2008 Woodie Awards
A Response from the Right Side
David Acocella
Issue date: 3/23/05 Section: Letters to the Editors
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Beginning in the Fall of 2004 after the Republican National Convention and going on through this week, Kevin Agnese, who the Quadrangle lists as a staff writer but rarely writes anything except opinion pieces, has continually lied to Manhattan College students. I think it's about time that a rebuttal to his "work" is published in the interest of fairness and balance for the students of this college.
?Those who have read Mr. Agnese's opinion pieces and know anything about politics can obviously distinguish him as far left of center. His pieces are opinions, but I think Manhattan College students deserve better than to have to read his biased and baseless headlines and articles on how he views the world. As a former member of the Kerry campaign, we cannot trust him to give us a balanced view of the opposite side. We see this every week. Agnese desperately flings whatever mud he can at the President and Republicans because of his obvious dislike for them. His sour attitude over America choosing George W. Bush and conservatism has made his more recent pieces illustrate that he will not comprehend or accept the fact that a majority of the voting populous of this country does not agree with his point of view.
?His most recent article entitled "Memo Warned White House of al Qaeda Threat," was no exception. I also took this article to be a new low for Mr. Agnese. Agnese's own quote from the memo shows that it did not warn of specific attacks. This coincided with what former National Security Advisor and current Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has been saying all along; she said that saying al-Qaeda was a threat was stating the obvious. Without specific intelligence, there was little the Bush administration could have known about 9/11.Aviation officials were not lulled into a false sense of security. The problem was our pre-9/11 intelligence community. There was little or no communication between agencies and important intelligence did not get to the places it needed to get to. Some of these walls were put up by the Clinton administration. Reforms by the Bush administration since then have corrected some of the problems that were never addressed by the Clinton administration which dealt with one domestic terrorist attack and several overseas attacks. Agnese also tries to take a shot at the President by suggesting that the administration tried to block the release of this memo until after the election. If this is true, it sounds a lot like a Kerry tactic. John Kerry refused to release his tainted Vietnam records even though he based much of his candidacy on his Vietnam service and the President had released his. David Alston, who campaigned for Kerry and spoke at the Democratic National Convention, also refused to release his records. When Kerry and he gave conflicting accounts of the action that got Kerry his Silver Star and reporters questioned Alston, he disappeared from the campaign trail for the rest of the election.
?Those who have read Mr. Agnese's opinion pieces and know anything about politics can obviously distinguish him as far left of center. His pieces are opinions, but I think Manhattan College students deserve better than to have to read his biased and baseless headlines and articles on how he views the world. As a former member of the Kerry campaign, we cannot trust him to give us a balanced view of the opposite side. We see this every week. Agnese desperately flings whatever mud he can at the President and Republicans because of his obvious dislike for them. His sour attitude over America choosing George W. Bush and conservatism has made his more recent pieces illustrate that he will not comprehend or accept the fact that a majority of the voting populous of this country does not agree with his point of view.
?His most recent article entitled "Memo Warned White House of al Qaeda Threat," was no exception. I also took this article to be a new low for Mr. Agnese. Agnese's own quote from the memo shows that it did not warn of specific attacks. This coincided with what former National Security Advisor and current Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has been saying all along; she said that saying al-Qaeda was a threat was stating the obvious. Without specific intelligence, there was little the Bush administration could have known about 9/11.Aviation officials were not lulled into a false sense of security. The problem was our pre-9/11 intelligence community. There was little or no communication between agencies and important intelligence did not get to the places it needed to get to. Some of these walls were put up by the Clinton administration. Reforms by the Bush administration since then have corrected some of the problems that were never addressed by the Clinton administration which dealt with one domestic terrorist attack and several overseas attacks. Agnese also tries to take a shot at the President by suggesting that the administration tried to block the release of this memo until after the election. If this is true, it sounds a lot like a Kerry tactic. John Kerry refused to release his tainted Vietnam records even though he based much of his candidacy on his Vietnam service and the President had released his. David Alston, who campaigned for Kerry and spoke at the Democratic National Convention, also refused to release his records. When Kerry and he gave conflicting accounts of the action that got Kerry his Silver Star and reporters questioned Alston, he disappeared from the campaign trail for the rest of the election.