By Michael Miner
9/11: He Saw It Coming
Paul Bremer, the American viceroy in Baghdad, was asked the other day by Meet the Press's Tim Russert to whom he'd be turning over the keys to Iraq on June 30. Bremer couldn't say. But that's when Iraq supposedly gets its sovereignty back and Bremer can go home.
Once Bremer's time is his own again, the 9/11 commission should bring him in to testify. The question that haunts the commission today -- what should the U.S. have been doing before September 11, 2001, to prevent a terrorist attack? -- preoccupied him for years.
Before 9/11 the nation wasn't blind to the peril it was in. In 1998 Congress told the Clinton administration to conduct a study of the nation's ability to defeat terrorists armed with weapons of mass destruction. An advisory panel that became known as the Gilmore commission was assembled and issued a series of annual reports. Its second, released in December 2000, asserted that "the United States has no coherent, functional national strategy for combating terrorism. . . . The organization of the Federal government's programs for combating terrorism is fragmented, uncoordinated, and politically unaccountable." The commission recommended that "the next President should develop and present to the Congress a national strategy for combating terrorism within one year of assuming office."
A career diplomat, Bremer was President Reagan's ambassador-at-large for counterterrorism. A decade later he sat on the Gilmore commission. In 1999 another congressionally mandated panel, the National Commission on Terrorism, began a six-month study of America's capacity to prevent and punish acts of terrorism. "Seriously deficient," it would conclude. Bremer chaired this commission.
On February 26, 2001, the Robert R. McCormick Tribune Foundation opened a three-day conference on the theme "Terrorism: Informing the Public" at Cantigny, the colonel's estate in Wheaton. Bremer, who gave the keynote speech, recalled his work on the National Commission on Terrorism.
"We concluded that the general terrorist threat is increasing," Bremer said, "particularly because of a change in the motives of terrorist groups. . . . We have seen a move from narrow political motivation to a broader ideological, religious, or apocalyptic motive for many terrorist groups -- groups that are not attacking because they are trying to find a broader audience, but are acting out of revenge or hatred, or simply out of an apocalyptic belief that the end of the world is near." The new terrorists, he said, weren't interested in killing just enough innocent people to get noticed. For them it was the more dead the better.
The Bush administration had been in power just about a month at this point, but Bremer had already seen enough to draw some conclusions about it. He told the many journalists invited to the Cantigny conference to hold the White House's feet to the fire: "It is the media's responsibility, and an important one, though very uncomfortable for people in government, to put a very strong spotlight on the government's policies and practices on terrorism, especially given the current disorganization of the federal government's fight against terrorism. In this area, the federal government is in complete disarray. There's been remarkably little attention to the major recommendation the Gilmore Commission made for a substantial reorganization of the government's approach to terrorism. Journalists shouldn't let politicians get away with that.
"The new administration seems to be paying no attention to the problem of terrorism. What they will do is stagger along until there's a major incident and then suddenly say, 'Oh, my God, shouldn't we be organized to deal with this?' That's too bad. They've been given a window of opportunity with very little terrorism now, and they're not taking advantage of it. Maybe the folks in the press ought to be pushing a little bit."
Bremer's remarks, somewhat abridged, survive in Terrorism: Informing the Public, the McCormick Tribune Foundation's book-length report on the conference. By the time it was published, in 2002, that window of opportunity had slammed shut.
Liberals Get a Rush of Their Own on Air America
The new liberal radio "network" Air America Radio found itself in a silly predicament last week -- in a fit of pique, the owner of a couple of pip-squeak outlets knocked it off the air in Chicago and Los Angeles.
I turned of course to my computer. (Air America started broadcasting March 31, and two million audio streams -- some sort of record -- were reported the first week.) High tech and talk radio aren't natural allies -- the romantic ideal is the interstate trucker guzzling joe and hee-hawing at the malice oozing from the dash. But they're a better match than talk radio and Al Franken. He's too congenial. He sounds like a long-lost Magliozzi brother who moans about WMDs instead of carburetors.
Air America disappeared suddenly last Wednesday from WNTD in Chicago and KBLA in Los Angeles, both owned by MultiCultural Radio Broadcasting of Manhattan. MultiCultural owner Arthur Liu claimed a check had bounced. The Tribune reported being told that the Air America rep overseeing the feed from New York was tossed out of WNTD by a MultiCultural representative who switched to a Spanish-language feed and changed all the locks.
Air America went to court the next day, and a New York state judge ordered Air America back on the air in Chicago. (LA remained off.) So I sat at my desk counting on streaming audio to keep me abreast of the excitement, while behind me WNTD (950 on our AM dials) chattered away in foreign languages. I expected the station to resume its regular programming at any moment, but Air America didn't return until Friday afternoon.
PM drive-time hostess, Randi Rhodes, as I am not the first to notice, is the real thing. "She's obnoxious. She gets it. Barely tolerates the callers who agree with her," I scribbled. The key to being a great talk-show host, I surmised, is the ability to loathe your enemies and abase your friends, the ability to reduce listeners to fawning acolytes who call in to thank you for blessing their squalid lives with God's own truth. The ability to, without disagreeing with a word of praise they lavish, somehow convey your contempt for their servile need to lavish it.
Rhodes has that down cold. I'm never wrong, she said more than once, a true ideological dominatrix. "Unflinching candor," says her Air America bio, which traces her progress from Brooklyn to a "most outstanding woman" air force award to a Mexican restaurant in Seminole, Texas, where she waitressed while breaking into radio to her "legendary" talk shows in south Florida. I'm fat and I'm ugly, she said breezily on the air. And she's a hater.
More . . .
chicagoreader.com |
