Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

On Thursday, June 6, 2002, FBI agent Coleen Rowley testified before Congress that 9/11 might have been avoided had her agency been better organized to manage the clues it had in hand. The whistleblower’s assertion reverberated all that weekend, threatening to flip the post-9/11 narrative from one of vigorous counteraction by manly officials to incompetent snafu by Republican bureaucrats.

By Monday, though, Americans would forget about Coleen Rowley. Her story was sidelined after then Attorney General John Ashcroft called an emergency press conference from Moscow to announce that federal agents had seized Al Qaeda operative Jose Padilla and foiled a plot to set off a radioactive “dirty bomb.” The deliciously terrifying phrase immediately filled our airwaves and nightmares. And it redirected the news cycle’s focus from Rowley’s blonde hair to Padilla’s dark face, from talk of constructive government criticism to plots of urban mass destruction. A few people did stop to wonder why Ashcroft was making such a fuss, all the way from Moscow, about a man the United States had been holding in custody for a good month already. But back then, in 2002, most Americans still reacted skeptically to the Cassandras who suggested that Padilla was dragged out of obscurity precisely to shove Rowley’s story from the top of the broadcast. It is only today, after scores of similar examples, that Americans can look back at those moments and see the earliest beta tests of the Bush media-management model. http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/06/0081552