have out there.

So, let me ask: is the media is solely at fault or do you think the media does not get entirely accurate information - and maybe it is partly because they would rarely report it anyway or they can't be trusted with it?

MINITER:  I think there is an extraordinary amount of information out there.  What it requires is energy.  Reporters have to be required to pick up the phone or go into Lexis-Nexis and read documents.  They have to be willing to do their jobs.  If they are, you would be surprised to learn how much is out there in the public records.  I found that generally military officers are willing to speak and do interviews, and even be quoted by name.  And those commanders are often very detailed in what they say and they are also very honest; they tell you when they have failed and they tell you when they have made mistakes because these are men and women who make decisions every day and they know that they are going to live with their record.  Just the same as a quarterback does not lie about the score of last night's game, military officials, generally speaking, will give you a pretty honest account.

Where the problem comes in is with the politicians - especially the Democrats in Congress who have decided that they want to undermine the war and make the war seem hopeless in the hopes that it will lead to an American defeat and that defeat will in turn lead to defeat of President Bush.  So the Democrats have put themselves into this impossible political position where they are hoping for the defeat of the country in order to bring themselves back into power.  I think that is a very bad position for them to be in institutionally.

GIACHINO:  In your most recent book, you dispel many of the current myths surrounding the war on terror and I want to touch on some of them - we probably won't have time to touch on all 22 of them.  Earlier in the interview you mentioned that numbers after 9-11 - roughly 15,000 members in the terrorist cell, and that now there is roughly 1/3 fewer.

With respect to one of the myths you write about in the book that relates to the widely held belief that the Mexican border is the most likely place for Al Qaeda terrorists to sneak into our homeland.  If it is not the Mexican border - which in the book you suggest that it is not, then where is it?

MINITER:  First of all, I think that terrorists coming to the United States by land are probably the least likely possibility.  All of the 9-11 hijackers came by air.  Most of the Al Qaeda terrorists who have been arrested in this country - and bear in mind more than 700 have been arrested inside the United States since 9-11, most of them have come by air and a few by boat.  Virtually none have come by land.

Let's compare Canada and Mexico for a minute from an Al Qaeda perspective.   In Canada you see a large Muslim immigrant population in the major cities.  That means that Al Qaeda can blend in.  In Mexico, there are not significant Muslim populations or Muslim immigrants in the major cities. 

Secondly, Canada has one of the most generous welfare states in the world.  And we know from captured Al Qaeda manuals that when you are setting up a terrorist cell, the first thing you do is get every member of that cell on welfare.  That way they do not have to work and they can work full-time on terrorism.  Well Mexico does not really have a welfare system.  So again, advantage Canada.

The third thing is lax law enforcement.  There are so many politically correct restrictions on Canadian police that when they do arrest a suspected terrorist - and they have a number of times, the Canadian media immediately turns on them and calls them racist and Islamaphobes and groups form calling for the immediate release of the prisoners even before they have been charged.  The legal community is very hostile.  The judges are usually very hostile to the prosecutors who bring the case to try to prosecute the suspected Al Qaeda terrorists.

So as a result, Canada is a pretty friendly environment for Al Qaeda terrorists - for better or for worse.  And they figured that out.  That's why although we have never captured a single Al Qaeda terrorist on or near the Mexican border; there have been a number of them captured near Canada.  This includes the gentleman who was plotting to blow up Los Angeles International Airport in December 1999.

GIACHINO:  Again, I am not sure if this is misinformation or disinformation, but I did in fact earlier today receive an e-mail from the organization "We Need a Fence" and they indicated that it has just been revealed that an Al Qaeda operative on the FBI's terrorist watch list was recently taken into custody by the U.S.-Mexico border.  So they may now have caught there very first one in that area.

MINITER:  Did they say who that was?

GIACHINO:  Let me see if I have that in here.  No, they sure don't.

MINITER:  Well these reports crop up from time to time.  I investigated every single one of them - just as U.S. Homeland Security and the CIA has.  And it turns out that there basically, with every previous report, upon further investigation it turned out to be false.  But we don't know about this yet.

GIACHINO:  Well I have your website address and maybe what I will do is just forward this announcement to you and you can contact the head of that organization - "We Need a Fence."  The gentleman Colin Hanna is spearheading that effort and he has been on the show.

Obviously it is in his organizations best interest if that did happen because they are working very hard in Washington, D.C. right now with their current effort to get legislation passed to build a security fence at the Mexican border.

And I raised with him when he was on the show why the focus is only on Mexico and why not Canada.  And he had the opposite opinion - although there may not in fact be the facts to support that.

MINITER:  Let me respond to that briefly.  I am not saying that the Mexican border is not a problem.  It is, for a whole bunch of reasons.  Just not for the reasons of Al Qaeda terrorism.

GIACHINO:  You are right, and Mr. Hanna made that point although terrorism is certainly something that gets more attention on Capitol Hill than a lot of the other issues surrounding illegal immigration.

Again, I think that the numbers will either be there or they won't.  Either they did catch this guy or they did not.  So we will see how that plays out in the news media.

But you were talking about how many of them do not come by foot - by land, they come by plane.  This goes to another one of the myths that you write about in the book.  This goes to racial profiling and how it will not stop another massive terrorist attack.

And I think you are right.  Terrorists do not always look like terrorists.  Take for instance, the latest woman-to-be-bomber that we had.  I am sure we don't always target Middle Eastern woman near as much as we target the Middle Eastern men.

You also noted, and I was surprised to learn this in your book, that most terrorists come from the middle class and not from the poor.  That again, I would assume, will make it even more difficult for us to stop them from coming in.  Is that true?

MINITER:  That's right.  Most terrorists come from intact middle income families.  Most have grown up with both father and mother in an upper-middle class household.  More than two-thirds of them go to and graduate from colleges and universities.  If you look at every aspect of their lives - disposable income, education, the jobs they go into, the jobs they end up in as professionals include doctors and lawyers and dentists, lab assistants or semi-professionals like military officers, these are the professions that they go into.  As to just looking at the demographics of these people, you would say that they are the best and brightest of the Arab world or the Islamic world.

Unfortunately their minds have been poisoned by and ideology which they have found attractive.  There is actually an idea that they were recruited when they were very, very young.  That also is not true.  Based on the databases of more than 600 captured Al Qaeda and the records that have been developed, University of Pennsylvania professor Mark Sageman, who is a former CIA official and now a forensic psychiatrist, he was searching this data base and what he discovered was that most Al Qaeda are recruited outside their home country and they are studying abroad and they are vulnerable.  They feel like a stranger in a strange land.  They don't understand the customs.  These are men usually who are not used to co-ed education.  They deal at 18 or 19 years old with girls the way a 13 or 14 year old boy might actually do so, because they have been totally cut off from women.  And that awkwardness creates a sense of alienation or isolation and therefore they end up clustering together and the identity is Islam.  And then as you add the radical ideology to it, which is not real Islam, but a political equivalent of Islam, they find that very attractive.  It becomes some way to explain what they perceive as the rejection of themselves by the world.  They say "okay, I am in turn going to reject the world, I am going to take on this ideology, I am going to change the world."  And that is the psychological building block that becomes the terrorist cell.

And the once you are in a terrorist cell, the secrecy that is involved, the whole group identity - this gang like group identity that is forged, they are more tightly knit than a platoon of Marines, it gives them a purpose which is maintaining themselves.  So when they go to kill and die they are doing anything they can to perpetuate the cell, which gives them meaning in their lives.

So it is not money that drives people or lack of money that drives people to become terrorists.  It is ideology and social dynamics.

GIACHINO:  I think that reading this book has made me a better consumer of news media information; certainly, I can no longer pick up the newspaper and read through it and assume that everything that I read is accurate.  We are going to have to - and fortunately we have the Internet that allows us to do this, we are going to have to get out there and look at the same issue from multiple perspectives.

We were just talking about the profile of people who commit terrorist activities and I think that we are certainly seeing terrorist actions here in the United States and overseas.  A lot of things are happening with respect to social issues and you raised that in your last comment as well.

You have lived and worked overseas more than many authors, writers and reporters combined.  On an entirely separate subject, but I think it is still related, can you give us your thoughts on the Paris riots and how France is handling it?

MINITER:  I think this is what happens when you put off hard decisions.  When it finally becomes time to make that hard decision it is far worse than if you had dealt with it earlier.  For the past 20-25 years in France if you go to any of the major French cities you see that what they call politely in the news "suburbs" but really they are public housing projects that ring the outer cities.  The police have decided that they will cut deals with the Muslim gangs and they will not patrol these areas and they will not try to enforce their laws.  In exchange, these gangs do not try to leave the housing projects, which are the general vicinity of these housing projects.

This is a very bad deal for the police to make.  You don't make deals with criminals, first of all. Second of all, by ignoring the problem there is a growing criminality in the African immigrant communities in France.  When the day of reckoning came, and I think it did, when they first decided to burst out of the suburbs and start burning cars on a vast scale and wrecking shops and basically engaging in what looks like a civil war, which is a frightening glimpse into the future of France.

Today there are more practicing Muslims in France than baptized Roman Catholics.  If you want to frighten a Frenchman, and I used to do this a lot when I would go to France and someone would get uppity and start criticizing the United States, I would say "well I just have one question, who is going to pay for your glorious welfare state when the average Frenchman prays five times a day?"

GIACHINO:  That's interesting.  Well your book contains 22 myths about the media's coverage of the War on Terror.  There are myths about bin Laden, myths about September 11^th, myths about Iraq, myths about terrorism, liberal myths and conservative myths.

We have about 30 seconds left.  I know that one of the chapters in the book talks about how the media likes to make it sound like Iraq is another Vietnam and you disagree and devote an entire chapter to that subject.  Do you think how the media is playing out the war in Iraq affects our members of the military in any way?

MINITER:  Yes, I think that by focusing so much on our enemies' movements and successes - car bombings and such, while entirely ignoring the successes of our troops - like Operation Steel Curtain which just ended today and was a tremendous victory over the insurgents with more than 100 of the terrorists being captured and thousands of weapons and bomb making materials were seized, a very successful operation which the news media just does not report.  By tilting the coverage so much in favor of the enemy, first of all it encourages the enemy to keep fighting because they are given the impression that they are right on the verge of winning because the media keeps telling them so.  Secondly, it makes it harder for the free Iraqis and the Americans to get allies in the Middle East because of course Al Jazeera watches American news too and they must assume that it is far, far worse than the media's portrayal so for them to say negative things about America it must mean that it is going very badly indeed in Iraq - which is of course the opposite of the truth.  And so it makes it harder for us to recruit allies in the Arab world and it is having a profoundly negative effect.

And I think that one of the biggest failures of the Bush Administration is the failure to communicate with the American public and tell them on a regular basis exactly what is happening in the world - the good, the bad and the ugly.  Letting the media tell the story against America and against the President, Bush may come to regret letting them do that.

GIACHINO:  Well thank you very much.  I appreciate your writing this book and it is going to make me a more educated consumer of the news media.  The book is Disinformation:  22 Media Myths that Undermine the War on Terror.  Thank you for your time today, we appreciate it.

MINITER:  Thank you so much for having me on.