Journalist Says Media Ignored 9/11 Portents

A former journalist and terrorism expert chided the American media for missing the warning signs leading up to last year’s Sept. 11 terrorist attacks during a lunch-time speech yesterday at the Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics and Public Policy.

Daniel S. Benjamin ’83, co-author of The Age of Sacred Terror, which focuses on the threats of religious fanaticism, said that given the wealth of information available and the numerous indications of the likelihood of such an attack, the U.S. government and the American public should not have been caught unawares.

Sept. 11 came as a greater surprise than Pearl Harbor, he added.

“I feel like we will be spending a lot of time in the future trying to figure out what went wrong with this country in the ’90s,” Benjamin said.

He said he partly blames this unpreparedness on the poor international coverage by the American media.

Before the attacks, only three American newspapers were committed to worldwide reporting. These and a handful of wire reporters constituted the first and only line of defense for the public, he said.

Benjamin said the government, too, ignored concrete indications of the possibility of impending terrorist attacks, citing the fact that President Bush did not have a top-level meeting on terrorism until Sept. 4, 2001.

The numerous smaller, international terrorist attacks of the late ’90s should have been enough to put the government on guard.

Benjamin detailed three aspects of these attacks which should have raised warning flags in the minds of government analysts: the indiscriminate nature of the attacks, the unprecedented coordination of the Embassy bombings and—most importantly—the knowledge gathered in 1998 that a terrorist group was interested in acquiring weapons of mass destruction.

While reporters are not privy to much of the information the government has access to, Benjamin said he feels they did not act enough like intelligence analysts and “connect the dots” themselves—they simply refused to consider the possibility of a serious threat.

Journalists had a propensity to require “courthouse standards of evidence” Benjamin said.

For example, journalists reporting on the al Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan, which was thought to be a cover for a chemical weapons plant, assumed that they had the wrong plant when they could not find a certificate of ownership with Osama bin Laden’s name on it.

Only one reporter discovered that the manager of the plant was living in bin Laden’s old house.

Because of the timing of the al Shifa controversy—in the midst of the Monica Lewinsky scandal—the serious threat of chemical weapons was ignored in favor of “wag the dog” coverage, Benjamin said.

Benjamin said he attributes the unwillingness to believe in the seriousness of the threat of a terrorist attack to the growth of skepticism about the U.S. government, which has, he said, hardened into cynicism.

In a question-and-answer session afterwards, he did have some positive words for journalists, praising them for “getting themselves up to speed” since Sept. 11.

“I think that we’re under-informed is a matter of ignorance, not of willful neglect,” Benjamin said.

“The government needs to understand the importance of having educated journalists reporting on this issue,” he added. “And intelligence is not an easy area to infiltrate without government help and cooperation.”

But Benjamin acknowledged the very real problem of reporters using anonymous sources to reveal information concerning national security.

He criticized both Bob Woodward from the Washington Post and Seymour Hersh from the New Yorker, two of the “big-names” in journalism who he said “cavalierly” revealed national concerns “no rational journalist would reveal.”

His conclusion echoed the warnings laced throughout his speech.

“We have a timing problem with the possible war on Iraq. By making Saddam our priority we will confirm to al Qaeda their belief that the U.S. is making war on the Islamic world.”