US Lapdog Press Emerges from Post-911 Syndrome

Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit


[All the news isn't completely bad. Suddenly, Dan Blather has opened
his mouth, after the half-wit at the White House put his foot in his
mouth several times last week. Dan confesses he's been feeling the
'pressure' to be overly 'patriotic' -- a cheerleader with a flag
lapel pin, and not a journalist at all. (Wow, Dan, you figured that
out, did you? Didn't know you ever were a journalist. Isn't your job
title "on-air personality?") 

This apparently has given all kinds of non-journalists permission to
awaken from their somnambulist state of post-traumatic patriotic
disorder and speak up, seriously, instead of merely humorously (Dowd)
or bombastically (Friedman). Hell, even the cowardly polticians are
joining in. Where were all you guys when they were trashing the Bill
of Rights and disappearing people into interminable detention, and
setting up concentration camps on occupied land in Afghanistan and
Cuba? Gee thanks, guys but it's a little late. --ny transfer]

The New York Times - May 19, 2002

Our Man in Arizona

By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON--He hasn't been featured in any of the flinty-eyed,
lantern-jawed photo shoots where the Bush team preened as war heroes.
Annie Leibovitz has never laid eyes on him.

Even his name has been secret. He's the hidden 9/11 hero. With almost
cinematic uncanniness, the G-man from Arizona got into the heads of
America's mortal enemies.

Bush officials keep insisting that no one could have predicted 9/11.
But the Phoenix F.B.I. agent predicted enough to perhaps pre-empt it,
if he hadn't been blocked by superiors too lazy to pursue hot leads
and too arrogant to share them.

The F.B.I. man figured out that Osama bin Laden might have dispatched
followers to flight schools in Arizona and elsewhere to train them
for a coordinated terrorist operation that would infiltrate our
airlines.

Headquarters thought it was too much trouble to check out, even
though his vivid, detailed memo landed in Washington only days after
the terrorism czar Richard Clarke warned F.B.I., aviation and I.N.S.
officials to be on the highest alert because "something really
spectacular" would happen soon. The six-week superalert was still
going on when W. began his four-week vacation.

The F.B.I. chief, Robert Mueller, said the Phoenix memo had been
junked by midlevel analysts because it had seemed like "a monumental
undertaking without any specificity." The C.I.A. wasn't even told
about it until two weeks ago, when it discovered two Al Qaeda names
on it.

I guess nothing short of a copy of Mohamed Atta's Travelocity
itinerary would have stirred the F.B.I. from its stupor. It couldn't
call a few flight schools? I always thought F.B.I. agents were paid
to lose sleep over imprecise but alarming details and lucky hunches.
Even a month later, when they got Moussaoui, who told flight
instructors he didn't need to know how to land, they didn't connect
those darned dots.

The F.B.I. has known for years that American flight schools were
breeding grounds for Al Qaeda pilot-wannabes. And the idea of planes
as weapons was nothing new. In 1994, an American crashed his Cessna
150 at the White House and Islamic militants were thwarted trying to
slam a plane into the Eiffel Tower.

The F.B.I. was warned in 1995 by Philippine police that Ramzi Yousef,
who planned the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, had schemes to
hijack and blow up a dozen U.S. airliners on the same day and to
hijack a plane and dive it into the C.I.A.

A 1999 intelligence report for the C.I.A. warned that bin Laden's
terrorists might hijack a plane and slam it into the C.I.A., the
Pentagon or the White House. The Italians told U.S. authorities last
summer at the Genoa summit meeting that Islamic terrorists might try
to ram a plane into the summit headquarters.

After an Islamic fundamentalist shot Meir Kahane in 1990, the F.B.I.
seized 29 boxes of evidence from the killer, including bomb formulas
and speeches by the blind sheik in the '93 bombing about "destroying
the edifices of capitalism," with pictures of the Washington
Monument, the Empire State Building and the World Trade Center. The
F.B.I. did not bother to translate this stuff for three years until
after the '93 bombing.

Even if all President Bush learned at his Crawford briefing on Aug. 6
was that bin Laden was gearing up for hijackings here, why not order
tougher airport security and fortified cockpit doors? After all, the
9/11 attacks started as old-fashioned hijackings.

The Bushies were still fixated on their Maginot line of missile
defense in the sky when the threat was Al Qaeda freaks with box
cutters. They cast themselves as the pros from Dover, the generals of
the Gulf war with the right stuff.

They did not live up to their own billing. They were caught
flat-footed and struck back, but not well enough to get the guy
behind the attack. Now comes Mullah Omar spouting off that he and
Osama will bring "fire and hell" on America. Even the unshakable
Condi seems shaky.

Maybe the 9/11 indicators were general. But it's the job of
government to interpret, develop and pool the info, to game out
scenarios, to force the F.B.I. and C.I.A. to share.

Dick Cheney suggested that Democrats asking questions were
unpatriotic. But that suggestion is anti-American. Maybe there has
been too much bipartisanship lately. You can't get the truth that
way.

                           *


A Failure to Imagine

by Thomas L. Friedman

If you ask me, the press has this whole story about whether President
Bush had a warning of a possible attack before 9/11, and didn't share
it, upside down.

The failure to prevent Sept. 11 was not a failure of intelligence or
coordination. It was a failure of imagination. Even if all the raw
intelligence signals had been shared among the F.B.I., the C.I.A. and
the White House, I'm convinced that there was no one there who would
have put them all together, who would have imagined evil on the scale
Osama bin Laden did.

Osama bin Laden was (or is) a unique character. He's a combination of
Charles Manson and Jack Welch a truly evil, twisted personality, but
with the organizational skills of a top corporate manager, who
translated his evil into a global campaign that rocked a superpower.
In some ways, I'm glad that America (outside Hollywood) is not full
of people with bin Laden-like imaginations. One Timothy McVeigh is
enough.

Imagining evil of this magnitude simply does not come naturally to
the American character, which is why, even after we are repeatedly
confronted with it, we keep reverting to our natural, naïvely
optimistic selves. Because our open society is so much based on
trust, and that trust is so hard-wired into the American character
and citizenry, we can't get rid of it even when we so obviously
should.

So someone drives a truck bomb into the U.S. embassy in Beirut, and
we still don't really protect the Marine barracks there from a
similar, but much bigger, attack a few months later. Someone blows up
two U.S. embassies in East Africa with truck bombs, and we still
don't imagine that someone would sail an exploding dinghy into a
destroyer, the U.S.S. Cole, a few years later. Someone tries to blow
up the World Trade Center in 1993 with a truck bomb, and the guy who
did it tells us he had also wanted to slam a plane into the C.I.A.,
but we still couldn't imagine someone doing just that to the Twin
Towers on 9/11.

So I don't fault the president for not having imagined evil of this
magnitude. But given the increasingly lethal nature of terrorism, we
are going to have to adapt. We need an "Office of Evil," whose job
would be to constantly sift all intelligence data and imagine what
the most twisted mind might be up to.

No, I don't blame President Bush at all for his failure to imagine
evil. I blame him for something much worse: his failure to imagine
good.

I blame him for squandering all the positive feeling in America after
9/11, particularly among young Americans who wanted to be drafted for
a great project that would strengthen America in some lasting way a
Manhattan project for energy independence. Such a project could have
enlisted young people in a national movement for greater conservation
and enlisted science and industry in a crash effort to produce enough
renewable energy, efficiencies and domestic production to wean us
gradually off oil imports.

Such a project would not only have made us safer by making us
independent of countries who share none of our values. It would also
have made us safer by giving the world a much stronger reason to
support our war on terrorism. There is no way we can be successful in
this war without partners, and there is no way America will have
lasting partners, especially in Europe, unless it is perceived as
being the best global citizen it can be. And the best way to start
conveying that would be by reducing our energy gluttony and ratifying
the Kyoto treaty to reduce global warming.

President Bush is not alone in this failure. He has had the full
cooperation of the Democratic Party leadership, which has been just
as lacking in imagination. This has made it easy for Mr. Bush, and
his oil-industry paymasters, to get away with it.

We and our kids are going to regret this. Because a war on terrorism
that is fought only by sending soldiers to Afghanistan or by
tightening our borders will ultimately be unsatisfying. Such a war is
important, but it can never be definitively won. Someone will always
slip through. But a war on terrorism that, with some imagination, is
broadly defined as making America safer by also making it better is a
war that could be won. It's a war that could ensure that something
lasting comes out of 9/11, other than longer lines at the airport and
that something would be enhanced respect for America and a country
and a planet that would be greener, cleaner and safer in the broadest
sense.

Too bad we don't have a president who could imagine that.
 
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