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The Media and 9/11: How We Did – The Atlantic

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/09/the-media-and-9-11-how-we-did/244818/[9/15/2016 9:30:07 AM]

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After the attacks, journalists were swept up in the national feelings of fear

and outrage — and failed to do their job

tonythemisfit/Flickr

On the tenth anniversary of 9/11, journalists are spewing forth endless

The Media and 9/11: How We Did

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The Media and 9/11: How We Did – The Atlantic

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/09/the-media-and-9-11-how-we-did/244818/[9/15/2016 9:30:07 AM]

retrospectives — asking people to recall “where were you when,” interviewing

anguished families of victims, and probing whether politicians have been

successful in their “war on terror.” It is unlikely, however, that journalists will

look at themselves and their profession and ask, “How did we do post 9/11?”

They should.

“Osama bin Laden wasn’t Einstein, not even Lenin
or Che Guevara. He was Charles Manson.”

The role — many would say, failure — of the media in the run-up to the Iraq war

has been widely debated. But two questions more immediately related to 9/11

have been less loudly argued: Did we exaggerate the threat of Osama bin Laden

and Al Qaeda, thus contributing to the collective paranoia, intrusive security

measures at airports, and multi-billion dollar security industry that survives on

fear? And did we fail to monitor the erosion of civil liberties?

During the Cold War, a communist-under-every-bed hysteria was fueled by

demagogic politicians, aided and abetted by journalists who didn’t want to risk

being branded anti-American, or who perhaps shared the view. I remember a

reporter in Egypt once telling me that she knew how to see her stories get on

the front-page: put a reference to “communism” in the first three graphs. After

9/11, Al Qaeda terrorists were ubiquitous, and “linked to Al Qaeda” became a

journalistic mantra, still in wide use today.

When I was in Southeast Asia from 2002 until 2006, stories about the

Philippine organization Abu Sayyaf routinely asserted that it was “linked to Al

Qaeda.” Yes, at one time in the early 1990s, Osama bin Laden may have given

money to the organization, but after 9/11 it degenerated into a lawless gang of

bandits that kidnapped and murdered for money, without any ideological

commitment.

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http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/09/israel-and-obama-big-issues-in-the-race-to-replace-weiner/244823/

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2011/09/from-sweden-a-new-vision-of-americas-black-power-movement/244832/

The Media and 9/11: How We Did – The Atlantic

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/09/the-media-and-9-11-how-we-did/244818/[9/15/2016 9:30:07 AM]

What does “linked to Al Qaeda” mean, anyway? That

the “linked” group’s leaders pledge allegiance to

Osama bin Laden? That some members trained at Al

Qaeda camps, or that the terrorists share a hatred of

the United States and Jews?

Osama bin Laden wasn’t Einstein, not even Lenin or Che Guevara. He was

Charles Manson. Al Qaeda never posed an existential threat to the United

States, failed to establish control in a single country, let alone establish a

caliphate from Morocco to Indonesia. What he did on 9/11 was a crime, a crime

writ large, not the opening salvo in a war, and we should have treated him as a

long-bearded psychopath cowering in a cave.

Instead, like the politicians, journalists were consumed with the fear that there

might be a terrorist attack they hadn’t anticipated, and that there were Al

Qaeda sleeper cells crawling around Europe. Newspapers deployed their

resources accordingly.

They were far less concerned about civil liberties. Editors long ignored isolated

reports that the United States was holding suspected terrorists in secret

prisons. “We wouldn’t publish it even if we knew,” a senior editor at a major

American newspaper said when it was suggested that his paper devote its

impressive investigative talent to exposing the secret prisons.

That outlook, formed by 9/11, was shared throughout the industry. It took four

years before the “secret prisons” were exposed, by Dana Priest at the

Washington Post (though her editors, at the request of the White House,

withheld some of what she had found, including the countries that were

cooperating with the U.S.).

When reports began to emerge that suspects were being tortured, the Bush

Administration came up with the euphemism “enhanced interrogation

techniques.”

We supinely went along. For decades prior to 9/11, the four largest American

newspapers called waterboarding torture, according to a study by the Joan

http://www.theatlantic.com/special-report/9-11-ten-years-later/

The Media and 9/11: How We Did – The Atlantic

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/09/the-media-and-9-11-how-we-did/244818/[9/15/2016 9:30:07 AM]

Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard. Then, in

2004, in the aftermath of revelations that the Bush Administration was

engaged in waterboarding of terrorist suspects, the four newspapers almost

never referred to waterboarding as torture.

When suspected terrorist suspects were taken to Guantanamo, they were by

any common understanding prisoners. But the government called them

“detainees,” and so did we, which sounds far less pernicious.

A book could be written about the lives that have been ruined by allegations

from intelligence officials that a man was a “suspected” terrorist. We routinely

reported on these arrests without flinching. One of the first cases of

extraordinary rendition was that of Muhammad Saad Iqbal, a Pakistani who

was picked up in Jakarta in December of 2001. He was secretly shipped off by

the CIA to Egypt, where he was tortured. Indonesia said he was sent to Egypt

because he had an Egyptian passport and was wanted for visa violations, which

a major American and an Australian newspaper reported prominently in

stories that gave credence to the allegations that he was a terrorist sent to

Indonesia to hatch other plots. In fact, he had never even been to Egypt, nor

Afghanistan. He was completely innocent, without any “links” of any nature to

Al Qaeda; indeed, after being held by Americans for seven years, he was

released without a single charge being filed against him. No one will be held

accountable for the damage to his life — not public officials, not journalists.

In Britain, perhaps the most glaring example of journalists’ being too willing to

accept what law enforcement officials said in terrorism cases was the arrest of

the pilot Lotfi Raissi a few weeks after 9/11. The FBI and British authorities

alleged that Raissi had trained some of the 9/11 pilots. The evidence seemed

compelling — pages missing from his flight log — and few journalists expressed

skepticism (here, I must ashamedly plead guilty). As we subsequently learned,

the pages were “missing” due to the negligence of Scotland Yard, and Raissi

was completely exonerated.

A brief explanation for what happened to the press after 9/11 can be found in a

book by a New York Times correspondent. In Bush’s Law: The Remaking of

The Media and 9/11: How We Did – The Atlantic

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/09/the-media-and-9-11-how-we-did/244818/[9/15/2016 9:30:07 AM]

American Justice, Eric Lichtblau tells how, in 2003, Attorney General John

Ashcroft said in testimony to a congressional committee that a mosque in

Brooklyn was sending money to Al Qaeda. Lichtblau wrote a story that ran on

the front page, even though the Times reporter in Brooklyn cautioned against

accepting Ashcroft’s allegation. The Brooklyn reporter was right. The story was

wrong, as Lichtblau acknowledges in his book.

“We in the media were no doubt swept up in that same national mood of fear

and outrage,” Lichtblau writes.

His honorable candor should invite, if not shame, his colleagues to do some of

their own professional soul-searching.

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