“In an article on April 3, 2001, the Wall Street Journal reported that the [Bush] administration had deliberately decided to play down bin Laden’s role [in the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole] by not mentioning him in public: ‘U.S. counterterrorism officials believe they inflated Mr. bin Laden’s power and prestige in recent years by portraying him as the ultimate terrorist mastermind and the top threat to America’s security.’ Indeed, the State Department’s annual Patterns of Global Terrorism report, which had devoted an entire page to bin Laden’s life history and ambitions in 2000, omitted that page in the 2001 edition.”
– Roy Gutman, How We Missed the Story, Page 250