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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
This just in: President Bush dishes out overblown al-Qaida threats -- and the press laps them up.
Feb 11, 2002 | For news consumers prone to anxiety, the end of January was probably the scariest stretch of time since the first weeks after the Sept. 11 terror attacks. After a fairly quiet month on the home front, a parade of senior government officials, including President Bush himself, suddenly appeared on every news channel, detailing a slew of grave and startling terrorist scenarios.
Bush's State of the Union address contained chilling warnings about "thousands of dangerous killers" who have spread throughout the world "like ticking time bombs set to go off without warning."
Later, White House communications director Karen Hughes told reporters 100,000 men had been trained in al-Qaida camps and were now scattered in 60 countries.
Bush also revealed that U.S. intelligence officers had found in Afghanistan caves "diagrams of American nuclear power plants and public water facilities, detailed instructions for making chemical weapons, surveillance maps of American cities, and thorough descriptions of landmarks in America." Even the Seattle Space Needle had been cased by al-Qaida, new documents revealed.
The same week, FBI Director Robert Mueller warned that undetected al-Qaida "sleeper cells" may still be operating on American soil. The FBI also issued an alert to public utilities warning them that Osama bin Laden's operatives were eyeing dams and reservoirs.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld warned Americans to prepare for other attacks that "could grow vastly more deadly than those we suffered" Sept. 11. And CIA Director George Tenet sent a report to Congress saying agents found crude diagrams of nuclear weapons in a suspected al-Qaida safe house in Afghanistan. Maybe the scariest scenario of all was an alleged terrorist plot to fly a commercial airliner into an American nuclear power plant.
The bad news came so fast and furious that it was hard to get a handle on what was strangest about it: that the Bush administration, which has so far maintained strict secrecy about its domestic anti-terror operations, was suddenly so talkative, or that the media reported the thinly documented terror threats so breathlessly and uncritically.
This is the same administration, after all, that refused to identify hundreds of mostly Middle Eastern immigrants jailed in the U.S. since Sept. 11, that ordered many routine immigration hearings closed to the public and then mandated that records of the proceedings not be released to anyone. Since then, it has refused to release the identities of al-Qaida fighters held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and proposed that accused terrorists be tried in secret military tribunals. It has also refused to release information about questionable U.S. military raids in Afghanistan that reportedly resulted in innocent civilian or Northern Alliance casualties.
Yet when it came to suggestive and potentially deadly terrorist scenarios, the White House opened the spigots for the press. The administration's previous suggestion that Americans go about their normal lives seemed to have been replaced with the credo, "Be afraid. Be very afraid."
But the new al-Qaida scare was a win-win for the president and the news media. Suddenly the story of America's war on terrorism, which for weeks had been sagging while the Enron scandal gained steam, had new juice. It came just in time for the Bush's hawkish State of the Union address, just in time for his proposed $48 billion increase in defense spending, and just when an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll showed nearly half of Americans felt the nation was back to normal, or nearly normal.
The doomsday revelations also let the media, especially television, tease viewers with tantalizing hints of new terror threats that would keep frightened Americans tuned to the TV again. CNN reported "al-Qaida planned to crash a hijacked plane into a nuclear power plant in this country." A concerned Bill O'Reilly informed Fox News' viewers "bin Laden's terrorists were planning a nuclear attack on America," and that the fresh information, "escalates the terrorist situation into another realm."
Newsweek dubbed Bush's State of the Union address "scary as hell."
The address was scary, but not because of the news it contained about terror threats. It was alarming because Bush used the threat of "thousands" of al-Qaida terrorists loose in America, and the subsequent alarming warnings, to write himself a blank check to prosecute the war, even to widen it to fight a new "axis of evil" that includes Iraq, Iran and North Korea. Even scarier was the way the media mostly let him get away with it.
