Dance of the Reptiles (32 page)

The president is feeling upbeat these days because the troop surge, which he initially resisted, has succeeded in reducing sectarian bloodshed in Baghdad, as well as U.S. casualties. Other forces have been able to leave the city and hunt down insurgents who’ve been targeting our troops.

However, equally important factors in the lower death toll are a cease-fire declared by a key Shiite militia and an unexpected Sunni backlash against extremists. These two key ingredients for peace could evaporate soon if the Iraqi government doesn’t get its act together. The fact that fewer U.S. soldiers are dying is welcome news, but it’s not the same as winning the war. We’re more deeply mired in Iraq today than we were in the spring of 2003. Suicide bombings against civilians and police continue, and less than two weeks ago, five American soldiers were blown up inside a house rigged with bombs.

In the bitterest of many ironies, the American occupation has given Al Qaeda a foothold in a country where the terrorist organization had never previously been tolerated. Meanwhile, the spiritual father of the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin Laden, remains alive and well, delousing his beard somewhere in the caves of Afghanistan.

Among the presidential candidates, only John McCain shares the president’s view that the tide has turned in Iraq and that it is there we must ultimately fight until jihadist terrorism is vanquished. McCain has said that the United States should keep its forces in Iraq for a hundred years, if necessary.
It’s a statement bound to haunt him in the coming months, no matter who his opponent turns out to be. The American people have had enough.

No matter who the next president is, the road out of Iraq will not be swift or smooth. Long after Bush is chopping brush back on the ranch in Texas, young American men and women will still be coming home from Baghdad in coffins.

No. 3,982 was Lerando J. Brown, 27, an army specialist from Gulfport, Miss.

You can put the number beside his name, but you can’t put a true price. The same can be said for this war.

September 10, 2011

The Dumb Deed Before the Terror Attack

Osama bin Laden knew what he was doing when he implanted several of the key 9/11 hijackers in Florida. There was no better place for his suicide crews to be overlooked, as they not so invisibly prepared for the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

On the day after Christmas in 2000, flight controllers at Miami International Airport were annoyed to peer out at one of the crowded taxiways and see a small Piper Cherokee. The plane wasn’t moving, and the cockpit was empty. One official in the flight tower spotted two men walking away, crossing the airfield in the direction of the main general aviation hangar.

Even in Miami, this doesn’t happen every day. Even rookie pilots know to radio the tower if their aircraft conks out while rolling toward the runway. Nobody just abandons a plane in a line of waiting commercial jetliners. The men who pulled this stunt were named Marwan al-Shehhi and Mohamed Atta. Nine months later, they would be infamous,
but on December 26, 2000, they seemed just like two more knuckleheads in the Knucklehead Capital of America.

They had learned to fly at Huffman Aviation in Venice, near Sarasota. According to the report of the 9/11 Commission, both men earned their private pilot licenses on August 14, 2000. Atta spent only 69 minutes on the test and scored 97 out of 100. Al-Shehhi scored an 83 and took 73 minutes to finish.

The Piper Cherokee that stalled at MIA had been rented from Huffman that day by the two future hijackers. They weren’t supposed to fly it all the way to Miami, so the general manager of Huffman was surprised to get a phone call from the men, asking how to restart the plane. Not long afterward, a flight official at MIA dialed Huffman to say the Piper had been abandoned, forcing other aircrafts to taxi around it. It was about 5:45
P.M.
, one of the busiest periods for commercial takeoffs and landings. “Any time the tower calls, they are not in the best of moods,” the manager of the aviation firm told Jim Yardley of
The New York Times
.

Meanwhile, Atta and al-Shehhi were renting a car to drive back to Venice.

The Federal Aviation Administration later demanded the maintenance records of the Piper. It turned out that the engine might have flooded because of a loose spark plug. In grim hindsight, it’s natural to wonder why authorities evidently made little or no effort to track down Atta and al-Shehhi after the MIA incident. The reality is that not much would have happened to the men, anyway—perhaps a small fine or a warning. Even in the unlikely event that their pilot licenses had been yanked, it wouldn’t have prevented the horrific events to come. These guys would have already gained what they’d come to Florida to get: working knowledge of aircraft controls.

On the morning of September 11, Atta steered American Airlines Flight 11 into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan. Seventeen minutes later, al-Shehhi crashed United Airlines Flight 175 into the South Tower.

During the months preceding the attack, Atta and several hijackers had moved their base of operations from the Sarasota area to South Florida, where they continued to blend in splendidly. The martyrs-in-waiting worked out in local gyms, hung out at sports bars and even strip joints, presumably not searching for virgins.

In April 2001, Atta got pulled over in Broward County for driving without a license. A month later, he legally got a Florida license, as did al-Shehhi and 11 other hijackers. But in the manner of thousands of scofflaw Floridians, Atta blithely ignored the driving ticket he’d received. When he didn’t show up in court, a bench warrant was issued—again, no cause for alarm. His puny case was but one in a judicial system swamped by bigger ones. Atta had a better chance of dying from a bee sting than of being arrested.

Bin Laden and his organizers clearly anticipated that the young hijackers would make some mistakes in America. That’s why Florida was such an obvious staging area—the bar of dumb behavior here is so high that it’s almost impossible for bumbling newcomers to get noticed.

Even if you abandon a plane between runways at an international airport.

So comfy were Atta and al-Shehhi in their new locale that they didn’t consider the Piper fiasco a close call. When they returned to Venice, the first thing they did was ask the manager of Huffman Aviation to reimburse them for the rental car.

He said no way. Days later they were back in Miami, practicing on a Boeing 767 simulator. The rest is awful history.

PSEUDONEWS

September 9, 2001

Frenzy by the Media, Not the Sharks

The governor and other officials have complained that the frantic media coverage of shark attacks is scaring tourists away from Florida.

To this charge, we must plead no contest.

Every summer sharks bite people, and every summer we pump the story as if it’s something new and extraordinary. We’re really not that lazy, we’re just bored.

Traditionally, this is the slowest time of the year for serious news, so journalists are on the prowl for something juicy and hair-raising.

At the risk of overstating the obvious, let’s just say we’re suckers when it comes to wild critters—especially critters with teeth. Take alligators. They aren’t rare, elusive, or cunning. They’re big, pea-brained, and ubiquitous. Yet local TV stations will use any cheap excuse to run alligator footage. The stories tend to fall into three categories:

It must seem like the TV folks are trying to insult your intelligence by passing this stuff off as news, but don’t take it personally. Most journalists in Florida come from places that don’t have large predatory reptiles, so they get a little carried away. You’d probably see more gator stories if only they’d bite more people, but they won’t. They’d rather eat garfish.

Which brings us to sharks. As inconceivable as it might seem, your average journalist knows even less about sharks
than he or she does about alligators. This is evident from the way they scramble for the satellite truck every time some nitwit nails a dead hammerhead up on the board at the charter docks.

There’s no reason to kill such a fish except to get your big fat face on television or in the papers, and it seems to work. Last week, an eight-foot shark that was caught in California somehow made the local news in Miami, where eight-foot sharks are about as unusual as two-legged chickens. The public’s fearful fascination with sharks is matched only by the media’s goggle-eyed gullibility. Hype is the inevitable result.

In Florida, the typical victim is a surfer who gets bitten once on the foot or leg while paddling in turbid water. We’re delighted to call these “shark attacks,” even though it’s a silly exaggeration. In such cases the shark isn’t stalking humans; it’s hunting bait fish. Upon realizing its mistake, the shark swims away, unaware that it will be starring in tomorrow’s headlines. Meanwhile, the surfer gets stitched up and heads back to the beach.

Once in a while, a large shark attacks in the true sense of the word, and we’ve got a legitimate news story. That’s what happened on Labor Day weekend off North Carolina and Virginia, with tragic outcomes.

The deaths of two swimmers should have put our minor, everyday shark encounters into perspective, but we weren’t about to let that happen. Instead the incidents were treated as the grisly culmination of a season-long siege.

NBC opened its nightly news touting “The Summer of the Shark,” a phrase poached from an earlier cover of
Time
magazine. The implicit message: Watch out, America—they’re not just nibbling anymore!

Statistically, you’ve got a much better chance of being flattened by a beer truck on your way to the beach than you
do of being bitten by a shark. It’s also true that the frequency of shark attacks worldwide is down from last year’s rate. We in the media have dutifully reported these facts, though not so prominently as to put a damper on the hype. Heck, two more weeks of summer, and we’re back on gator duty.

Sharks might be bad for tourism, but they’re good for the news business. They’re also good for the helicopter business. All up and down Florida’s shorelines, TV and police choppers are swooping low in search of the telltale sinusoidal silhouettes.

Some of the video has been impressive, too—large schools of lemon sharks, blacktips, and other species lazing along within a few hundred yards of popular beaches.

Let’s be honest. Sharks have been migrating along these routes for millions of years, and the only thing new about the phenomenon is the presence of humans in helicopters.

But hey, isn’t it more exciting than the rush-hour report from I-95?

December 30, 2001

Blame This Bad Reporting on “the Fog of War”

Slowly but surely, America is learning to laugh again.

Thank you, Geraldo. And thank you, FOX News, for sending him to Afghanistan.

Let’s admit it. Ever since the Taliban crumbled and the bombing slacked off, television coverage of the war on terrorism has been grindingly monotonous. Lucky for us, Geraldo Rivera is on the scene. FOX lured the mustached dandy away from CNBC with the irresistible promise of a pay cut and a chance to be shot at during a live broadcast.

Upon arriving in the war zone, Geraldo breathlessly announced that he’d be carrying a gun at all times and that he personally would plug Osama bin Laden if the opportunity
presented itself. During one satellite dispatch, Geraldo frantically ducked for cover, claiming a bullet had narrowly missed his noggin. Viewers were left to wonder whether it had been fired by an Al Qaeda sniper or a disgruntled member of Geraldo’s own crew. In another memorable segment, our daring correspondent lithely descended a cave to hunt for signs of bin Laden, a search that die-hard Geraldo fans hoped would end at Al Capone’s vault.

So far, though, the highlight of his Afghan adventure was an emotional report from the “hallowed ground” where three U.S. soldiers accidentally had been killed by an errant American bomb. Reported Geraldo: “It was just, the whole place, just fried really, and bits of uniforms and tattered clothing everywhere. I said the Lord’s Prayer and really choked up.”

One tiny problem: Geraldo wasn’t anywhere near the site of the fatal bombing. He transmitted his story from Tora Bora, hundreds of miles from Kandahar, where the friendly-fire tragedy occurred.

This rather humongous factual error was pointed out in a critical article by David Folkenflik, the television writer for
The Baltimore Sun
. In response, Geraldo blamed “the fog of war.” He said he had “confused” two separate incidents and actually had been at the scene where two or three Afghan fighters—not the American troops—had been killed. Unfortunately, that version of the story hasn’t held up well, either. The Pentagon told Folkenflik that the friendly-fire deaths at Tora Bora occurred three days after Geraldo filed his initial report. Wrote Folkenflik: “FOX News did not have any explanation for how Rivera could have been confused by an event that had not yet occurred.”