Did the Press Fail on 9/11 Threats, Too?

By: William E. Jackson, Jr. The same accusatory questions hurled at government officials about Sept. 11, 2001, may just as well be addressed to national newspapers. Were any newspaper editors running around with their "hair on fire" in the months preceding 9/11, given all the ominous flak in the air? To find out, E&P interviewed a dozen editors and national security reporters at major papers in the past week.

The national press corps needs to address the question posed by Eric Lichtblau in The New York Times of April 18: "In a Lost World of What-ifs, Could Anything Have Stopped 9/11?" What should the media have done during the 2001 spring and summer period when warning signs pointing to a major terrorist attack on the United States "spiked," and the government internally possessed in its warrens ample evidence that al Qaeda was scheming to inflict a major blow on home territory?

At least one FBI counter-terrorism official has pointed to the news media as not being focused on the threat of terrorism before the 9/11 attacks. He cited to Lichtblau the search for the two future hijackers living in San Diego, and asked: "Would CNN have really aired their photos if we'd asked them?"

Should the press have been "at battle stations" even if the government was not? After three weeks of hearings by the commission investigating the tragic events of 9/11, there is a lengthy record which makes clear that predictions of an attack by al Qaeda had been communicated directly to the highest levels of the government.

How to explain the seeming dichotomy between what the government (or parts thereof) knew and the press did not pick up on? One veteran national security reporter, Walter Pincus of The Washington Post, candidly stated to me: "Since the Bush administration was focusing on missile defense and undoing treaties with Russia, that's where I remember I was."

E&P put the following questions to a dozen editors and reporters with national newspapers: "Until recent weeks, did American newspapers, for the most part, fail to probe deeply White House explanations for not being able to prevent 9/11? What more could or should reporters have done, given recent revelations? Was there too much else to cover in this time period -- and too many obstacles to learning the facts -- or did the press allow the administration to 'stonewall' for too long?"

'A Bolt From the Blue'

An enterprising reporter on terrorism for another national newspaper spoke to me on a not-for-attribution basis: "Newspapers bought in too much to the idea that 9/11 was a bolt from the blue. But the obstacles to pursuing this were considerable." However, "the spike in terrorist threats in the summer of '01 was well-known, even at the time, though we know now a lot more about their vivid nature. But newspapers let administration officials emphasize the foreign threat while minimizing the domestic."

He continued: "The chief revelations in recent weeks have been the gap between Richard Clarke's recommendations and what the Administration did." He cited as further examples the July 5 meeting on the domestic threat; the Aug. 6 President's Daily Briefing (PDB); and the degree of detail in some pre-2001 warnings about hijacking and use of airplanes as missiles. Of these, though, "only the pre-2001 warnings were probably gettable unless administration officials began to talk (as Clarke did) or released documents that remained highly classified." The distribution of the PDB is so limited that it was "virtually impossible" to get anyone to contradict the administration's claim that the Aug. 6 memorandum was mostly historical until the 9/11 commission extracted it.

Most of the editors and reporters were more adamant that their papers did about all they reasonably could have.

Liz Spayd, assistant managing editor for national news at the Post, in a ringing endorsement of the contributions of Pincus, Dan Eggen, Dana Priest, and Bart Gellman, informed me that after 9/11 "there are few subjects that we have devoted ourselves more thoroughly to than the Bush administration's counter-terrorism efforts before 9/11."

She noted that the staff had won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting on a package of stories that was focused largely on that subject. Among a long list of stories, she cited a 2002 report by Dan Eggen and Bob Woodward that "broke the story of what was in the controversial PDB" of Aug. 6, 2001. The Post had "probed most every aspect of the administration's pre-9/11 behavior, from the FBI's performance, to that of the CIA to the White House," aggressively pursuing what warnings might have been overlooked -- "from the FBI Phoenix memo to the miscues in the Moussaoui case to the CIA's failure to watchlist two of the hijackers."

Spayd noted that more information is coming out now "from a commission invested with the authority to call witnesses and demand testimony and even classified documents. Those are powers we do not possess."

Bob Drogin of the Los Angeles Times, who played a major role in breaking open the administration's case for WMD in Iraq, made a similar point: "I don't agree that the press 'allowed' the White House to stonewall. Arguably, media pressure helped force the White House to reverse course and let Condi Rice testify. More generally, reporters ask questions, they search for documents, they look for sources. They don't have subpoena power, and they can't force the president or his aides to testify. That's why the 9/11 commission is so important. It can do things that reporters can't, and it has done so all in one place at one time so the public can gain perspective."

The most dramatic news from the commission, he added, has come "because senior administration figures suddenly were forced to answer specific questions, and because key classified documents and materials suddenly were unclassified. I'm not sure how reporters could have gotten access to that material on their own." The only "whistleblower" to emerge, Richard Clarke, saved his criticism for his book and the commission.

Moreover, argued Drogin, "it is silly to blame the press for failing to specifically warn that 19 guys would fly airplanes" into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. "Barring specific intelligence (which the government clearly did not have), such a warning would be as meaningless as warning that a comet inevitably will hit earth one day." Saying something "could" happen and saying it "will" happen are very different. The CIA director has publicly warned that another major attack on the U.S. is inevitable, Drogin said. "What are we to make of that?"

Drogin noted that the L.A. Times and other news organizations devoted considerable time and space to reporting on terrorism and the growth of al Qaeda around the world, especially after the African embassy bombings in 1998. And his paper, in particular, "reported extensively on the potential of terrorism in the U.S. and the use of sleeper cells in North America after the arrest in December 2000 of an al Qaeda operative who was plotting to blow up LAX."

Overall, concluded Drogin, the 9/11 commission hearings have "largely confirmed that mainstream reporting over the last two years had uncovered the main elements of the pre-attack story." The L.A. Times "reported the internecine CIA/FBI struggle, the CIA failure to notify the FBI or immigration of two al Qaeda suspects in the U.S., the FBI's failure to find them, the multiple screwups over the Moussaoui case, the spike in terrorist 'chatter' ..." It also established what front pages in the spring and summer of 2001 already showed: "that terrorism was not high on the administration's agenda."

No Doubt of Al Qaeda Attack

John Diamond, intelligence reporter for USA Today, made a forceful argument on the proper locus in placing blame for what went wrong: "It is ridiculous and scary to think that our system depends on moving threat information all the way up the chain of command to the very top to make the President aware of the threat and then awaiting his orders cascading all the way back down before anyone does anything."

The FBI had the authority to do what it should have done; and there is plenty of criticism to go around. But "is anyone seriously proposing that in the future the President become, in effect, a police chief who gives out operational orders to people about 11 layers down the chain of command?"

The "unspoken assumption" in the criticism of the White House is that "the FBI and CIA apparently didn't realize how dire this situation was, but briefed it to the President and he didn't do anything, so they didn't do anything. Well, the FBI and the CIA are the pros who are supposed to understand a situation is dire. If they did understand it was dire, then they [should] brief the President on the threat along with what they are doing about it."

John Walcott, Washington bureau chief for Knight Ridder, added: "I don't think the fact that al Qaeda was aiming to do something in the United States was news to anyone. In fact, there's a videotape of Rick Rescorla, the VP for security at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter and the subject of a book by Jim Stewart, predicting that al Qaeda, having failed the first time, would attack the WTC again. John O'Neill, the ex-FBI counter-terrorism guy and WTC security chief, also understood the al Qaeda threat, but no one in the FBI paid any attention to his warnings."

The Case for Media Culpability

There is a case to be made that the media paid insufficient attention to Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, for various reasons:

1. The al Qaeda threat wasn't on either the Clinton or the Bush administrations' radar and, to too great a degree, the government sets the media's agenda.

2. After the Soviets departed Afghanistan, that country was out of sight and out of mind, as well as difficult and expensive to get to, and hard to talk news editors into putting on the front pages or nightly newscasts.

3. The attention that was paid to more unorthodox terrorist threats was partly hijacked by the "hyperventilation" in the government and the press -- over the possibility that terrorists would use chemical, biological, radiological or even nuclear weapons. Such ideas were more alarmist on a grand scale, and good for selling books and getting on TV, but it turned out to be much more convenient to use a commercial jetliner as a weapon.

4. Given the multiplicity of targets, here and abroad, and means of attack, it would have been very difficult for any reporter to have gotten beyond what several commissions said publicly: The threat of an attack in the United States is growing. Where? When? Who? How? What can we do to defend ourselves? There are no satisfactory answers to these questions, even today, two-and-one-half years after 9/11.

But, all in all, American national newspapers were on public alert to a degree that the government was not, either publicly or privately.