THE STATE OF THE BEAT
Imagining Evil
Homeland Security: What We Don’t Know Can Hurt Us
“The most important failure was one of imagination.” — Report of the 9/11 Commission
It could happen, and some are certain that it will: another catastrophic attack on an American city, another day of horror and heartbreak. The raw scenes would be carried live on national television, and the media would rise to the occasion, as they did after the airplanes hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Television would focus its lens on nothing else; newspapers and magazines would begin work on amazing packages that, in time, would begin to piece together just how the security of the homeland had again been breached. Commissions would be convened, and we’d cover every word. We would begin to hear from our colleagues echoes of things that were written and said in the aftermath of the first attack, on 9/11, as we once again declared that the age of fluff and celebrity was over.
But what about now, before such an attack? What, exactly, is being done to prevent one? Three-quarters of Americans say they are satisfied that the government is doing a good job of protecting them from terrorists. But do they really know? Billions of dollars have been spent, vast quantities of data that were once part of the public record have vanished, reams of new regulations have been written, and the largest reorganization of the federal government in half a century has taken place — all in the name of defending the homeland. It’s quite a story, and for a few months after 9/11, the media were filled with articles about homeland security just as they have been filled lately with stories about terror alerts.
Yet extensive and specific searches by CJR show that over the last couple of years, coverage of the effort to prevent another 9/11 has been spotty, episodic, reactive, and shallow. The strong stories we did find are the exceptions that prove the rule, and they more than demonstrate the need for a continuing and critical assessment of whether the government’s policies and practices actually match their stated purpose of safeguarding America.
While some news outlets assign reporters to cover the Department of Homeland Security, few do it full-time and none cover all twenty-two agencies that make up its bureaucracy. News bureaus give it short shrift, as they do most federal agencies. Yet homeland security is not only a Washington story. It’s a national, state, and local story all at once. It’s about the ports, the railroads, the airlines, the utility plants, the food supply, communications — the guts of America. It’s about the records at your doctor’s office and restrictions on our civil liberties. It’s about the rules placed on businesses and expanding markets for big corporations and little start-ups selling baggage scanners and bomb-sniffing technology. It is a beat for those willing to dig along the underlying fault line that has opened since 9/11: the public’s right to know versus their most basic need for safety.
Given that the universe of homeland security is so expansive and diffuse, that it is wrapped in secrecy and muffled in bureaucracy, it is not surprising that journalists have had a hard time embracing what is a monster of a beat. Still, considering the significance of the subject — it is hard to think of a more important one — it follows that editors and reporters should be eager to try. If the government’s prime objective is protecting its people, ours should be making sure it carries out that task. Why haven’t we done that? One reason is that media companies have consistently dictated cuts to the newsgathering budget to make investors happy; hard, slow digging costs money.
But there’s more to it than that.
“This isn’t just any story,” points out Dr. Tara O’Toole, who heads the Center for Biosecurity at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. “We are in a whole new era, the end of American hegemony, in which we are vulnerable to attack. And that makes people very uncomfortable.”
It is also a story that demands imagination. Journalists like to report on happenings, not on question marks; the specificity of an event allows us to report with authority and some semblance of objectivity. In the months preceding the war in Iraq, for example, few stories tried to look forward to what would happen after the invasion ended and the occupation began. Yet high-quality material for such speculative but informed stories was out there, in think tanks and reports and in the minds of dozens of experts. James Fallows is one of the few writers who found and used them, for his celebrated November 2002 piece in The Atlantic Monthly, “The Fifty-first State?” which explored likely scenarios for postwar Iraq. On the homeland security front, one of the few reporters to do something similar was Matthew Brzezinski, a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, who wrote a well-reported piece in February 2003 about how day-to-day life might change if the U.S. moved to “total terrorist preparedness.” Much of Brzezinski’s reporting was done in Israel, a nation that knows something about that condition.
Since homeland security stories are essentially about what we hope does not happen, they often require us to game out probabilities and possibilities, most of them dire. And we resist. “Editors sometimes see homeland security as ‘henny penny the sky is falling’ stories,” says a prominent Washington reporter who covers homeland security for a major newspaper. “Like ‘the American ports could be attacked.’ They get tired of the possibility that this could happen.” This reporter says that homeland security coverage is a step removed from the more dramatic work of covering terrorism. “It’s analyzing in an antiseptic way what a terrorist might do.”
The Department of Homeland Security itself, meanwhile, is the most secretive of agencies in the most secretive of administrations. When a CJR intern asked for the exact number of terrorist warnings to the public since 2002, a p.r. person at the department, who declined to give her full name, said the information was “classified.” The department, housed in a former naval facility on Nebraska Avenue miles from downtown Washington, has the aura of an impenetrable fortress. And for most reporters there’s no advantage in hanging around. “All you get are p.r. people. If you want to get a policy person, it’s near impossible,” says Sean Moulton, a senior policy analyst at OMB Watch, a public-interest group that promotes government accountability. Some information, of course, must be kept out of the public domain. There is no need to provide a tip sheet for the terrorists. But simply trusting the department to make the decisions about what the public gets to know is not merely naďve, but dangerous.
This is especially true when we consider what the government tries to keep secret, and when we consider some of the strong reporting that journalists have managed to do in the months since 9/11, the solid stories that demonstrate the possibility and significance of the beat. Two examples:
Air Cargo Last May in Indianapolis, the I-Team investigators at WISH-TV presented their viewers with a frightening bit of news: the belly of an ordinary passenger plane carries commercial cargo that probably has never been screened.
Using government reports, interviews with air safety experts, and their own test of packages containing questionable items that they sent through the mail on airplanes, reporters at the CBS affiliate documented a gaping hole in air safety. They showed that federal legislation passed after 9/11 required the screening of all mail and cargo carried on commercial passenger jets — cargo that could carry explosives, dirty bombs, or deadly biological agents. But they then used the government’s own investigations to show that those screening procedures had never been put into effect, largely because of industry resistance.
The team’s revelations made something of a mockery of the elaborate screening procedures that passengers endure at the nation’s 445 commercial airports. Yet WISH-TV’s six-part series on air-cargo safety, which began with an anonymous tip, is a rarity. CJR searched for stories on air-cargo safety in the mainstream media, including national and regional newspapers, news magazines, and major broadcast outlets, and found that although news outlets mentioned the problem from time to time, they often did so in the context of other stories. Time magazine, for example, ran a survey of homeland security vulnerabilities in its August 2 edition, in the wake of the 9/11 commission report; the part about air cargo was limited to a single sentence.
In June, WISH-TV saw an opportunity to show viewers the difference between the security talk and the political walk, and followed up on the story. That month the U.S. House of Representatives defeated — by a vote of 211 to 191 — a bill that would finally have ensured inspection of all cargo shipped on passenger planes. The station reported that Indiana’s House delegation voted against the bill, and included comments from one member, who had earlier told the I-Team that he found unchecked cargo “troubling.” The point was to show that politicians said one thing, then turned around and did another because of industry lobbying, says producer Loni McKown. The air-cargo industry claims that meticulous checking would slow the system down too much, and that appropriate technology is not available, a point WISH-TV showed is in dispute.
In fact, the economic interests of the powerful air-cargo industry, which helped defeat the June bill and has thwarted the congressional mandate of 2001, are seriously undercovered. For example, the Associated Press in its story about the defeat of the bill briefly noted that the cargo industry helped sink it. The piece, a wrap-up story about other homeland security spending legislation, was picked up by just a few papers, including USA Today, and papers in Houston, Charleston, West Virginia, Grand Rapids, Seattle, and Milwaukee. The Washington Post did its own version, but it’s a good bet that most air travelers still do not know that one-quarter of the nation’s air cargo is flying with them, and that almost none of it has passed through a screening machine.
There is plenty more they don’t know about air safety. They may not know, for example, that the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), which is responsible for examining passenger baggage, sometimes puts the airlines’ need to keep passengers moving above passengers’ need for a safe journey — a point Mother Jones and The Seattle Times both made in July. The publications took a rare look at the contradictions that abound even in passenger screening. The Seattle Times found that in its hometown, airlines loaded unscreened baggage onto planes. Mother Jones reported that when two men who trained tsa screeners raised questions about unscreened luggage, they lost their jobs.
Chemical Plants In the months after 9/11, Carl Prine, a reporter for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, owned by the conservative philanthropist Richard Mellon Scaife, walked into sixty-two chemical plants in Baltimore, Chicago, Houston, and Pittsburgh. He found lax security; easy access to sites; unguarded rail lines; and employees, customers, and neighbors who allowed a stranger to walk in, some giving directions, to the most sensitive valves and control rooms in the place. At one steel plant, near Pittsburgh, mill workers tipped their hats to Prine as he wandered “toward 100,000 pounds of acid that could kill, injure, trap, or displace 16,000 people” living within a mile of the plant.
The paper continued with coverage of the lobbying efforts of the American Chemistry Council, an industry trade group, to defeat legislation that would require stronger security at the nation’s 15,000 chemical plants. That legislation, championed by Senator Jon Corzin of New Jersey, remains stalled.
Those stories stand as a model of dogged reporting for the rest of the press. Says Steven Aftergood, a senior research analyst at the Federation of American Scientists: “Chemical plant security has been inadequately reported. Chances are that wherever you are, there’s a call for journalistic oversight of your local facility.” After 9/11, and in 2002 and 2003, many media outlets did briefly note that chemical plants might be vulnerable, and some mentioned Corzine’s mission to make them safer. But none came close to rivaling the Pittsburgh stories for thoroughness, enterprise, and insight.
By 2004 most of the press seemed to lose interest. Much of this year’s coverage of the subject has centered on an address by John Kerry to the National Conference of Black Mayors, accusing the Bush administration of leaving chemical plants open to attack. Even when the General Accounting Office released a second report in February reiterating the same points it made a year earlier — about plant vulnerability and the inadequacy of a voluntary approach to security — only a handful of papers saw this as news.
One bright exception, though, was a 60 Minutes investigation, first aired last November, in which reporters followed Prine’s map and visited dozens of chemical sites across the country. They found the same kind of security lapses that Prine had found two years earlier, including unlocked gates, dilapidated fences, and unprotected tanks filled with deadly chemicals. 60 Minutes noted the same legislative barriers to greater security that Prine had written about. The segment ran again in June, after which correspondent Steve Kroft pointed out that almost nothing had changed — including the lobbying by the chemical industry to defeat Corzine’s bill.
“You could say that homeland security is all about money,” says Jeff Stein, who edits Homeland Security, an online newsletter published by Congressional Quarterly. The press, for the most part, has yet to delve into the connection between decisions about homeland security and the profits or losses that flow from those decisions.
Consider Project BioShield, which President Bush announced in his 2003 State of the Union address. The program sets aside $5.6 billion over ten years to develop a new generation of drugs to fight anthrax, smallpox, botulinum toxin, and other agents that could be used in a terrorist attack. As an incentive for biotechnology firms to invest in costly research and development, the government guarantees a market for the new drugs. “We must assume that our enemies would use these diseases as weapons, and we must act before the dangers are upon us,” Bush said in his speech. Few would argue with that premise.
But the press has not put Project BioShield under a microscope. Although several stories have mentioned the program, they haven’t probed its costs and benefits. Some seemed to parrot the administration’s enthusiasm for a pet project. In one news story in 2003, USA Today flatly asserted: “The need for bioterrorism drugs and vaccines is great. Botulinum toxin, for instance, is one of Saddam Hussein’s major bioweapons.” But the media have not yet asked basic questions about the program’s effectiveness, its cost, and its long-term wisdom, given other health-system problems, such as a crumbling public health infrastructure. Merrill Goozner, a former journalist who recently joined the Center for Science in the Public Interest, raised such issues in a story that appeared last fall in The American Prospect. Yet even in July, when the president signed Project BioShield into law, the project remained largely unexplored.
Another undercovered money story: what is happening to the money doled out for “first responders?” After 9/11, people inside and outside government recognized the need to bolster the capabilities of the police, firefighters, emergency workers, and public health officials who are the first responders when disaster strikes. The government addressed the problem by shoveling huge sums of money toward the nooks and crannies of America. From 1999 to 2003 funding for first responders increased 2,375 percent; by 2003 the federal treasury was ponying up more than $2 billion for local jurisdictions to buy equipment, pay for training, and conduct preparedness exercises.
But curiously, much of that money has not been used, according to a recent report by the Homeland Security department’s own auditor. The report offered some puzzling statistics: as of February 2004, fifty-six states and territories had drawn down only 36 percent of the 2002 grant money and 23 percent of the 2003 money. For 2002, Delaware, New Jersey, New York, Oklahoma, and Wyoming had not used any of the money. For 2003, that list included Colorado, Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Illinois, New Mexico, and South Dakota.
Homeland Security Funding Report, a newsletter published by CD Publications, ran several stories showing how the money is often caught in a labyrinth of paperwork that almost guarantees that it doesn’t flow easily. Yet CJR found very few stories published or aired in those states that had not spent their chunk of the first-responder money.
The Buffalo News is one news outlet that did examine the slow spending in its region, in a 1,500-word piece that also looked at the other side of the ledger — some of the oddities of what was purchased with money that authorities did manage to spend. Among the paper’s findings: the administration of Governor George Pataki had sent 1,800 escape masks to Erie and Niagara Counties, which weighed ten pounds each and contained five minutes worth of oxygen. The paper noted that a spokesman for the state Task Force on Weapons of Mass Destruction declined to discuss any aspect of the procurement.
Yet in general we have been slow to follow up on leads about homeland security that should spark reportorial interest, including leads from the government itself. Take, for example, the Justice Department’s announcement in early May that the government’s use of secret warrants to monitor suspected terrorists had increased sharply in 2003. The Justice Department said it had sought more than 1,700 warrants — an increase of 500 over 2002 —from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the secret court that oversees terrorist and espionage cases. Law enforcement officials are held to a lower standard of proof in seeking these warrants than in regular criminal cases. Yet only four major newspapers ran news stories about the increase, which civil liberties advocates see as an alarming trend, and one ran an editorial.
Even when leads are followed up, the going is tough. For those who are trying to do serious reporting on homeland security, a freeze on unclassified information has altered the landscape. At the Environmental Protection Agency, for instance, citizens can no longer view environmental impact studies for chemical plants. Risk-management plans submitted by companies to the government, which detail disaster preparedness, have disappeared from government Web sites.
And the “sensitive security information” provision tucked into the Homeland Security Act, which agencies are just now beginning to define, may well erect a larger barrier to reporting. This provision, intended to make it easier for state and local officials to share information about the risk of attacks on vulnerable infrastructure, requires all those receiving the information to sign nondisclosure agreements; violations may result in heavy fines. What state official will violate such an agreement? The not unreasonable fear is that the definition of “sensitive” will be so broad that the public may never learn whether, say, their water supply is at risk. While one can argue that such a provision keeps terrorists from learning about security loopholes, the counterargument is that it keeps government and industry immune from pressure to do something about the dangers. Journalists can’t expose the problem, and the community can’t agitate for change. Take something as simple as learning about a city’s disaster preparedness plan. “I can tell you I made a custom mass dispensing model [for antibiotics], but not anything about the model,” says Dr. Nathaniel Hupert, an assistant professor of public health at the Weill Medical College of Cornell University. “Any time I’m asked about New York City’s preparedness, I refer people to the Department of Health.”
Buried in the Homeland Security Act is yet another obscure provision dealing with “critical infrastructure information.” This gives businesses protection from civil lawsuits and protection from the prying eyes of reporters in exchange for providing the government with data about their plants, communications systems, and the like that could be open to an attack. If, say, a company that built a bridge has reason to believe the cables will snap, the firm can come forward and share those concerns with the government. But the provision forbids the government from using that information in any regulatory action or disclosing it to the media. It is also exempt from Freedom of Information Act requirements. At the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, for example, reporters cannot easily obtain critical infrastructure information about liquefied natural gas plants or hydroelectric dams. The agency still has its electronic library but has made the process for obtaining data far more onerous. Those trying to access the information, for instance, must prove they have need for it, and may be asked to sign a nondisclosure statement. What reporter would sign one?
Some journalists and public-interest advocates believe that this information shutdown is as much about helping big business get its way with government regulators as it is about thwarting terrorists. “A lot of industries are using the fear of terrorism and the homeland security mandate as a way of getting goodies they’ve been unable to get legally for years,” says Joseph Davis, a former reporter for Congressional Quarterly and director of the Watchdog Project for the Society of Environmental Journalists. “This needs to be reported.”
Secrecy, no matter its rationale, makes it harder for news organizations to do their job. Earlier this year the Fort Worth Star-Telegram was working on a story about $10 million worth of tax breaks that the city of Roanoke, twenty miles northeast of Fort Worth, had given Citibank to build a large data-processing facility. The paper planned to run a map showing where the access roads and the building would be — basic information it thought residents of this tiny town, population 4,650, might want about a big new employer. But the city refused to give the paper the documents it needed and referred the matter to the Texas attorney general. The reason? The paper’s request fell within the critical-infrastructure-information provisions of the Texas Homeland Security Act. The attorney general bought Citibank’s argument that a terrorist attack on its processing center “could severely impact the company’s business operations, and, in turn, cause enduring economic damage to the country’s economic system.” Editors thought the argument was a stretch, and the paper published stories about its fight with Texas officials. In the end the paper ran a story describing the intersection where the building was to be built, but no map.
The government’s attack on information is “one of the biggest stories of our lifetime,” says Lucy Dalglish, who heads the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. “The public’s ability to exercise oversight of government operations is being eviscerated.” Stories that tell of that threat, she added, are few and far between.
At the heart of the media’s hesitation about homeland security may be fear of confronting the government. “We in the press were slow to find the line where secrecy is legitimate and where disclosure is imperative,” admits Andy Alexander, Washington bureau chief for Cox Newspapers and chair of the Freedom of Information Committee for the American Society of Newspaper Editors. “We were slow to get to the point where information was being shut down.”
Indeed. Consider the story of James McNeil, a government contractor, who in November gave public, unclassified testimony to the House Government Reform Committee. McNeil described how an undercover agent of the Transportation Security Administration had smuggled small handguns past airport screeners in Rochester, New York, by taping them to their thighs with Ace bandages and claiming he had just had surgery. In February the TSA demanded that McNeil’s testimony be expunged from the public record, arguing that it included “sensitive security information.” The TSA asked the House committee to post a redacted version and asked the Federal Document Clearing House, which provides transcripts of hearings to news organizations, to remove the testimony from its media archives. Both complied.
The Clearing House then asked its customers to delete McNeil’s prepared statement. Congressional Quarterly refused to delete the testimony from its Web site, and its newsletter, Homeland Security, told its 1,200 subscribers about the demand. Yet mainstream media did not tell their readers and viewers, who number in the millions. “The idea that the public record can be retroactively modified is appalling,” says Steven Aftergood, of the Federation of American Scientists. But CJR found no editorial comment about this, and the only news stories on the subject appeared in the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle and The Washington Post.
Contrast media response to such demands for secrecy with the outrage expressed by librarians over provisions in the Patriot Act. The law allows FBI agents to seek permission from the secret court set up under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to obtain personal records ranging from data on a patron’s reading habits and use of the Internet to medical histories and bookstore purchases. Librarians participated in rallies, challenging Attorney General John Ashcroft when his road show promoting the Patriot Act came to some towns in the summer of 2003. They expect to collect one million signatures by the end of September to support amending the act.
This from librarians. Where are the journalists? A fundamental tenet of the American system is that a free flow of information is essential to democracy. That flow is being pinched like never before. Instead of passively standing by, journalism should be working against this dangerous trend.
A new effort that may fire up the media is the Coalition of Journalists for Open Government, formed at the beginning of the year with a grant from the Knight Foundation. Its twenty-seven members include the American Society of Newspaper Editors, the Radio-Television News Directors Association & Foundation, and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. The group has begun to speak out, and recently offered strong testimony to the Department of Transportation and the Transportation Security Administration about regulations and review procedures regarding sensitive security information. Such lobbying activities are not universally popular among journalists and publishers. “There’s a reluctance to see this as the priority it used to be,” says the AP’s president, Tom Curley, who has called for a battle plan to strengthen statutory guarantees of access to government records. Curley sees many reasons for the reluctance, ranging from the time it takes to get the right decisions on a First Amendment case to worries about declining audiences. “Are they afraid they don’t have the public’s support?” he asks.
But the public, we are willing to bet, would indeed like to know that terrorists can tape guns to their legs and climb aboard airplanes; that airplanes fly with a hold full of uninspected cargo; that ships bring in some 7 million containers to America each year, and only a fraction are ever inspected; that security at chemical plants and other dangerous sites is porous. The public surely would like to know if the government is really trying to close such loopholes in homeland security. And if we make our case well and report forthrightly on the homeland security beat, the public just might want to make certain that we have the tools we need to hold the government accountable. The public’s right to know is central to what we do. If we don’t believe that, we are in the wrong profession.
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