Why America Was Unprepared

by Ken Sanes
Oct. 4, 2001

Two days after terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center, Jerry Falwell made his now-infamous remarks about how America had brought the disaster on itself. According to Falwell, the attack was God's retaliation for the sins of "abortionists", feminists, "pagans", gay activists, the ACLU and People for the American Way.

Referring to all of these groups and to everyone who had worked to secularize America, Falwell said, "I point the finger in their face and say, 'You helped this happen.'" As quoted in the Washington Post, he also said that the destruction may go much further if God allows "the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve." 

Falwell's remarks were rightly compared to some of the beliefs of the terrorists. Like them, he seemed to confuse the actions of evil men for those of God. And he tried to use the terrorist war on America to advance his own side in the culture war, at a time when the nation was barely coming to terms with its grief.

But Falwell's comments do point to an essential truth, which is that the terrorists didn't carry out their attack without help. America unwittingly assisted them and, just as Falwell claims, it did so through its own moral failings, although they were not the kind of moral failings Falwell had in mind.

More specifically, America made itself vulnerable to attack because it was led astray by the bad practices of its own media and government. Both pretended to be engaged in the nation's business when they were really engaged in their own. Both failed to focus on the danger because doing nothing was easier and less risky than sounding the alarm. 

In the case of the media, it is obvious that most journalists understood that terrorists and rogue nations were developing the ability to engage in attacks of mass destruction. They also knew that we might see no evidence of those attacks before they occurred. But they neglected to devote the kind of sustained attention to the danger that was necessary to get government to act.

To understand how misguided this was, consider the way the media behaves when it believes it has a good story. Look at the overwhelming force with which it descended on Gary Condit or the way it covered the death of Princess Di or, in a more innocent age, the way it dug up Watergate. Those subjects received saturation coverage that was very different from the occasional reporting on the danger of attacks of mass destruction.

Why did the subject receive inadequate attention? One reason is that news was being shaped more by the demands of marketing -- and pack journalism -- than by civic responsibility. And from a marketing perspective, journalists knew the story was just too scary. Focusing day after day on the danger that thousands or millions of people might be killed had the potential to drive away the audience. It also left news organizations vulnerable to the accusation that they were morbid and out of touch with practical reality. 

As a result, the media played into the nation's state of denial and often treated the danger as a taboo subject. When it was discussed, it was often (although not always) presented as something hypothetical that might happen rather than as an urgent issue that needed to be immediately addressed. 

But the media didn't only ignore the subject. It also filled the space where the truth should have been with stories that didn’t deserve the attention they received. The Gary Condit story is a classic example. Another, of course, is the great shark attack scare, which was hyped by the media to arouse public interest.

It is obvious from the nature of these stories that the media, especially television, was frequently deciding what would be news based once again on marketing considerations. If a story appealed to the emotions and played into the fantasies of the audience, it passed the test, while other stories that were more important were ignored.

It was precisely this criterion that resulted in shark attacks becoming an ideal story for the media. After all, the subject was scary enough and strange enough to hold an audience. But people also knew, if only in their heart of hearts, that the chance of actually being attacked by a shark was virtually nonexistent. That allowed news organizations such as Time magazine, with its July 30, "Jaws"-like cover, to do for audiences what horror movies do – let them enjoy the excitement of being scared from a vantage point of actual safety.

It may even be that these fake dangers functioned as defense mechanisms for the collective mind of American society. They allowed us to pretend one set of things was important while we ignored something more disturbing. It is a terrible irony that we distracted ourselves with so many invented dangers in news and entertainment while we ignored the real dangers that threatened our survival.

When we look at the nation's political leaders, we see pretty much the same thing. They too were masters of inaction when it came to the fight against terrorism. Even after studies warned of the danger in stark terms, and even after numerous previous attacks, they allowed anti-terrorism efforts to get bogged down in the bureaucracy.

Like the media, they also paid lip service to the idea that we needed to protect ourselves. But they weren't willing to take the political risks and spend the money that would have been necessary to do so. Instead, they filled the space where truth should have been with their own agendas and cynical partisan games.

This failure was entirely bipartisan and involved both the Congress and the presidency over at least two decades. But it is obvious that Bill Clinton bears a disproportionate share of the responsibility since he was the chief executive for the larger part of the 1990s. When he should have been securing the country and trying to lead a world movement to prevent the development of both a global terrorist network and weapons of mass destruction, he was focusing on domestic policy and absorbed in the scandals that plagued his presidency. 

We can see the way these failures played out by looking at the way government and the media responded to one of a number of studies that were done of the danger, this one by the National Commission on Terrorism, headed by L. Paul Bremer. The study bluntly warned last year of the threat of devastating attacks. But its recommendations for enhancing our ability to fight terrorism received lackluster news coverage, at least in the large number of print and Internet news stories I examined. And the media devoted much of its attention to opposing a recommendation for improving the monitoring of foreign students, because of concerns about civil liberties. The coverage was too little; much of it failed to convey a sense of urgency and it distracted the public onto one issue. 

An extreme example was a story dated June 12 of last year, in Salon magazine, headlined, "The hyping of domestic terrorism: Why a new report on the threat of international terrorist attacks on U.S. soil is a con job".

It didn't merely oppose many of the recommendations; it minimized the existence of the danger. The story said, in part:

The National Commission on Terrorism's warnings are a con job, with roughly the veracity of the latest Robert Ludlum novel. Evidence of this fraud comes not from civil libertarians or American friends of some guerrilla army, but from the top G-man himself: FBI Director Louis Freeh. 

Just over a year ago, on Feb. 4, 1999, Freeh testified on the subject of terrorism before the Senate Appropriations Committee's Subcommittee on the departments of Commerce, Justice and State. Freeh's testimony was overlooked in every news account this week, but his detailed evaluation makes the Bremer Commission's hold on reality appear tenuous.

"The frequency of terrorist incidents in the United States has decreased in number," Freeh emphasized. Since the World Trade Center bombing of 1993, Freeh pointed out, "no single act of foreign-directed terrorism has occurred on American soil."

Support for violent revolutionaries emanating from Cuba and North Korea, he noted, "appear to have declined" with those nations' economic free falls. Even the American cells of violent Middle East political movements as Hamas and Hezbollah, Freeh declared, are devoted exclusively to "fundraising and low-level intelligence gathering."

Just how much terrorism is not much? Freeh testified that in fiscal 1998, the FBI prevented 10 planned "terrorist acts." Not one emanated from abroad.... 

Foreign students did not figure in Freeh's account at all. Indeed, Freeh told Congress that the main threat of terrorist violence comes not from foreign sources but from the overlapping constituencies of the far right: abortion-clinic assassins, Christian Identity militias and the like.

Freeh's testimony squares better with recent history than the Bremer Commission's anxiety-provoking report.

My purpose in offering this excerpt isn't to single out Salon, which has offered somewhat complicated coverage on the danger of terrorism and attacks of mass destruction. But this story is an example of another motive on the part of the media for downplaying terrorism. The author makes clear that he believes some of the anti-terrorism recommendations could limit freedom. So he tries to minimize the danger.  

But Salon's story is only an extreme example of news coverage in print and on the Internet that profoundly failed the American people. In the end, according to Bremer, the Congress did nothing with the commission's recommendations last year. It is clear that if the news media had treated the study with the urgency it deserved or if we had public officials with more vision and courage, the outcome would have been very different.

In an Oct. 4 column in the Washington Post, Richard Cohen provides another example. He says that on July 26, 1999, William Cohen, who was then secretary of defense, "published an op-ed piece in The Washington Post in which he warned of the imminence of a terrorist attack against the United States. Cohen mostly concerned himself with biological or chemical terrorism, but the general thrust of his warning was downright prescient. 'There is not a moment to lose,' Cohen concluded.

"(Leslie H. Gelb, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations) read that piece and later eagerly watched all the major TV news shows that night. Nothing. Not a word. The secretary of defense -- the secretary of defense! -- had warned of a likely terrorist attack and not a single one of the network news shows considered it worth reporting."

One has to ask, if William Cohen believed the threat was this urgent, why didn't the Clinton administration or Congress call the American people to action? I can't provide any details on why they failed to do so. But it is clear that Cohen was trapped in a dysfunctional political system in which the media and political leaders reinforced each other's failings. It was a system in which people in government were often focused on satisfying limited constituencies and enacting narrow agendas.

Perhaps that problem is endemic to democracy. But we managed to make things worse than they had to be by creating a system in which politicians had to engage in the endless task of hitting on contributors and making promises to be elected. Inevitably, that chased out most of the best people. Even as it filtered out the best, it helped select political leaders who were focused on using government for the benefit of powerful interests.

The stock of good candidates was also reduced by another characteristic of the system: journalists, politicians and their consultants created an atmosphere of smear and privacy invasion that discouraged people from running for office. As a result, we were frequently left with mediocrity instead of a meritocracy, and it was these less-then-ideal public officials who we entrusted with our safety. Granted, democratic government doesn't usually produce meritocracy. But in a nation this rich in talent, far better could have been achieved if people seeking office were treated with more respect.

Once again, the media bears a large share of the responsibility for this state of affairs. Armed with the false idea that candidates are asking to be employed by voters, and therefore lose many rights when it comes to privacy and respectful treatment, the media turned the public arena into a killing field of reputations. And why not? It created drama; it drew an audience, and it made those in the media look like powerful crusaders for the public good who were exposing dishonest politicians. Of course, the more the media and politicians savaged reputations, the more the best people deserted public service, leaving the media with political leaders who were easy targets. 

To understand how pernicious this media culture has been, one need only reflect on how some of our greatest presidents would have been treated if the practices of the 1990s existed in their own time. Lincoln, it now appears, would have been outed. The extramarital affairs of Kennedy and Roosevelt would have been an obsessive concern of reporters and pundits. There is a good chance none of them would have entered politics. If they had, they probably would not have survived politically or they would have withdrawn for family reasons. And what shape would America be in today if it had never been led by Roosevelt or Lincoln?

What we have witnessed with all of these failures has been a process of defining news down. Swathed in rationalizations and excuses, much of the media converted itself into a form of entertainment, while journalists engaged in a timid form of pack journalism in which they focused on subjects that were already being covered by colleagues and competitors. That, in turn, helped define government down.

In the end, we left ourselves open to attack for the same reason many civilizations before us have brought about their own ruin: we made decisions that were irrational and self-destructive, and we allowed people in power to substitute their own short-term interest for the public interest. The task now is to have the will and clear vision to win a war and reform our institutions so we can deal effectively with a more dangerous world.