Opinion polls show the press enjoying unprecedented public approval, with ratings as high as 89 percent, in response to commendable reporting on the World Trade Center attack, U.S. military actions in Afghanistan and the ongoing specter of bio-terrorism, in which the media itself has become a sympathetic victim. But before the pile of bouquets grows too high, maybe we should stop and remove a flower or two from the stack.
Post-mortem analyses of the attack have pointed out significant weaknesses in immigration policies and practices, which terrorists were able to exploit in order to embed themselves in our society and operate beneath the radar. (According to the INS, three of the 19 hijackers were here illegally on expired visas, another six had no visas at all, and a few who were able to obtain valid visas were on U.S. intelligence agency watch lists.) Yet the journalistic establishment bears some responsibility, too, for the disarmed condition in which we found ourselves on Sept. 11.
Looking at the issue of immigration largely through ideological rose-colored glasses, the press has long given minimal attention to many of the numerous holes in the state and federal immigration net, which Sept. 11 revealed, confirming terrorism expert Steve Emerson’s insistence to a House subcommittee last year that “an absence of a vigilant media” has allowed terrorists to anchor themselves and operate here. Though Sept. 11 has indeed spurred much of the media to report about immigration more vigilantly, there is still considerable evidence of a politically correct mindset, largely reflected in a new solicitude toward Muslim and Arab immigrants and the place of Islam in a multicultural America.
After the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, U.S. officials overseas were supposed to tighten procedures governing screening procedures for visas issued to more than 10 million foreigners who apply for them annually. (Approximately 7 million of those who apply get them, including nine of the hijackers.) But the screening system is still spectacularly lax and badly run. Consular officers have not had access to FBI criminal databases, face tremendous pressure to push the line forward and worry for offending “the host country” by denying too many applications. In some cases, much of the day-to-day work is performed by non-American nationals in the embassy employ, their loyalties uncertain. (This is distressingly true in Saudi Arabia, where 15 of the hijackers came from.) Intelligence, law enforcement and immigration reformers have been trying to draw attention to the disarray in the visa-issuance system. But aside from the Washington Times, which pegged off a 2000 backgrounder from the Center for Immigration Studies, database searches show a minimal press response – the watchdog that did not bark.
There have been considerable weaknesses in another area involving the monitoring of visitors – especially those using flights from Egypt and Saudi Arabia – and a lack of interest from the press as well. For a decade, federal officials have asked foreign airlines to electronically provide passenger lists when planes begin flights to the United States. These electronic transmissions, called the Advance Passenger Screening System, allow customs and immigration officers at points of arrival to get a head start on checking names against “watch lists” of high-risk passengers, which often takes considerable time given the fragmentation of various federal agencies’ databases. Ninety-four foreign airlines cooperate, but Egypt Air and Saudi Arabian Airlines have refused for years to do so and continue to refuse. (A Saudi embassy spokesman quoted in a New York Times piece on Oct. 18 said: “At this time, hundreds of Saudi citizens are being detained and questioned with regard to the hijackings. A lot of them are innocent people. That number would probably quadruple if we shared advance information on air passengers with the United States.”)
This is not a small story, especially in light of the billions we give both of those countries and how virulent their Muslim fundamentalist problems are. Yet a database search of the major newspapers reveals no attention was paid to this gap at all, aside from a breezy 1997 New York Times travel section piece aptly headlined “Zipping Through Customs.” Visa policies involving foreign access to U.S. aviation also seem to have some glitches. Countries like Syria are barred from landing their planes in the United States because of Syria’s support for terrorism. Syrian pilots, however, like a group who arrived just last week, can get U.S. visas for purposes of taking private flight-school instruction. But this situation, too, received no attention from any major American news organization until WorldNetDaily broke the story on Oct. 16, later picked up by Fox News and a few others – another revelatory “sin of omission.”
Visa overstays are still another weak spot, both in terms of policies and press coverage. The Immigration Reform Act of 1996 was supposed to introduce a tracking system to match entries and exits (the number of overstays is estimated at 2 million, growing by 125,000 every year). But Congress never implemented that tracking system, and the few press reports that addressed the issue gave prominence to minimizers, like a representative from the American Immigration Lawyers Association who told Congress recently that most overstays were “innocent” people spending “an extra week at Disneyland.”
News organizations have also been remiss with respect to the opposition of academic institutions to the implementation of a much-needed system for monitoring student-visa holders. (There are 500,000 foreign students in the country now, their exact whereabouts untracked; according to officials, one hijacker had a visa to study at a California Berlitz school but never showed up for class.) Many of the colleges and universities who have objected to student-visa tracking have done so because they don’t want the bureaucratic hassles – they fear loss of revenue if foreign enrollments dip (foreign students often pay full tuition), and because they feel that treating foreign students differently from American citizens is stigmatizing and discriminatory. This is a good story.
Another good story is the intense bureaucratic warfare within the INS over the failure to fund and implement this student-tracking program (formerly known as the Coordinated Interagency Partnership Regulating International Students, or CIPRIS, and now known as the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System, or SEVIS). But again, on both of these angles, coverage was minimal, and the stories that did surface on the resistance in higher education cast academic anti-border types in a positive light.
Coverage of problems associated with illegal-immigrant access to state driver licenses and other documents used to establish false identity or avoid detection has also been remiss. According to authorities, many of the hijackers obtained multiple state driver licenses, using them to blend into society or to bolster false identities that made them difficult for law enforcement to identify or track. (Virginia, where a robust black market in licenses and official ID cards has flourished for at least four years, was a particularly easy mark – seven hijackers got identification documents there, courtesy of a network of corrupt lawyers and notaries public.) Yet when the subject of illegal-alien access to driver licenses got any press attention at all, most analyses presented it favorably, as a way for illegals to connect to mainstream society and economic opportunity, and as a way for them to feel more “personal independence.”
A New York Times story about the situation in North Carolina published a month before Sept. 11, cheered liberal licensing policies as a sign of illegal aliens’ “increasing acceptance in society,” and closed with a bit of victimology from a much-lauded emissary of Mexican President Vincente Fox, who scolded U.S. states that do not grant licenses to illegal immigrants. “These are the people who are building the roads in America,” he said caustically of license-less illegals. “But they’re not allowed to drive on them.”
A similar lack of press scrutiny has extended to specialty licenses too, such as the hazardous material (hazmat) permits that the FBI now thinks several dozen suspicious Middle Eastern immigrants sought through a Colorado truck-driving school. According to Time Magazine, the men paid cash and did not use the school’s job placement services – an important aspect of the program’s appeal. They also could speak no English, relying on a translator they brought along, yet somehow passed the state’s hazmat written exam, which is given only in English. (Authorities suspect the men bribed state motor vehicle officials.)
In a less politically correct newsroom climate, a local or regional news organization like the Rocky Mountain News or the Denver Post might have taken notice or given a second look to some of the oddities involved here. But no notice was taken, and more than a month after Sept. 11, authorities are still anxious that some of the 30,000 hazmat trucks out there might be turned into rolling bombs.
In the days since the attack, almost all major newspapers and networks, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, ABC News and NPR have all played a fast game of catch-up, producing reports showing how lapses in the immigration system, including several noted above, contributed to the terrorists’ effectiveness. Editorial writers at the New York Times have even touted provisions of the 1996 Immigration Reform Act, which the paper had broadly attacked before. Although instead of admitting the Times’ responsibility for helping to neuter the 1996 law, the editorial page blamed “a lack of collaboration between government agencies.” The Times also now calls for increasing security along our “porous borders” after years of reporting and commentary shot through with the assumption that illegal immigration was not such a big deal. (N.Y. Times Magazine: “What Illegal Immigrant Problem?”)
But a reflexive, pro-diversity newsroom climate survives, especially with respect to post Sept. 11 coverage of Arab- and Muslim-Americans, who have become the objects du jour of journalistic piety and skittishness. Although many Muslim-Americans are appalled by the terrorist attack, a larger proportion of that population than has been admitted have expressed approval. Warnings about a “dangerous, functional and foreign-born Fifth Column” (New York Post) might be a touch overwrought, though sleeper cells are here. But certainly there is the specter of “dual loyalty,” though this seems journalistically taboo to admit, no matter what the available evidence.
When stark anti-American attitudes are highlighted, these attitudes are seen through the lens of cultural relativism. Case in point: a recent New York Times piece on attitudes of Muslim teen-agers in a private Islamic academy in Brooklyn. According to the reporter, Susan Sachs, some of the Pakistani, Egyptian, Yemeni and Palestinian immigrant teens interviewed for this piece have little feeling toward their new nation and think the ideal society would follow Islamic law and make no separation between religion and state. One 17-year-old boy, for instance, said he would support any leader he determined to be an observant Muslim who is fighting for an Islamic cause, even if that meant abandoning the United States or going to jail to avoid U.S. military service. Other students expressed “empathy for the young Muslims around the world who profess hated for America and Americans.” Yet, instead of seeing such sentiments as worrying examples of dual loyalty (no loyalty, really) Sachs tepidly described them as a sign of “the strain” that immigrants and their children traditionally can feel “between their adopted and native culture.”
More active, adult terrorist sympathizers have gotten easy treatment, too. When most of the prominent Muslims invited to the White House recently were identified as known sympathizers with other terrorist causes in the Middle East, the story and its implications got little play. On Oct. 19, the Times made mention that pre Sept. 11, “incendiary anti-American messages” were long a “staple” at some Muslim events, but that the attack had prompted influential American-Muslim clerics to “temper their tone.” But the story of incendiary rhetoric should have been done long ago, and the ongoing militancy of some of these clerics post Sept. 11, despite such tone-tempering directives, has not been a journalistic priority. Islam is “a religion of peace,” as an early October NBC News report declared, veiling its more violent and hegemonic faces.
A recent story in the New York Times announced that a high-ranking U.S. Army Muslim chaplain had been counseling Muslim soldiers that it was indeed morally right for them to fight and kill fellow Muslims from hostile nations. But the story neglected to bring the issue of Muslim servicemen’s resistance to fighting fellow Muslims down to the ground by examining just how demoralizing and divisive the issue has been for quite some time, particularly in units where Muslims serve in any numbers and where many commanders worry about ethnic insubordination. According to one Army Ranger chaplain I know, units with high percentages of Muslims, such as those that served in Bosnia and Kosovo, have been deeply polarized, with Muslims and non-Muslims lining up on very different sides of the barracks.
A sidebar story that could be done, and which has not, has been the significant under-representation of Muslims in the service. (According to the Pentagon, there are only 4,000 Muslims in the entire armed forces, in a country with a Muslim population now edging toward 6 million) This severe under-representation could serve as a journalistic springboard to discuss the problem of dual loyalty or Muslim resistance to “Americanization,” but it has not.
The increase in anti-Muslim harassment is another area of significant miscoverage. “Tough but hopeful weeks for the Muslims of Laramie;” “Isolated family finds support and reasons to worry in Illinois;” Parents fear their children will be targets of bigotry.” In the six weeks since the attack, not a day passed that there was not some kind of major story in the New York Times highlighting victimized Middle-Easterners during this time of “anti-Muslim fervor,” as Jodi Wilgoren of the Times called it, and the networks were quick to follow the Times’ lead. Of course, the press is right to report on this problem, especially in the cases – few but fiendish – where hate crimes, including murder, have occurred. But even as news organizations report that as the alleged wave of anti-Muslim violence is waning (see the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, Oct. 26), a very strong case can be made that the issue got way more attention than the evidence dictated, and that reporters were lax in verifying the truthfulness of some presumed victims.
A mid-October Times story, “Christian Arabs, too, are harassed,” by Gustav Niebuhr, was built on nothing but claims of harassment, citing no police reports and referencing the experience, relayed third-hand, of one Arab teen-ager taunted at school for looking “like Osama.” The piece actually closed with a quote from an Arab-American academic in Cleveland who said people have actually been more sympathetic to Arabs since the attack. This was a confusing and contradictory quote, at best, and made one wonder how close the headline writer, under pressure to have the piece fit an approved script, actually read Niebuhr’s copy.
Another Times story, by Somini Sengupta, closed ominously with an anecdote relayed second-hand of an Indian-American who, her intermediary source said, was “chilled to the bone” in the process of parking his car “by a volley of threats and insults from a white man who had stepped out of his house” in New Jersey. A Sept. 14 NBC story warned of a growing threat to Arab-Americans, but could only cite an incident in which a child was insulted on a playground. There have also been a raft of newspaper and network stories built around complaints from Arab cab drivers and local Arab political leaders of verbal abuse from passengers and callers – and not much more.
Other harassment reports are pure “cry wolf,” such as the case of Ahmad Saad Nasim, a student at Arizona State University. On Sept. 13, Nasim claimed to have been attacked by a gang of white assailants who screamed, “Die, Muslim, die!” The claim was given considerable state and national media coverage and resulted in more than 50 fearful Muslim students leaving the ASU campus. But when police questioned him after he was found bound and gagged in a university library, he confessed to having fabricated the first assault – and staging the library incident as well – a confession that did not receive anywhere near the attention the original “hate” attack received. (Such episodes bring to mind a long series of racial hoaxes stretching from Tawana Brawley in 1986, to the largely press-created “epidemic” of black-church burnings in 1996.)
It is also hard to see credibility in media insistence on a national spasm of “anti-Muslim fervor” when imams appear prominently, and disproportionately, at virtually every public memorial for the attack, from Washington’s National Cathedral to New York’s Yankee Stadium. Note, too, that the FBI has opened more than 100 hate-crime investigations into Muslim complaints – something it can ill-afford to do at a time when its resources are stretched thin tracking terrorist suspects and stopping future attacks. Somehow in all this, we should also keep in mind that there were more Muslims killed in a single day of anti-U.S. riots in Pakistan (four) – and by other Muslims – than in the month following Sept. 11 here.
The alleged erosion of constitutional protections, especially in the case of immigrant Arabs – some legal, some illegal – detained in the anti-terrorist crackdown, is another story slathered thick with politically correct pieties. As civil libertarians press their case that the detention of Arab immigrants represents violations of core U.S. freedoms and abuse of government authority, news organizations have often echoed them, ignoring important legal distinctions courts have affirmed between rights of citizens and resident aliens and those of visa-holders and the undocumented. News organizations have also echoed complaints about “racial profiling” of Middle Easterners, without which no real preventative screening can happen.
In a week when it could have done some investigative reporting about the manhunt for the 100 terrorist suspects the FBI can’t locate, or about the issues associated with detainees who will not cooperate, the Oct. 21 New York Times Magazine preferred to run a 3,000-plus word piece about the “Kafkaesque” ordeal of a “soulful”-eyed Saudi radiologist in Texas who spent 13 days in federal detention before being released with no charges. This was a revealing example of journalistic priorities. Worse, though, was the credulousness, or calculation, of the Times reporter, Deborah Sontag. The radiologist’s detention, the Texas director of the ACLU told Sontag, “makes those of us Arabs and Muslims who are American think, ‘Are we living in a country as dirty as the ones we ran from?'”
The Los Angeles Times hasn’t been far behind in victimology either, running a sob-sister piece on Oct. 7 about three illegal-alien Yemeni siblings innocently caught up in the sweep, one of whom has been in the country for 12 years and has been defying a deportation order since April. “It was beyond humiliation” the fugitive’s 23-year-old sister said, referring to (shudders) the way the neighbors looked into the open front door of their shared apartment as officers came and went. Later at the detention facility, she was initially denied the right to wear her veil. “I lost my dignity right there,” said the woman. The fugitive brother had been listed as a second driver on insurance papers for a car that a material witness in the World Trade Center investigation had rented. Still, the Times made it seem as if it was ridiculous that the three were ever detained – and dangerous that they might be sent back to Yemen, where they “could suffer retribution for their Western ways.” (Apparently, the veil only gets you so far.)
Indeed stories about the supposed lack of effectiveness of the dragnet (“Hundreds of arrests, but promising leads unravel” – New York Times), might speak less to the fundamental innocence of the detainees than to the impossibility of fighting terrorist cells under current legal rules of engagement, which bar interrogation tactics other nations can employ. As one assistant U.S. attorney lamented to me from the trenches: “We’re still following traditional criminal procedures, and that’s why we’re not getting anywhere. We’re just not set up for something like this.” Stories disparaging the dragnet’s effectiveness also don’t account for the fact that even with restrictive rules, the FBI believes it has disrupted several additional terrorist operations and might even be holding up to 10 al-Qaida members.
Whether Sept. 11 should prompt a broad rewriting of immigration policy and immigration procedures is going to be the subject of a fierce debate. On one side are those favoring as open a system as possible, who claim the borders need not be closed and that law enforcement and intelligence agencies have the tools to fight terrorism if they would just do their jobs well. On the other side are restrictionists, insisting that American citizens have a right to protection from the depredations of foreign non-citizens and that limitations on immigration, including a moratorium on certain Middle Eastern nationals, or a more selective system modeled on “most-favored nation” trading status, are the only way to ensure that.
The outcome of this debate is uncertain, though another big attack will undoubtedly favor restrictionists. One thing is clear though: The record shows that a politically correct lack of rigor before the attack undercut the watchdog role the press should have been playing on immigration. Despite the calamity that has befallen us, too much of a PC sensibility, and the victimology it encourages, endures.
William McGowan is the author of “COLORING THE NEWS: How Crusading For Diversity Has Corrupted American Journalism” (Encounter Books). You can purchase his book now in WorldNetDaily’s online store.
