273: “. . . that this terrible threat is far more likely to happen than logic suggests. ” One reasonable way to tackle potentially catastrophic scenarios would be to look to real experience of the threats under discussion. But that rarely happened. For all the talk of killer viruses, for example, few mentioned that the last smallpox outbreak in Europe (Yugoslavia, 1972) resulted in only 35 deaths. Nor was much attention given to what happened when an unknown killer virus suddenly appeared in the heart of Europe: It was 1967 and laboratory staff working with African monkeys in the German town of Marburg became infected with what was to be dubbed “Marburg virus,” a close relative of Ebola. In the imaginations of journalists or terrorism experts, this incident would undoubtedly end with horrific loss of life, but the reality was considerably less dramatic: There were 32 infections and seven deaths.
276: “. . . got a tiny fraction of the initial, misleading coverage.” Many other cases followed the same trajectory. Most notoriously, when Jose Padilla, an American citizen and Muslim convert, was arrested in May 2002, the Bush administration triumphantly proclaimed that Padilla had been part of a plot to explode a so-called dirty bomb. It was huge news all over the world. Held incommunicado, Padilla sat in limbo. Then, two years later, the Justice Department quietly acknowledged that Padilla had not been planning to explode a dirty bomb. The plot was to turn on the gas in an apartment and ignite it, the department alleged. What had been waved about as proof of terrorists on the cusp of deploying weapons of mass destruction turned out to be nothing more than allegations of a minor, bumbling plot that came to nothing. More time passed. Finally Padilla went to trial and the allegations shrank further: Padilla was alleged to have trained with terrorists in Afghanistan but was not accused of planning any specific attack. And the media? As the allegations got smaller, so did the coverage. By the time Padilla stood trial, he and his case were largely forgotten—leaving intact the impression made years before that the government had narrowly averted a major assault by terrorists armed with a weapon of mass destruction.
The pattern of gross official exaggeration was obvious but still the media didn’t hesitate to trumpet new announcements of catastrophes averted. In June 2006, simultaneous press conference in Washington and Miami were called to announce the arrest of a group of men in Florida who were conspiring to, as the indictment put it, “levy war in the United States”—a phrase echoed by the U.S. attorney general, who said the men intended to launch a “full ground war.” Among their plans was the destruction of the Sears Tower in Chicago, reporters were told. Soon, however, it became clear that the men were not quite the highly trained and tenacious terror cell they had been made out to be. In fact, they had no connections with al-Qaeda, no training, no weapons, no equipment, and no plans. An undercover government agent pretending to be with al-Qaeda bought them boots. They were, in short, nothing more than a handful of thuggish malcontents playing “international terrorist”—a realitythat, once revealed, did not get a fraction of the media attention garnered by the original press conferences.
277: “In Cohen’s mind, there simply is no Door Number 3.” It sometimes seems that, in media coverage of terrorism, frightening statements and skeptical scrutiny are inversely correlated. Consider that in September 2007, Ron Kessler, an investigative reporter and author of several books on terrorism, told a reporter with the Ottawa Citizen that “it’s fairly easy for them [al-Qaeda] to get nuclear devices either out of Russia or from their own scientists.” On its face, this is a dubious statement. If it’s “fairly easy,” why haven’t they already done so? But Kessler was not asked this rather self-evident question. It was simply passed along unchallenged by the wide-eyed reporter. In 2006, CNN.com even managed to turn literally nothing into a threatening story by noting that al-Qaeda had “gone quiet”—the top leaders had not released video- or audiotapes for some time—and speculating on what the silence could mean. In May 2007, USA Today found it alarming that al-Qaeda had not struck the U.S.: “Intelligence analysts say the lack of an al-Qaeda led strike here may signal that the group is waiting until it can mount an attack that will equal the 9/11 strikes in casualties and publicity value.”
278: “. . . the politics had changed and so had Rich’s standards about what constituted reliable proof.” Similarly, Mother Jones—the venerable magazine of the American left—declared terrorism to be a growing menace in March 2007. “The Iraq Effect: War Has Increased Terrorism Sevenfold Worldwide” read the headline about a study commissioned by the magazine that had found a huge spike in “fatal jihadist attacks worldwide.” Britain’s The Independent newspaper, reporting with evident delight on the same study, ran the headline: “How the War on Terror Made the World a More Terrifying Place.” Buried deep within both stories was the critical fact that the surge in terrorism was happening almost exclusively in the Middle East and South Asia. The fact that the infinitesimal risk to any one person in America or Europe had not budged was left unmentioned.
282: “. . . in order to make the generals race there. . . .” In a September 2007 video, bin Laden also boasted that “19 young men” were able to radically change American policy and “the subject of mujahedeen has become an inseparable part of the speech of your leader.”
283: “. . . recognize that terrorism is a psychological tactic.” As novelist William Gibson put it in an interview, “terrorism is a con game. It doesn’t always work. It depends on the society you are playing it on. It certainly has worked in the United States.”
286: “. . . is much lower than it is commonly portrayed, it, too, is real.” Oddly, one can plausibly argue that too little money has been spent mitigating the risk of nuclear terrorism—which may be an improbable form of terrorism but is nonetheless the greatest terrorist threat simply by virtue of the number of lives it endangers. At least half the Russian facilities with nuclear materials still have not received security upgrades because American funding for the program that does this work is so limited. Similarly, huge quantities of plutonium that the Russians agreed to destroy were simply put in storage because there was no money to do the job. The UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency—the world’s nuclear watchdog—has a budget of only $130 million and its director often has to go begging for cash. “The agency constantly risks lagging behind in the technology race because we are forced to make do on a shoestring budget,” Mohamed El Baradei told the Associated Press in 2007. Ted Turner and Warren Buffett became major funders of nuclear security initiatives after the billionaires discovered how the work was being shortchanged by the world’s governments.
CHAPTER I2
292: “. . . started inching up. In 1900, it stood at forty-eight years.” See Robert Fogel, The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death: 1700-2100.
292: “. . . died before they were five years old. . . .” See Samuel H. Preston and Michael Haines, Fatal Years: Child Mortality in Late Nineteenth-Century America, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1991. The authors show that the toll was distributed throughout American society. Losing children was a common experience even for the very wealthy.
293: “... life expectancy will rise in every region of the world.” See Colin Mather and Dejan Loncar Projections of Global Mortality and Burdens of Disease from 2002 to 2030, Public Library of Science Medicine 3, no. 11 (November 2006).