The Other 9/11 Casualty: Bin Laden’s Unrecognized Assault
By Michael Moran, Skytop Contributor / July 4th, 2022
Michael Moran is a geo-strategy and sustainability expert whose books and documentaries have won awards and influenced the global debate for decades. He currently serves as Chief Markets, Risk & Sustainability Officer at Microshare, a global leader in Smart Building and ESG data technologies, and is a Lecturer in Political Risk at the Josef Korbel School of International Affairs at the University of Denver.
Moran is a former Principal and Chief US/Macro Analyst at Control Risks and led digital content strategy at the Council on Foreign Relations, winning three Emmy Awards for documentary work while there. He also has launched successful editorial offerings for Roubini Global Economics, the Carnegie Corporation of New York and other clients and was a member of the launch team at MSNBC.com, where he served as a columnist and international editor for over a decade.
He is author of several books, including The Reckoning: Debt, Democracy and the Future of American Power, of which Ian Bremmer of Eurasia Group wrote: “Moran is a sharp thinker and fine storyteller, and The Reckoning is a terrifically engaging read.” Moran is co-author with economist Charles Robertson of The Fastest Billion: The Story Behind Africa’s Economic Revolution and a novel, The Fall (2015). His analysis of political risk and international affairs has appeared regularly on CNN, CNBC and other major broadcast outlets and in the pages of The New York Times, the Financial Times, Forbes, Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy magazines and many other journals.
The Indispensable Nation Indisposed
Cast your mind back through the mists of recent history: It is 2001, a bright late summer morning in New York City. In a flash, a commercial airliner slams into the North Tower of the World Trade Center, shattering American illusions about the unipolar moment. The “post-Cold War world,” the New American Century, the mantra of the times, looks in retrospect like a delusion of grandeur which was vaporized along with the twin towers.
The 9/11 attacks found the” indispensable nation” quite indisposed. Air Force interceptors, kept expensively at the ready since the early 1950s, played no role that day. The lack of presidential and military command-and-control in the first hours of the attack left a vacuum filled by countless anonymous citizens, first responders, and yes, Rudy Giuliani. Hudson River ferries on their own volition rescued dazed survivors from lower Manhattan. Some brave passengers on United Flight 93 took matters into their own hands, probably preventing far greater tragedy.
National Unity Collapse
It all really happened. I was there. This is an important point, because, unlike the period before 9/11, facts today are malleable, twisted for political and economic intent out of all resemblance to their original form. This was not the case on 9/11, but it became true very soon thereafter as a period of national unity collapsed into finger-pointing, failures of strategic imagination, military planning and intelligence, and a wild overreaction to the events of that day.
So, I was there, as were millions of people in New York and New Jersey, northern Virginia and DC, as well as Shanksville, Pennsylvania. But for the tens of millions of people living outside the various “Ground Zeroes,” it was television news and eventually the deeper, more considered analysis provided by print media on September 12 would define their experience of the day. The media coverage of the immediate aftermath was notable for its seriousness, not just in cataloging the attacks themselves, but in its balance and intent on exploring the dynamics that caused it. “Why they hate us,” was the cover of Newsweek’s next edition, written by Fareed Zakaria, and still today a perfect expression of the myopia that had seized America at the end of the millennium. It was terrorism, it was appalling. But it had its causes.
The Old Rules of Objective Reporting
Viewed in the rear-view mirror, the September 11 attacks stand out as perhaps the last major event in American history in which the old rules of objective reporting, public discourse and media standards prevailed. Think about it: cell phone networks failed that day as comprehensively as NORAD. Internet news sites, still largely dominated by 20th century brand names, mostly served to embellish the reporting of the mothership, whether that be NBC News (MSNBC.com), The New York Times website, Fox News or the BBC. By and large, people could get to a television, where the awful spectacle ran over and over with varying degrees of intelligent commentary, but very little of the vitriol we might now expect from our polarized, sensationalist broadcast outlets.
A Baseline for Conversation
The coverage that followed in the immediate aftermath of the attacks – the forlorn rescue efforts, the national mourning, the search for bin Laden, airstrikes and ultimate toppling of the Taliban, captured the last gasps of a rational national conversation in America. The flow of information, the cadence of it all, was familiar from a decade that saw the fall of the Berlin Wall, of communism in Eastern Europe, Tiananmen Square and so much else that suggested the world was heading, just possibly, in the right direction.
That day, within minutes of the attacks, the three major broadcast networks, still in the game as setters of the national agenda, had rolled their greying male authority figures onto the set to run the coverage. This model, alternately derided by left and right at the time as either “corporate journalism” or “liberal propaganda,” had some major advantages that we sorely miss today. One was authority: viewers generally believed what Brokaw, Jennings and Rather intoned back then, with some exceptions. At the very least, that set a baseline for conversation.
A Reliable Set of Facts
Another benefit was public accountability. While the media was still largely controlled by vested interests, getting it wrong back then could cost you your job. (See Rather, Dan or Arnett, Peter). A third and even more important benefit is what I call the “fireside chat” effect. For whatever reason, every weeknight, starting when television came of age in the 1950s until the early 2000s, more than 75 percent of American households watched some version of “the evening news.” Whatever they thought of the presentation or personalities, by and large they at least got a reliable set of facts as a jumping off point for the next day’s water cooler debate.
The Worm Turns
Yet within four months of the 9/11 attacks, the more partisan approaches by cable news, talk ratio and the Internet began to inflict genuine pain not only on the networks but on the so-called “dead tree media,” too: print outlets like Time, the Economist, the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and the rest who were losing advertising revenue even faster than audience. The well-publicized role of conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones were only the tip of the iceberg. Disinformation flowed widely on blogs and in the newish chat rooms and bbs ecosystem that would ultimately be productized and weaponized as Twitter and Facebook. It is in this niche, still dismissed back then as irrelevant, where libels like “the Mossad warned all the Jews not to go to work that day” started. And stuck, at least in some twisted minds.
Outlets Without Accountability
So 9/11 and the toxic Iraq War debate that it spawned seriously and permanently changed America by quickening the mainstream media’s decline as a trend setter and acting as an accelerant for the rise of “democratized” media outlets, which is a polite way of saying outlets without accountability, respect for facts or common decency.
Sure, you can find various “Ur” moments for our conspiratorial, poisonous national conversation. Look back into the previous century – the 1994 election of Newt Gingrich’s uncompromising Congress, the Clintons and their prevarications, the Kennedy assassination, the disputed 2000 election, the lies that underpinned our involvement in Vietnam, the McCarthy witch-hunts. We could list many more.
But American public discourse and the media’s commitment to public accountability managed to survive those and other trials intact. Indeed, one of the characteristics of late 20th century American society was its self-correcting nature: Crises really did not go wasted.
Not so 9/11. With the benefit of what we now know about the internal debate within the Bush administration and the intelligence community, the rather laudable initial reactions of both government and public were but temporary. The enormous coming together among Americans, the rally around the flag, the surge of enlistments and the stellar quality of the reporting that followed quickly began to fray.
The Start of Something New
By the time New Year’s 2002 rolled around, the drip, drip, drip of flawed and (worse) false intelligence on Saddam Hussein’s alleged involvement in the attacks had begun. The media cast off its skepticism and its rules about anonymous sources. Broadcast outlets sported graphics like “America’s Revenge” and “Saddam’s Secret Nuclear Arsenal.” The US made fun of allies who warned that the march toward an Iraqi invasion might be premature. The New York Post’s “Axis of Weasel” headline captured the moment perfectly.
It was the start of something new in contemporary America: the idea that facts should be regarded as obstacles to truth rather than their foundation. Gen. Eric Shinseki, the Army Chief of Staff who warned that the Bush plan for Iraq would require hundreds of thousands more troops than planned, was pushed into retirement. Bush administration economic advisor Lawrence Lindsay was also ousted in late 2001 for daring to challenge the $60 billion figure the administration said the war would cost. He suggested $100 to $200 billion would be more like it. (The actual figure, according to the Congressional Budget Office, is $2.7 trillion).
And when American troops were not met by Iraqi eager to slide roses in their M-16 barrels, and WMDs turned out to be, shall we say, more elusive than expected, the war was merely rebranded. The new mission, “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” was about democracy and liberty. It always was, we were told. And amazingly, many believed it. (Something very similar is going on in Russia right now as Putin seeks to explain the death toll and battlefield failures of the “special military operation” in Ukraine).
The Lost Civility and Accountability of American Public Discourse
In many ways, Donald Trump gets far too much credit for his role in ushering in the era of fake news. Like fake bronzing lotion and hair plugs, it predates him. The lost civility and accountability of American public discourse, whether reflected by news media, political rhetoric or the Stalinist bent toward censorship on our university campuses, is yet one more victory for Osama bin Laden. Al Qaeda aimed to push America out of Saudi Arabia, to punish its support for Israel and to spark uprisings around the Middle East that would result in the creation of a new caliphate. On every count, then, bin Laden failed.
But bin Laden also sought to weaken America, to puncture its self-importance, to sow dissent and demonstrate that the superpower was not invulnerable. It may be too far to draw a direct line between bin Laden’s atrocity and the loss of faith in democracy now reflected in the responses Americans give to pollsters. But it isn’t hard to imagine how it all looks to the millions of angry people who applauded what he did that day. No, he did not bring America low. But we certainly have it in us to finish that job.