August was a month about the distance between the story and the thing itself. In Moscow, 4 1/2 years of carefully policed vocabulary finally gave the game away: Vladimir Putin still insists Ukraine has no agency of its own, while describing a country capable of burning Russian warehouses a thousand miles behind the front line. In Washington, the president has claimed total victory over Iran; three charts showed an economy in genuine collapse and a regime still very much in charge of it.
And the press secretary who spent 18 months making herself the story announced her exit the day after the story became difficult. The rest of the month was about the gap between an image and a life. The Prince of Wales has built a strategy for saving the monarchy on relatability, then sent his heir to a school costing $85,000 a year.
Newsweek reexamined the final weeks before September 11, 2001, and found not a failure of law but a failure to read what was already sitting on the desk. And a woman in Indiana went back over the decision her faith had made for her and asked, for the first time, who it had actually served. Here are six of my favorite articles from the month that made sense of it all for Newsweek members: This was the opening entry in a day-by-day reconstruction, republished for the 25th anniversary, of the 37 days in which 19 men moved uninterrupted toward the worst terrorist attack on American soil.
Arkin argues that the familiar exculpation—that the law tied everyone’s hands—does not survive contact with the record. Nothing prevented the FBI from searching Zacarias Moussaoui’s belongings after his arrest in Minneapolis on August 16; the bureau simply chose not to seek a criminal warrant. The CIA had held reports for more than a year that two known Al-Qaeda operatives were inside the United States.
The mastermind was already in the system, indicted in 1996, and moving under aliases the agencies had in hand. The Phoenix Memo had been written in July. Condoleezza Rice would later say nobody could have predicted such an attack; the reconstruction shows the FBI discussing precisely that scenario.
The Prince of Wales has spent years making the case for the monarchy through aggressive relatability: the cider, Aston Villa, the school run, a turn on the Kelce brothers’ podcast. This cover story sets that against two problems converging at once. His heir is starting at Eton, at $85,000 a year, a school fewer than one percent of British children could contemplate; and his estranged brother is moving back to Britain, six years after leaving, to compete for the same cameras.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
