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Promoting security - or frenzied symbolism?

Thursday, January 7, 2010

TALKING ON RADIO last week, I used the label “hysterical” a few times while discussing media reaction to the failed Christmas Day airline bombing attempt.

In the cooler realm of the written word I tend to moderate my phrasing, like a lot of communicators, but a week later here I am unreservedly typing out the word hysteria, as I survey the media frenzy that's still building.

 

The over-stimulated feedback loop between Government and Media has once again fueled a frenzy. It's meant that however controlled and analytical President Barack Obama’s 90-minute Situation Room inquisition may have been in reviewing the security failures that climaxed in near-catastrophe over Detroit, the emerging executive “remedies” – and hyperventilating publicity – have looked totally irrational and alarmingly close to lunatic.

 

I mean specifically of course the new “watch-list” of fourteen countries, from which citizens and both originating and transient travelers will now undergo “enhanced” searches (a disturbing euphemistic echo from the Dick Cheney - Donald Rumsfeld era, don't you think?) when they fly to the US.

 

It was also, gratifyingly, on radio - my often-favored medium - that some more balanced assessment was mounted this week, employing journalists and other writer-commentators from several of those freshly targeted countries. The assessment, as it happened, came not on WHDD, the Connecticut public station where THE MEDIA BEAT is featured every weekend, but on Brian Lehrer’s regularly resourceful show, aired weekdays by WNYC in New York. (And as full disclosure, I should say I serve on that latter station’s Community Advisory Board, where – frankly – we deal in brickbats as frequently as in plaudits.)

 

Lehrer talked with Omoyele Sowore of SaharaReporters.com, a website drawing together reporters from Nigeria and those whom Sowore calls “social advocates” with a “Nigerian-African perspective” – and they rightly questioned the logic of the Transport Security Administration (logo above) in including that particular country in its new list.

[Listen to their observations here ...]

 

 

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I too question the TSA's logic. If the point is purely that the accused plane-bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab comes from Nigeria, then the other 160 million law-abiding Nigerian citizens have much to complain about. Abdulmutallab didn’t become a threat because he’s from Nigeria. He went to school in Togo and was (reportedly) radicalized while a student in Britain. How come that the list doesn’t include Togo - well, maybe that would be a stretch - or the UK? Richard Reid, we shouldn't forget (the convicted "shoe-bomber" caught in the attempted act on a Boston-bound flight) is a British citizen and was cultivated by jihadist extremists in London.

 

The original 9/11 hijackers included citizens of Saudi Arabia (they comprised the majority, in fact) and of Egypt. Neither of those countries is on the list, and nor is - it goes without saying - the UK.

 

Lehrer’s broadcast, including as it did contributions from the Somalian Abdi Aynte of the US radio service Voice of America, the Iraqi Abdul Razzaq Al-Saiedi of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and The New York Times’ “At War” blog, and Havovi Cooper, originally from Pakistan and now with the Thomson Reuters news agency, suggested strongly and with good reason that none of those allies of the US, for that’s what they are, figure on the list ... precisely because they are US allies.

 

So I guess that at base what we’re seeing here is not merely hysterical or even all that illogical – it’s plainly and simply political. (And oh yes, why else is Cuba, of all places, on the list? Good old-fashioned politics again, with the stress even more on “old” nowadays.)

 

The obvious and unavoidable truth is that terrorists will these days come from, or via, almost any country and carry almost any passport. Any policy or practice that assumes otherwise is empty political set-dressing.

 

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SPEAKING OF POLITICS – AND THIS TIME especially domestic party politics … there’s one bit of partisan maneuvering that’s worth holding up to the light.

 

Republican politicians and their cable TV, talk-radio and blogging surrogates are inevitably exploiting the Abdulmutallab “screw-up” - to quote Presidential language, albeit in a behind-closed-doors, Situation Room variant, not his Press Conference dialect - in order to decry Obama’s repatriation of released Guantanamo detainees to Yemen. We have all heard that Yemen is supposed to be where the young Nigerian got his (evidently inadequate) explosives training. And yielding to the inevitable, Obama is naturally enough “suspending” such repatriations - six men having only recently been dispatched there, in December.

 

Something, however, that hasn't so far attracted the full glare of the media's witch-hunting searchlight is one awkward fact. It wasn't Obama, but the George W Bush Administration who sent home fourteen Yemenis from Gitmo, several of whom are now known to be stalwarts of Al Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula.

 

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