An Incomplete Guide to 9/11 Coverage

It’s hard to name a media outlet that isn’t in some way commemorating the ten-year anniversary of 9/11. “Some specials are so niche-sensitive that they almost sound like humor-magazine parodies,” writes Alessandra Stanley in the Times. “CNBC, which has a series called ‘American Greed,’ came up with ‘American Greed: 9/11 Fraud,’ about the scams and profiteering that followed the disaster. Showtime offers ‘The Love We Make,’ about Paul McCartney’s journey through New York after Sept. 11.” Such a delicate topic means that “viewers become hypersensitive to the misplaced word or self-serving gesture.” Though most of the editors and writers undoubtedly mean well, good intentions do not always translate into quality journalism. Here, a roundup of some of the highs and lows of the print media’s 9/11 coverage.

image via esquire.com

Even after eight years, Tom Junod’s Esquire article about the iconic “Falling Man” photo stands head and shoulders above anything else written about the attacks. Junod recently published an update on the families he interviewed for the 2003 story, but it doesn’t add much to the outstanding original.

If you only read one newspaper’s coverage of the anniversary, make it the Times’ special “9/11: The Reckoning” section, which includes previously unreleased audio recordings of the flight controllers and FAA officials monitoring the hijacked planes on September 11. Two slideshows, one of possessions saved by New Yorkers and the other of 9/11-inspired artwork from across the world, are well worth clicking through. In the Sunday Magazine, a roundtable of former contributors epitomizes the paper’s elite liberal reputation. It’s the only conversation, for example, in which you’ll find a participant exclaiming “Good God, man!” with complete seriousness. Bill Keller, who just stepped down as the paper’s executive editor, offers a belated mea culpa for his part in giving the liberal seal of approval to the war in Iraq.

Businessweek offers its typical cynical take on the anniversary, running an article in the Sept. 2 issue about the reinsurance industry. Between terrorist acts and unprecedented flooding, the companies that foot the bill for reconstruction must attempt to balance risk and reward. A few weeks ago, the magazine devoted a feature-length story to Larry Silverstein, the developer building an office tower at 7 World Trade Center. If the apocalypse arrived tomorrow, Businessweek would undoubtedly be advising its readers on how to sell muni bonds to the anti-Christ.

image via newsweek.com

The most charitable thing one can say about Newsweek’s coverage is that Tina Brown has not Photoshopped an age-advanced Dick Cheney into the ceremonies at Ground Zero. Andrew Sullivan, who seemed like such a catch when Brown lured him away from The Atlantic earlier this year, takes a dismal look at the American response to the attacks, writing that “Bin Laden hoped to provoke a civilizational war between Islam and the West. And we took the bait.” Unfortunately, Sullivan continues to take the bait, trotting out the hoary cliche of Al Qaeda as “a few religious fanatics living in caves.” It’s an accurate description, to an extent, but it elides the seriousness of the threat posed by radical Islamists. A handful of fundamentalists can be dealt with — bombed back to the stone age, as the theory went before the war — but Bin Laden’s violent ideology and the deep-seated rage at the U.S. that permeates much of the world are less tractable issues. Sullivan also overstates the degree to which ordinary Americans have suffered over the past decade. Of the victims at the World Trade Center, he writes, “Their terror ended quickly. Ours had just begun.” Pat-downs at airports, two wars as foreign to most people as the moon — these are not comparable to having one’s life snuffed out on 9/11.

image via thenation.com

The Nation and Mother Jones both engage in standard liberal hand-wringing over America’s lost civil liberties. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but . . . how predictable can you get?) At The Nation, David K. Shipler writes that “Obama has perpetuated so many of the Bush administration’s policies that even Republicans might take heart.” That Mother Jones chooses to mark the tenth anniversary of 9/11 with an issue dedicated to the FBI’s extraordinary rendition program gives even the casual reader an idea of its priorities. This is hardly the first time the tragedy has been misused — the Bush administration’s elevation of terror threat levels to correspond with election dates comes to mind — but it is particularly classless to run a scathing critique of post-9/11 intelligence without also acknowledging the victims of the attack. Adam Liptak of the Times actually offers a more nuanced — albeit less popular — interpretation of the Patriot Act, noting that “By historic standards, the domestic legal response to 9/11 gave rise to civil liberties tremors, not earthquakes.”

One of the more compelling stories is not from a national magazine or a New York publication but from the Boston Globe, which gives its coverage a parochial angle by recounting the stories of the ticket agents and security personnel at Logan Airport, where two of the hijacked flights originated. “They are the rarely noticed casualties of the terrorist attacks,” writes the Globe’s Eric Moskowitz. Ordinary details are twisted into life-changing, haunting memories: “Two men in their 20s approach, Middle Eastern, hair carefully trimmed, clothes so new they are still creased from the store.”

At The Atlantic, Andrew Cohen offers a fairly standard timeline of 9/11’s effects on the checks and balances of divided government. His argument, that the executive branch gained power at the expense of a fairly submissive Congress and judiciary, is familiar, as is his contention that such a concentration of power can only lead to abuse (see: Iraq, wiretapping, extraordinary rendition). The most interesting thing about this piece is Cohen’s recognition that the scales have not remained weighted in favor of the president. During George W. Bush’s second term, when a handful of Supreme Court decisions invalidated lower courts’ pro-administration rulings on indefinite detention and military tribunals, Congress mainly worked around the restrictions and allowed executive authority to grow unchecked. Since the election of Barack Obama, however, the legislative branch has rediscovered its voice, moving to place restrictions on an administration with which it disagrees. Cohen writes:

[L]awmakers blocked with great relish and fanfare the Obama Administration’s efforts to prosecute 9/11 planner Khalid Sheik Mohammed in federal civilian court. Such meddling in the discretion of the Justice Department’s charging decisions would have been unthinkable during the Age of Fear.

Apparently, the unitary executive theory was just fine as long as Dick Cheney was the one advocating it. Only when a Democrat moved into the White House did the war hawks in Congress begin to reevaluate their deference. A king is only popular among those who benefit from the palace’s largesse.

image via fastcompany.com

From across the pond, the Financial Times checks in with some of the families who had posted “missing” signs across New York after the towers collapsed. The stories are not all hopeful, but they are honest in revealing the different ways people deal with the death of a loved one.

Finally, if the TV networks’ incessant stream of 9/11 programming seems just a little crass, take a look at this Fast Company slideshow of taste-challenged advertisements. The worst offenders are from Europe, where the advertising industry as a whole is much more accepting of graphic, risque content.

Cupcake Jihad

Some recent dispatches from the can’t-hardly-believe-it world of national intelligence:

In the June 6 issue of The New Yorker, Seymour Hersh describes American efforts to monitor Iran’s nuclear progress in “Iran and the Bomb.” (Unfortunately, the full article is behind the paywall.)

Street signs were surreptitiously removed in heavily populated areas of Tehran — say, near a university suspected of conducting nuclear enrichment — and replaced with similar-looking signs implanted with radiation sensors. American operatives, working undercover, also removed bricks from a building or two in central Tehran that they thought housed nuclear enrichment activities and replaced them with bricks embedded with radiation-monitoring devices.

From a Washington Post blog on June 3:

Hackers working for U.K. intelligence agency MI6 recently modified an online al-Qaeda magazine and replaced the bomb recipes inside with cake recipes.

When followers went to download 67 pages of instructions for how to “Make a bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom” from Inspire Magazine, al-Qaeda’s first English-language magazine, the terrorists were instead greeted with garbled code that was a page of recipes from the Ellen Degeneres Show’s Best Cupcakes in America. MI6 dubbed the cyberattack operation “Operation Cupcake”

Don’t ever accuse the government of lacking creativity in its use of tax dollars.

Mladic and Bin Laden

I’m struck by how many of the world’s most fearsome men have ended their days in isolation, old and enfeebled, frail shells of the powerful commanders they claimed to be in their prime. Video from Osama bin Laden’s hideout in Pakistan shows a thin, gray-bearded man wrapped in a blanket, rocking back and forth as he changes the channels on the television. Ratko Mladic, the Serbian war crimes fugitive, was discovered in his cousin’s home, having been chased from the relative luxury in which began his years on the run. He had only $800 on him when he was captured. Doreen Carvajal and Steven Erlanger of the Times write:

Mr. Mladic was paying close attention, with plenty of time to watch television, according to investigators who described him as a “tired old man.” His face carried some of the story of how he had lived, a frail image that startled close friends and the men hunting him. That image was hard to reconcile with the burly, commanding ex-general whose wanted poster hung in the offices of war crimes prosecutors.

The Times reports that Mladic initially attended soccer matches and dined at restaurants, but “his world steadily shrank.” He was plagued by heart attacks and strokes, much as Bin Laden was rumored to suffer from kidney failure. (He was not, however good a punchline it may have made, on dialysis.)

When the similarities between Mladic and Bin Laden first occurred to me, my initial reaction was something to the effect of, “But Mladic is no Bin Laden.” The leader of al Qaeda has achieved such notoriety in the American mindset that he has become a kind of Hitler figure: someone to whom no one else, no matter how evil, should be compared. Despite the right-wing talking heads that like to compare labor unions to Nazis and the health care overhaul to the approach of Hitler’s armies, equating one of today’s small-fry dictators — Assad in Syria, Mubarak in Egypt — seems laughable. How can any of these leaders be compared to a man who systematically exterminated six million Jews?

But Bin Laden is not Hitler. Yes, he looms large in American consciousness, but 3,000 people (more, if you count victims beyond 9/11) are not six million. The attack on the World Trade Center was horrible, but it was not genocide, and the parallels between Bin Laden and Mladic are far greater than those between bin Laden and Hitler. Mladic stands accused of killing 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica, and countless more in the multi-year siege of Sarajevo. His crimes are, if anything, greater than Bin Laden’s. But though they are greater in terms of lives lost, to Americans there is hardly a crime greater than that which we feel Bin Laden perpetrated against us. He made us afraid, he changed our reality. He brought terrorism to the U.S. and gave us a taste of what is experienced daily by people in the Middle East. Most of all, he questioned our exceptionalism; that is, the idea that America was the exception to the rule of violence that is unavoidable in many of the world’s countries.

It is perhaps too much to ask for Americans to think rationally, especially after the specter of Bin Laden and al Qaeda was held up as the reason for Afghanistan and Iraq, where so many American soldiers have died. It is perhaps too much to ask that we acknowledge that the capture of Mladic has brought more justice — if justice is counted in number of deaths avenged — than the killing of Bin Laden. Americans, after all, are not asked for much. But though we regard our own wounds as deeper and more painful than those of the Serbian and Bosnian families that Mladic destroyed, we cannot escape the fact that there are tyrants in the world more evil and more powerful than the man behind 9/11.

With Friends Like These . . . .

“The Double Game” (The New Yorker)

Mostly I agree with all the pundits, analysts and “unnamed officials” who argue that the situation in Pakistan has left the U.S. between a rock and a hard spot. The cheek with which the country’s military and civilian leaders dismiss the Bin Laden raid as an illegal violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty is highly annoying. Twenty billion in aid since 9/11, and this is the thanks we get? The jingoist in me sees such temerity as an affront; does Pakistan really think it has a choice in the matter? But the fact is that it does have a choice. It can keep supporting, via the ISI, militant groups and al Qaeda fighters.

I’d like to think that the U.S. has a choice, too: the choice to cut off aid, to tell the Pakistanis exactly where they can stick their sovereignty. After all, I’m not even entirely convinced that a bunch of jihadists in Afghanistan and Pakistan really still pose a terrorist threat. If we pull out of Afghanistan, would the chance of another attack skyrocket? It’s hard to know, bellicose rhetoric aside, just how dedicated terrorist groups are to destroying America, especially considering the tides of the Arab Spring are lapping against closer shores. The chance of Pakistan dropping a nuclear bomb on India seems remote, though the other nuclear danger, the dispersal of bomb-making materials to groups of radicals, seems more plausible.

That said, I can see why the Obama administration feels damned if it does, damned if it doesn’t. We can’t very well abandon the effort in Pakistan — there are nukes, al Qaeda and its various offshoots, the influence on neighboring Afghanistan — but it’s hard to stomach continuing to allow the Pakistanis to play both sides. An article in the May 16 issue of The New Yorker, by Lawrence Wright, offered the first credible alternative I’ve seen:

Eliminating, or sharply reducing, military aid to Pakistan would have consequences, but they may not be the ones we fear. Diminishing the power of the military class would open up more room for civilian rule. Many Pakistanis are in favor of less U.S. aid; their slogan is “trade not aid.” In particular, Pakistani businessmen have long sought U.S. tax breaks for their textiles, which American manufacturers have resisted. Such a move would empower the civilian middle class. India would no doubt welcome a reduction in military aid to Pakistan, and the U.S. could use this as leverage to pressure India to allow the Kashmiris to vote on their future, which would very likely be a vote for independence. These two actions might do far more to enhance Pakistan’s stability, and to insure its friendship, than the billions of dollars that America now pays like a ransom.

The India-Pakistan rivalry has always seemed to me to be part of the problem; Wright’s genius is in making it part of the solution. While the military establishment in Pakistan is so strong and entrenched that I am not convinced reducing aid would empower the civilian government, making the president and prime minister more than mere figureheads is not an un-worthwhile mission. More may have to be done to accomplish it than simply slashing military aid, but in his consideration of the bigger picture in the Pakistan-Afghanistan-India morass, Wright is definitely on the right track.