The paper’s antagonistic posture was dictated in part by the sweeping nature of the policy changes required to fight a war on terrorism. A more fundamental reason, however, was a set of idées fixes about the nature of the threat represented by militant Islam, and about a supposed overreaction based on “Islamophobia” encoded in the nation’s DNA. Instead of seeing the radical Islamic jihad as a fundamental challenge to the West, the Times has invoked inappropriate, shallow and alarmist historical analogies—for instance, likening crackdowns on militant Muslims and illegal Islamic immigrants to the infamous Palmer Raids during the Red Scare of the early 1920s or the internment of Japanese American citizens and resident aliens during World War II. Rather than inventory the ways in which the Islamic jihad targets the West’s commitment to Enlightenment values of equality between the sexes, religious pluralism and tolerance for dissent, the Times has insisted that Islam is “a religion of peace,” that the government has overreacted to fringe elements in a cynical grab for power, and that Muslims in this country are victims of Islamophobia just as blacks are victims of racism and Hispanics are victims of nativism. Invoking the anticommunism of the Cold War, the Times’ regular Web contributor Robert Wright wrote in June 2010, “Once you decide that some group is your implacable enemy, your mind gets a little warped.”
One result of this script is that the Times has basically put its head in the sand regarding the various terror plots that have been mounted against the United States and its allies. The dangers that these plots represent are typically minimized and the role that jihadism plays in animating them is denied or downplayed, often in a journalistically clumsy way.
The Times’ treatment of Sami al-Arian was an early example of the paper’s prejudices. A Palestinian-born professor of computer science at the University of South Florida who ran an Islamic charity and think tank in Tampa, al-Arian first came under investigation by federal authorities in the mid 1990s, when news reports noted calls for the destruction of Israel and donations to terrorist groups. Later, al-Arian and his organizations came under closer scrutiny when a Palestinian colleague he had brought to the university disappeared abruptly, only to end up in Damascus as the leader of the terrorist group Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The University of South Florida suspended al-Arian at first, then dismissed him. Meanwhile, the government launched a terrorism funding case against al-Arian. According to the government, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which al-Arian’s think tank had helped found, had mounted a number of terrorist bombings that had killed civilians in Israel.
The case polarized the university community and infuriated Muslims throughout the country. Al-Arian’s supporters saw him as a free-speech martyr, “the new Alger Hiss.” (Al-Arian humbly played the Islamophobia card: “I’m a minority, I’m an Arab, I’m Palestinian. That’s not a popular thing to be these days.”) But his opponents saw someone who had infiltrated the university to advance a terrorist agenda. As the case against al-Arian grew, many former supporters felt burned, especially fellow faculty who had bought into the argument about free speech and academic freedom.
The Times went to bat for al-Arian, seeing him as a victim of a “New McCarthyism.” In late January 2002, the editorial board scolded the University of South Florida and the state’s Republican governor, Jeb Bush, insisting they dishonored “the ideals of public universities” in trying to fire al-Arian for his “anti-Israel statements.”
During his trial in 2005 and 2006, federal prosecutors introduced convincing evidence that al-Arian was not just another tweedy professor with eccentrically heterodox ideas. After a double suicide bombing killed twenty-two people in Israel, al-Arian, the government maintained, had written a letter soliciting “true support of the jihad effort in Palestine so that operations such as these can continue.” Al-Arian eventually reached a plea agreement with the government in which he acknowledged that his fundraising efforts were intended to finance terrorist attacks and did, in fact, make terrorist acts possible. Part of the agreement read that “the defendant, knowing the unlawful purpose of the plan, willfully joined it.”
Still, the Times continued to carry al-Arian’s banner. It took his side in a controversy over whether he should be compelled to testify before a federal grand jury in Virginia, which was investigating other branches of Islamic terrorism in America and which, the government claimed, would benefit from his knowledge. In April 2008, Neil MacFarquhar, ignoring all prior court evidence, said that al-Arian was “nothing more sinister than an outspoken Palestinian activist” who was being unjustly punished with threats of being jailed on contempt of court charges.
The Times was also solicitous toward Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, a 23-year-old Virginia Muslim who in November 2005 was convicted on charges of plotting to assassinate President George Bush, among other charges. Abu Ali had ties to several men convicted as part of the Virginia Jihad, known derisively to many, including many at the Times, as the “Paintball Jihad” because of their military training routines. Abu Ali had traveled to Saudi Arabia and had been arrested there in a government crackdown after terrorist bombings in Riyadh in 2003, thought to be the work of al-Qaeda.
In reporting the indictment in February 2005, the Times quoted friends and defense lawyers of Abu Ali who said he was not part of any plot but had given a confession as a result of torture by the Saudis. “Several of the government’s major terror prosecutions . . . have suffered significant setbacks in the courtroom or collapsed altogether amid questions of prosecution tactics,” said the report. An editorial shortly afterward repeated the claims of torture, and made clear that the Times saw the alleged infringement of Abu Ali’s civil rights as more serious than his plans to kill the president. “If the Justice Department believed that Mr. Abu Ali was a serious terrorist, he should have been brought back here long ago for trial,” the Times argued. “Instead, he became part of an unknown number of prisoners who were swept up by American officials or foreign governments working with Americans and questioned in the wake of Sept. 11.”
When Abu Ali’s jailhouse conversations with family members were put under a gag order, the Times sided with the family. James Dao and Eric Lichtblau reported that the case had “outraged members of Northern Virginia’s growing Muslim population and escalated a conflict with federal law enforcement authorities over terrorism investigations into religious leaders, mosques, businesses and private Islamic schools in the region.” They quoted a spokesman for the Dar al-Hijrah mosque in Falls Church, where Abu Ali and his family worshipped, as saying the whole Muslim community “was under siege.”
In the fall of 2005, the government filed additional charges against Abu Ali charging conspiracy to commit aircraft piracy and destroy aircraft, in a broad plan to carry out a major terror attack. An FBI agent told reporters that Abu Ali had discussed killing U.S. congressmen and soldiers and blowing up naval ships in U.S. ports. Later, federal prosecutors alleged that Abu Ali had scouted nuclear plants in the United States at the behest of confederates in al-Qaeda. But the Times did not report these additional charges until Abu Ali was actually convicted, and then it stressed the claim that he had been tortured in Saudi Arabia, although no real evidence supported it, and that he had not been read his Miranda rights when first interviewed by the FBI.
Abu Ali was sentenced to thirty years. In 2007, government prosecutors persuaded a federal judge in Virginia that Abu Ali should get a life sentence, partly because he had never renounced his al-Qaeda ties. This was an eminently newsworthy development, yet the Times let an AP report carry the news, and buried that AP report inside the paper.
Minimal coverage was given by the Times to an episode that may have been a “dry run” for airborne terror attacks. On Northwest flight 327 between Detroit and Los Angeles on June 29, 2004, thirteen Middle Eastern men—twelve Syrians belonging to a band and their Lebanese leader—spent the four-hour flight acting suspiciously. Their seats were scattered all about the plane, but in strategic locations; the men congregated in small groups at the back of the
plane and made consecutive trips to the bathroom. During all this, they seemed to be signaling to each other. One of the men stood near the cabin door as the plane prepared to land. At the end of the flight, when the seatbelt sign was flashing, they all stood in unison. At one point, a passenger and her husband had approached a stewardess to express their concern. The stewardess told them that she and her colleagues were also concerned, as were some air marshals secretly on the flight. After landing, the plane was met by law enforcement officials, who whisked the group away for questioning.
The alarmed female passenger, Annie Jacobsen, wrote a website account of the experience, “Terror in the Skies,” which the left-wing blogosphere cruelly ridiculed as paranoid and racist. In a piece headlined “What Really Happened on Flight 327?” (in the Business section), Times columnist Joe Sharkey asked whether it might have been “an innocent sequence of events that some passengers, overcome by anxiety and perhaps ethnic stereotyping, misinterpreted as a plot to blow up their plane?”
Three years later, inspectors general for several agencies determined that the incident really was a dry run. A Homeland Security report explained that a background check in the FBI’s National Crime Information Center database, which was performed as part of a visa-extension application, produced “positive hits” for past criminal records or suspicious behavior for eight of the twelve Syrians. The Department of Homeland Security found a similar incident involving the Lebanese leader of the group five months before the event of June 2004. The report also said that the leader was detained a third time, in September, on a return trip to the United States from Istanbul, and scolded the Transportation Safety Administration for not pursuing the matter further.
Two years after the Northwest flight 327 incident, there was a similar case involving Muslim passengers acting suspiciously, which was dubbed the case of the “Flying Imams.” One of the imams involved was the head of the Islamic Center of Tucson, which one terrorism expert called “the first Al Qaeda cell in the U.S.,” according to the Washington Post. Although the incident was covered extensively in much of the mainstream media, the only coverage of the actual facts of the case in the Times appeared in an op-ed piece by former Admiral James Zumwalt—hardly a way to convey important news about a potentially dangerous event.
A conspiracy to blow up airport terminals and fuel tanks at JFK International Airport in June 2007 might have been expected to make the front page (as it did in the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times), but instead it was buried on page 30 of the national edition. The four men involved were all Muslim, and authorities tied them to Jamaat al-Muslimeen, an extremist organization in Trinidad. On page one that day, the Times chose instead to highlight a story about the youngest detainee at Guantanamo Bay, whose lawyer said he was not a terrorist but a boy who would have been riding horses, playing soccer and reading Harry Potter if he hadn’t been unjustly imprisoned. It was only deep into the story that readers learned the boy-detainee was the son of “a senior deputy to Osama bin Laden.”
Even the public editor, Clark Hoyt, chastised the editors who made the decision to bury news of the JFK plot, hinting that the senior-most editor on duty that day was overly suspicious because of prior cases when he believed the government had hyped a plot for political purposes. The paper should have played the story on page one, Hoyt said. “Newspapers . . . have to be careful not to appear indifferent to plots that, allowed to mature, could pose real threats of death and destruction.”
One such plot involved a conspiracy in May 2009 to blow up synagogues in an affluent area of the Bronx and then shoot down military planes at an Air National Guard base in midstate New York. Based on testimony by an informant, four men were arrested in a long-running “sting operation” after planting what they believed to be bombs in cars outside two synagogues in Riverdale.
The Times’ first-day reporting indicated that three of the four men had converted to Islam in prison and all worshipped at the same mosque in Newburgh, New York. According to the criminal complaint, each said he was willing “to perform jihad.” One suspect said that the American military “is killing Muslim brothers and sisters in Muslim countries, so if we kill them here with IEDs and Stingers, it is equal.” Even from the paper’s own reporting it was abundantly clear that this was a jihadi plot and the criminals were radical Muslims driven by fierce anti-Semitism. Yet the Times reported on the second day of coverage that “Law enforcement officials said the four men were Muslims, but their religious backgrounds remained uncertain.” The paper also was extremely defensive about the role that incarceration may have played in radicalizing the men. According to Daniel Wakin’s “Imams Reject Talk That Islam Radicalizes Inmates,” the imam of the mosque who ministered to the four terrorists insisted that his years working with Muslims in prison had turned up little evidence that anyone became radicalized behind bars. “I don’t hear any of that wild stuff,” he said. “And if I did hear it, I would stomp it out. It is totally un-Islamic.” Wakin also wrote that “it is uncertain just how much of a role [the suspects’] faith played in their motivation.” Sidebars and follow-ups raised questions about the government’s use of a confidential informant—the cornerstone of an “entrapment” defense. The paper also reported that the group had no ties to larger terrorist networks like al-Qaeda, as if this lessened the damage they could have caused.
Just two sentences in the tabloid New York Post captured what the handwringing Times could not: “They were like a million other petty criminals—until they embraced radical Islam behind bars, launching a terrifying march to a planned mass murder that ended only when authorities sabotaged their sinister plot.” The role of prison Islam as a path to radicalization was underscored in 2010 when ABC News reported that there were scores of American ex-convicts now in Yemen who had converted to Islam in prison and might be training for sleeper-cell operations upon returning to the United States.
The Times demonstrated its ambivalence again in reporting on the dozens of Somali teens who, the FBI said in 2009, had disappeared in cities across the country, primarily in Minneapolis but also in Seattle, St. Louis and Columbus, Ohio. They were suspected of having been recruited to wage jihad with al-Shabaab, a militant group affiliated with al-Qaeda in Somalia. One of the teenagers was positively identified by DNA as a suicide bomber who drove an explosives-laden vehicle into a compound in a Somali city, leveling a UN building, a presidential palace and an Ethiopian consulate; the FBI called him “the first U.S. citizen suicide bomber.” Despite FBI fears that some of these U.S. citizens and/or passport holders could be commissioned to carry out acts of terror on American soil, the Times devoted a mere seven paragraphs to the story, restricting its coverage to a stenographic account of the FBI press conference. Meanwhile, NPR and the Los Angeles Times did numerous reports, fleshing out details and providing important context.
It was not until July—six months after the other news organizations had reported on the unfolding case—that the Times picked up on the story. Andrea Elliott, who had won a Pulitzer Prize for her soft-edged series on “An Imam in America,” described the impetus for the young men’s travel to Somalia as a “crisis of belonging,” born of religious devotion but also discrimination in the United States, where they were “taunted” by African Americans who told them to “Go back to Africa.” Months later, in November, Elliott detailed that fourteen people had been charged in the case as either recruits who had returned home or recruiters who had played a key role in convincing them to go and underwriting their travels. Some of them were in federal custody but others were still fugitives. It was, said Elliott, “one of the most extensive domestic terrorism investigations since the September 11 attacks.”
Elliott’s reporting seemed thorough, even if inexplicably late. But it failed to note that the recruiting had been done in mosques with permission of mosque leaders, that the Council on American-Islamic Relations had advised parents of the missing teens not to cooperate with the FBI, and that the parents had rejected CAIR’
s counsel, instead mounting protests against the organization—a significant news story in itself. Elliott’s piece closed with an odd jibe at the FBI. Although she reported that recruitment seemed to be continuing, she quoted an anonymous friend of a man suspected of recruiting for al-Shabaab as telling her that the FBI’s investigation had made an underdog out of the jihadist group, thus aiding recruitment.
While it minimizes the dangers posed by terror plots, the Times has been uniformly hostile to the tools used to investigate and prosecute real and potential terrorists. In 2002 alone, the Times ran three editorials that condemned sending undercover agents into mosques suspected of supporting terrorism, fingerprinting young male visa holders from countries friendly to terrorism, and temporarily detaining asylum seekers from high-risk countries for additional background screening.
Immediately after the 9/11 attacks, the editorial board demanded to know what was being done to screen airline passengers so that people who fit the threat profile could not board American planes. Yet since then, it has repeatedly editorialized and printed news stories against “racial profiling” of Arabs and Muslims. After the London Tube bombings, for instance, the paper applauded Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s new random search policy for subway riders as “a way to treat people fairly and still pursue any real threat.” This caused even liberals to roll their eyes. As Kurt Andersen put it in New York magazine, it was “deeply disingenuous of Bloomberg to deny the fact that not just ‘most’ but nearly every jihadi who has attacked a Western European or American target is a young Arab or Pakistani man.”
An FBI plan to take a census of mosques in individual communities was characterized in Times news accounts as “racial profiling.” One report prominently carried a reaction from Ibrahim Hooper, the spokesman of CAIR, who said that the order was obviously a signal to FBI field agents to view every mosque and every Muslim as a terrorist, and that it was “imposing a sense of siege on the Arab-American community.” The insertion of undercover police officers and FBI agents into mosques to conduct surveillance was seen by the Times as particularly heinous, even though they were not conducting broad surveillance of all worshippers but only of individuals already being watched as part of terrorism investigations.
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