What Did We Know?

By: Matthew V. Storin The now-famous presidential briefing memo of Aug. 6, 2001, titled "Bin Ladin (sic) Determined To Strike in U.S.," clearly raises questions about White House preparedness for a terrorist attack on the United States, at least in hindsight. What's getting less attention were similar warnings in leading American newspapers over the previous eight years.

The New York Times, which mentioned Osama bin Laden as early as March 28, 1993 ? a month after the World Trade Center had been damaged by a terrorist bomb ? reported that same year on

a larger threat to U.S. targets. In a May 2, 1993, story the Times quoted a RAND Corporation expert, Bruce Hoffman, warning that if the WTC attack "is what the second string was able to accomplish, imagine what a first-string terrorist group could do."

In the spring of 2002, for a research paper at the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, I examined more than 2,300 news stories, editorials, columns and letters published in two leading American newspapers, the New York Times and The Washington Post, from the time of the 1993 WTC bombing to the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.

While the resources and responsibilities of the nation's best newspapers are not to be compared to those of government, there are similarities in hints dropped and warnings uttered during those eight years that are parallel to at least most of the Aug. 6 briefing for the President. In fact, while much attention was previously given to the press' failure to emphasize the warnings of the Hart-Rudman Commission in 1999 and 2001, there is much in the press ? again viewed in hindsight ? that presaged the tragedy of 9/11.

In my Shorenstein paper, completed in May, 2002, I concluded that while the Hart-Rudman panel deserved attention when it predicted a major terrorist attack in the United States "over the next quarter-century," a three-part series on terrorism by the staff of the Times in January 2001 was more compelling. In the first of the series, a 6,200-word piece on bin Laden and his forces, it was reported, for example, that "Al Qaeda trains 'sleeper' agents ? to live undetected among local populations," planning attacks "months or years in advance."

As with government, there were mixed signals in the press as well. A May 31, 2001, Times story on the U.S. Embassy bombings in Africa said those attacks demonstrated "that while Mr. Bin Laden may be a global menace, his group, Al Qaeda, was at times slipshod, torn by inner strike, betrayal, greed, and the banalities of life."

Ominously, the Times reported in mid-1993 that the aviation security system that had been in place for 20 years might "not be adequate against a growing terrorist threat." And the Post in April 1994 reported the Immigration and Naturalization Service was no longer running routine fingerprint checks on immigrants as an anti-terrorist measure. Previously, reporter Robert Suro wrote, "thousands" of people had been blocked from entry annually.

On April 2, 2000, the Post published an interview with (the headline read) "an obscure chief in U.S. war on terror." The man's name: Richard Clark. He told the newspaper that the terrorists "will come after our weakness, our Achilles heel, which is largely here in the United States."

There were many other references in these newspapers that, looking back, pointed toward 9/11, though, as President Bush said about his briefing memo, there was no what, when and where. It will probably not surprise anyone who has worked in media that occasionally issues were raised and not followed.

For example, the Post reported on March 16, 1999, that the Clinton administration was committing $70 million to "equip and train" firefighters to respond to acts of terrorism. A LexisNexis search of the Post from then until 9/11 found no further mention of the program, though Washington was obviously a potential target for terrorism. And, as we learned, firefighters were vital to terrorism rescue efforts.

So what did the press know, and when did they know it? The warnings were embedded in the coverage, but the threat of terrorism only rarely was highlighted. A half dozen front-page stories in the year before 9/11 mentioned a threat of terrorism in the United States. Neither the Post nor the Times (or any other paper, including my own, The Boston Globe) made the possibility of a terrorist attack at home a dominant story at any time before 9/11. As Bob Schieffer of CBS News said at a Brookings Institution event in February of 2002, "Terrorism was not on anyone's front burner in those days."

One more thing: Before 9/11, and by and large, after, few major media outlets have examined the root causes of terrorism ? the most notable exception being Newsweek's "Why Do They Hate Us?" cover in September 2001.