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.

Afghanistan: Everything Has a Price

On Wednesday, President Obama announced his plan to draw down American troops in Afghanistan. Ten thousand will leave the country by the end of this year; another 23,000 will pull out by next summer. The president cited the reduced threat from Al Qaeda and the killing of 20 out of 20 “most-wanted” militants, but the subtext to his speech was all about the economy. Republicans have done an about-face on national security, with the party’s 2012 presidential field expressing major reservations about the American military adventure. Jon Hunstman has been the most outspoken, criticizing American involvement in Libya and bluntly telling Esquire magazine that “We just can’t afford it.” The Times reported that he also asked rhetorically about Afghanistan, “Should we stay and play traffic cop? I don’t think that serves our strategic interests.”

Other Republicans are following suit, with Jeff Zeleny of the Times writing that the shift “appears to mark a separation from a post-Sept. 11 posture in which Republicans were largely united in supporting an aggressive use of American power around the world.” So what has changed? The Tea Party, for one; Michele Bachmann and company are persistently isolationist, deriding the very concept of foreign aid and tacking away from George W. Bush’s “freedom agenda.” In the eyes of Ron Paul, et. al., liberty is more endangered by the creeping “socialism” of the Obama administration than by Islamic extremists abroad.

The other elephant (in both figurative senses of the word) in the room, of course, is the national debt. The breadth of President Bush’s push for regime change in the Middle East was anathema to many conservatives, who saw the billions of dollars poured into Iraq and Afghanistan as an abandonment of fiscal conservatism and small-government policy. Now, with Republicans determined to slash and burn their way to a “balanced” budget (insofar as a plan that boots children off food stamps and replaces Medicare with vouchers can be called balanced), both parties are scrutinizing Pentagon spending for savings. The AP described some of the proposed cuts as “gimmickry”:

Under the rules followed by the Congressional Budget Office, the agency currently projects war spending to grow with inflation even as troop drawdowns are ongoing. That means House Republicans could claim more than $1 trillion in savings by cutting the budget for war costs to $65 billion for 2014 and $50 billion a year shortly thereafter.

To some extent, conservatives are coming late to the party. Liberal Democrats have been screaming for years about the diversion of national treasure to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Dovish progressives stand ready with statistics about exactly how many teachers could be hired for the cost of one fighter jet, or how many Medicaid cuts could be avoided by plugging the hole with the shrink-wrapped loads of cash flown into Baghdad. On Monday, the United States Conference of Mayors passed a resolution that urged the president to end both wars and “bring these war dollars home to meet vital human needs, promote job creation, rebuild our infrastructure, aid municipal and state governments, and develop a new economy based upon renewable, sustainable energy and reduce the federal debt.” (The mention of the federal debt was a last-minute sop to Tea Party-esque conservatives.) Though it’s not as if money cut from the Pentagon’s budget would automatically be re-routed to cities (the federal budget is not exactly one big fungible pot), it’s telling that even low-level officials feel obligated to protest the expense.

Predictably, Republicans have castigated the president on both sides of the question. Mitt Romney, who has lately been just a step behind Huntsman in calling for an end to Middle Eastern entanglements, said that “this decision should not be based on politics or economics.” Tim Pawlenty, the most hawkish of the potential nominees, described the drawdown proposal as “deeply disturbing.” Obama faced an equal amount of criticism from the left. Joe Manchin III, a senator from West Virginia, railed against paying for a war when the nation is deeply in debt: “Will we choose to rebuild America or Afghanistan? In light of our nation’s fiscal peril, we cannot do both.” Manchin sets up a false dichotomy; surely America is rich enough to do both, especially if we raised the capital gains tax and allowed the Bush tax cuts to expire. Eliminating farm subsidies and tax loopholes for oil companies would also bring in a tidy sum.

It certainly seems straightforward to blame the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for the country’s fiscal mess. In an article entitled “Cost of Wars a Rising Issue as Obama Weighs Troop Levels,” the Times’ Helene Cooper explains that “spending on the war in Afghanistan has skyrocketed since Mr. Obama took office, to $118.6 billion in 2011. It was $14.7 billion in 2003, when President George W. Bush turned his attention and American resources to the war in Iraq.” The increased costs in Afghanistan, of course, dovetail with a decrease in costs in Iraq, as Obama shifted his focus from the so-called “war of choice” to the “good war.” Cooper cites the upcoming election as a factor in what she terms “the argument over whether the United States should be building bridges in Kandahar or Cleveland.”

The either-or formulation is popular, but it is also simplistic in that it transforms a complicated question into a binary choice. Of course, the reduction of a thousand complexities into one yes-or-no decision is a familiar Republican tactic. (For example, conservatives would have us believe that freedom and a social safety net are mutually exclusive.) In this case, however, both parties use simplification to advance their priorities. In a Newsweek article, Lawrence Kaplan states his thesis in the headline: “Afghanistan Is Not Making America Bankrupt.” Kaplan argues that military strategy should be created without input from the guys in accounting. A war crucial to America’s interests is no less important simply because it carries a steep price tag. “Put another way, if the war is right and necessary, then its expense shouldn’t matter,” he writes. “Likewise, if it is wrong or unimportant, either morally or strategically, the president has no business risking a single American life in Afghanistan.” Maybe somebody should have mentioned this to George W. Bush before he invaded Iraq.

Discussions about the cost of war often throw around large numbers: Ezra Klein of the Washington Post points out that the Congressional Budget Office estimates that ending the war in Afghanistan will save $1.4 trillion. This is largely due to the fact way the budget office makes its projections:

In the case of discretionary spending — which is the pot of money that goes to the wars — they simply take current spending and assume it grows at the rate of inflation. So though it’s clear our wars are winding down, they won’t count the savings from them in their projections until there’s explicit government policy that winds them down.

Kaplan sees things in a different light. He writes, “Next year the Pentagon plans to spend $107 billion in Afghanistan—this, in comparison to the $3.7 trillion that the Obama team plans to spend overall. Put another way, Afghanistan amounts to all of 0.75 percent of the nation’s $14.1 trillion GDP.” By contrast, the amount spent on Medicare, Social Security and “other domestic spending” is around $2 trillion, or 20 times the annual cost of waging war in Afghanistan. Kaplan also points out that “one-time sunk costs like equipment and construction—the constellation of bases that loop around Afghanistan, not the troops who inhabit them—account for the war’s steepest expenditures.” In other words, we’ve already spent a boatload of money in Afghanistan; backing out now will do nothing to recover those costs. If the U.S. beats a hasty exit, it’s cutting off its nose to spite its face, since the ongoing cost of the war is minimal compared to the investment we’ve already made.

I don’t know enough about the defense budget and military costs to know if Kaplan is correct, but I am immediately suspicious of his conclusions, if only because $107 billion still sounds like a lot of money. John Boehner and friends almost shut down the government this spring over a paltry $38 billion. Over at the Times’ “Room for Debate,” Kevin Hassett of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank staffed by deficit hawks, echoes Kaplan’s analysis:

The Congressional Budget Office originally estimated that troop surge in Afghanistan would cost about $36 billion between 2010 and 2013, so reversing this expenditure should provide a peace dividend of between $10 and $15 billion per year. A conversation about a “peace dividend” must begin with the observation that this amount is absurdly small compared either with the $118 billion budgeted for Afghanistan in 2011 or with the overall deficit of about $1.5 trillion.

The $1.5 trillion Hassett cites is the amount borrowed by the government for one year; the national debt (as opposed to the budget deficit) is in the neighborhood of $14 trillion. That $1.5 trillion is strikingly close to the $1.2 trillion that economist Mark Zandi notes that we’ve spent in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past decade. Though I don’t buy the theory, articulated by Zandi as well as several of his fellow contributors, that reduced defense spending in the 1990s was a direct cause of the economic boom and accompanying budget surplus, he does make a valid point:

For context, there is general agreement that the federal budget deficit must be reduced by some $4 trillion over 10 years to make the government’s fiscal situation sustainable. Simply cutting spending by half in Iraq and Afghanistan over the next decade would go a long way to achieving that goal.

In his speech on Wednesday, President Obama said that  “America, it is time to focus on nation-building here at home.” I have my doubts that the money not spent in Afghanistan will go to repairing roads or creating jobs. Cindy Williams, another “debater” at the Times, shares this outlook. She opines that “if history is a guide, any peace dividend we get will be used instead to reduce federal deficits.” Military spending decreased in the 90s, but “virtually none of the defense windfall found its way into infrastructure, education or other government activities.”

Lost in all the talk about the cost of war is the significance of talking about it at all. Anti-war Democrats have been pilloried in recent years for suggesting that the U.S. withdraw “before the job is done” — the equivalent of “cutting and running.” A measure of that criticism was still evident on Wednesday evening, when prominent Republicans like John McCain lambasted the president for attaching (supposedly) artificial timetables to battlefield decisions. But that’s just the point: Battlefield decisions are not made solely by battlefield generals. There is a reason that the president, a civilian, is also the commander in chief of the military. Tactical decisions are not the only criteria by which foreign adventures are evaluated, despite any wishful thinking by Lawrence Kaplan. The war in Afghanistan does not exist in a vacuum, and by bringing cost-benefit analysis into the picture, Obama is only accepting reality. Perhaps it is distasteful to suggest that the public’s appetite for war should sway the president’s choices on national security, but elected officials are elected for a reason. If they cease to consider the public’s interest, they have ceased to do their jobs.

The Times reports that General Petraeus, at a hearing about his nomination as C.I.A. director, told the Senate Intelligence Committee, ““There are broader considerations beyond those just of a military commander.” He is correct in his deference. Writing in Foreign Policy magazine about Jon Huntsman’s call to wind down U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, Douglas A. Ollivant states that the conversation about troop withdrawal “needs to happen in Washington.” He continues:

Too often we hear from politicians and pundits that we should defer to “the commander in the field.” But the commander in the field does not ask and should not be asking these questions. It is not the place of the ISAF commander Gen. David Petraeus to ask questions about our interests and do a cost-benefit analysis . . . . It is his job to do the best he can with the resources provided within the scope of clearly articulated national policy guidance that should, and must come from Washington.

This Wednesday, it did. Whatever the financial pluses and minuses of bringing home the “surge” troops, at least a decision has been made. Yet those who hope the country can finally move on from the wars of the past decade may be too hopeful. We’ve still got a pile of national debt and a Republican Party that refuses to bend to fiscal reality. If the GOP wants to cut and downsize its way back to prosperity, it should at least acknowledge that Obama is helping them out. After all, the cutting has to start somewhere.

The Camera Lies

The act of observation is never neutral. Reality TV does not show reality because the presence of the camera injects an outside element into an otherwise closed system. Perhaps the closest we could come to filming reality would be to watch through hidden cameras or one-way glass. It’s no secret that we act differently when we know we are being watched. The presence of the the media

The Saddam Hussein statue in Firdos Square

can turn a peaceful protest into a violent melee, as people “perform” for the camera or attempt to deliver the sort of excitement that wins coverage on the nightly news. Even if the journalists or photographers go unnoticed, their work inevitably frames and shades the public memory of the event. The cliche holds that “the camera never lies,” but it lies by its very nature, by the fact that it cannot capture everything around it. By definition, a photograph picks a square of space and squashes it between four walls; it includes some things and excludes others. A front-page picture of a demonstrating crowd may show people packed tightly together, but it may not reveal that, had the photographer pivoted 90 degrees to the right, he would have seen an empty street.

How much does the media influence world events? How much of the narrative we accept as history is a fabrication concocted by human beings trying to make sense out of chaos? Two recent stories explore what happens when reality becomes surreal, when the hand holding the camera is the same as the hand guiding the revolution.

In “The Toppling” (The New Yorker, 1/10/11), Peter Maass reveals that a symbolic, TV-friendly turning point in the invasion of Iraq — the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad’s Firdos Square — was perhaps more a product of the American military and media than any swell of anti-Saddam Iraqi spirit.

“The slap that sparked a revolution” (The Guardian, 5/15/11) is Elizabeth Day’s investigation of the life and death of Mohamed Bouazizi, whose self-immolation sparked the revolution in Tunisia. The particulars of the straw that broke the camel’s back, an argument with a government official that may (or may not) have ended in a slap to Bouazizi’s face, are hardly straightforward. Day writes that “there is also a growing murmur of dissent among those who believe that Mohamed was not a political hero but a media creation . . . .” Everything, from the slap itself to a visit by Tunisia’s dictator to Bouazizi’s deathbed, is in question.