Wasn't Rove Right About MoveOn?

Certainly Karl Rove's charge that "liberals" failed to grasp the true significance of the September 11 terrorist attacks was too broad. But in a significant part of his speech, Rove seemed to be directing his words specifically at MoveOn, and in that case, wasn't he right on the money? "In the wake of 9/11 conservatives believed it was time to unleash the might and power of the United States military against the Taliban," Rove said. "In the wake of 9/11 liberals believed it was time to submit a petition. I am not joking. Submitting a petition is precisely what MoveOn.org did. It was a petition imploring the powers that be to use moderation and restraint in responding to the terrorist attacks against the United States.'"

After Rove's comments, MoveOn released a statement saying that, "MoveOn did not oppose the U.S. military action in Afghanistan." And the Washington Post reported that MoveOn political chief Eli Pariser "disputed Rove's characterization of the petition calling for moderation and restraint, saying that the petition was a personal project before he was affiliated with MoveOn and that it was not on the group's Web site at the time of the Afghanistan war."

But what I discovered in the course of researching my book, The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy, suggested that MoveOn was in fact opposed to the war in Afghanistan, and that MoveOn founders Joan Blades and Wes Boyd hired Pariser in significant part because of his activism against that war.

It began with a man who has received very little attention in all of this, a young film student named David Pickering. Visiting his parents' home in Brooklyn on September 11, 2001, Pickering immediately began to worry about the consequences of U.S. retaliation for the terrorist attacks. "It was this incredible moment in which all doors were opened and the world was seeming to come together," Pickering told me in an interview last September. "I had this feeling that it would be a shame if that were spoiled by a spirit of vengeance."

The next day, September 12, Pickering wrote a petition calling on President Bush to use "moderation and restraint" in responding to 9/11 and "to use, wherever possible, international judicial institutions and international human rights law to bring to justice those responsible for the attacks, rather than the instruments of war, violence or destruction."

At the same time, Pariser, who had graduated from college the year before and was working at a liberal nonprofit organization in Massachusetts, was writing a similar petition, which he put on a website he created called 9-11peace.org. Pariser noticed Pickering's work and e-mailed him to suggest that they merge their sites. Pickering agreed, and 9-11peace.org featured a petition which read:

We implore the powers that be to use, wherever possible, international judicial institutions and international human rights law to bring to justice those responsible for the attacks, rather than the instruments of war, violence or destruction. Furthermore, we assert that the government of a nation must be presumed separate and distinct from any terrorist group that may operate within its borders, and therefore cannot be held unduly accountable for the latter's crimes...

Meanwhile, across the country in Berkeley, California, Boyd and Blades were writing an anti-war petition of their own. Entitled "Justice, not Terror," it read, in full: "Our leaders are under tremendous pressure to act in the aftermath of the terrible events of Sept. 11th. We the undersigned support justice, not escalating violence, which would only play into the terrorists' hands."

As they staked out their own anti-war position, Blades and Boyd were also following the progress of 9-11peace.org. In September 2004 I asked Blades how she came to know Pariser. "It was after 9/11," she told me. "He put out a message similar in results to the one we had, basically an e-mail petition asking for restraint. It went viral on an international scale...Eli's petition grew to half a million in half a week. Peter [Schurman, the executive director of MoveOn] contacted him because he figured he probably needed some help. We did provide him with some assistance, and we started working together on other issues and eventually merged." In the end, their shared opposition to U.S. military retaliation for the September 11 attacks brought Pariser and MoveOn together. As far as MoveOn was concerned, Rove was right.