Pushing Our Buttons

Vague warnings about 'credible threats' foster fears, raise questions of government's competence to fight terror at home.

By: David Neiwert

Anthrax and hijacked airliners are horrific enough, but they pale in comparison to the possibility that the government is no longer competent at protecting the public from those threats. Such a public perception, especially if it became widespread, would spread fear even more effectively than an actual attack. Yet the Bush administration's mixed messages over threats of new terrorist attacks - amplified by aggressive, 24/7 media coverage - have moved us another step closer to realizing that once-remote prospect.

The confused and seemingly impotent investigation into the series of anthrax attacks that have struck the East Coast, coupled with vague and perhaps unnecessary warnings of impending terrorist action, have raised very real concerns about the competence of the agencies handling these matters.

Congressional leaders on Tuesday confronted administration officials about their concerns. And on Thursday in California, the problem came into sharp focus when Gov. Gray Davis, finally providing some specifics, announced that a number of suspension bridges in his state were being threatened with an attack; yet within hours a Justice Department spokesperson was contradicting him, saying that the information (provided by the FBI) was "not as credible as the information we shared on Monday" - that is, the general warning that some kind of attack might be in the offing somewhere this week. Meanwhile, eight western states are on alert after an FBI warning about possible attacks on suspension bridges.

Conflicting Reports

The problems date back to Attorney General John Ashcroft's performance in a press conference on Oct. 18, when it became clear that the investigation into the anthrax mailed to media outlets and key politicians was quickly going nowhere. Asked whether the Justice Department was any closer to making any arrests in the anthrax cases, Ashcroft answered: "We have significantly more information than we started with. That's how I would characterize it."

There also have been conflicting reports from the investigation. Initially the focus was on Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaida network's complicity in the mailings. In recent days, however, reports in the Washington Post and elsewhere have indicated that investigators are now examining the likelihood that domestic terrorists were responsible. But Ashcroft's references to this possibility have suggested that he has only a tenuous grasp of how domestic terrorism has organized in the United States during the past 10 years.

Now comes the "terrorist threat advisory", the Justice Department's warning to law-enforcement agencies nationwide to be in a heightened state of alert through this week. Ashcroft and Homeland Defense Chief Tom Ridge both cited "credible" sources that indicated a serious terrorist attack would take place in that time - but would not provide anything more specific.

Lessons From History

The problem with such a warning is that there is only a marginal chance of its actually preventing an attack, and a considerably higher likelihood that it will backfire and actually harm the nation's chances of responding to terrorist threats successfully. Consider the lessons of history.

Fears of domestic terror after Pearl Harbor made life miserable for thousands of Japanese-Americans sent to internment camps.

In the days and weeks immediately following the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor, a wave of fear swept up and down America's West Coast. Public officials began trumpeting unfounded rumors that the disaster had been a direct result of "fifth column" activity by Japanese-American spies in Hawaii, (a report that later proved to be completely groundless). Soon the papers began hawking stories predicated on fears of an imminent invasion. The Los Angeles Times ran headlines like "Jap Boat Flashes Message Ashore" and "Caps on Japanese Tomato Plants Point to Air Base" - and the public quickly jumped aboard. Reports of "signals" being sent out from shore to unknown, mysterious Japanese boats offshore began flowing in.

The end result of all this hysteria was one of the great black marks on American history: internment of some 110,000 people of Japanese descent (70,000 of them American citizens), from 1942 to 1945 in barbed-wire camps. That spring of 1942, the populace and politicians demanded the removal of the "spies" from the Pacific Coast, citing the "imminent threat" their presence posed. Today, few historians doubt that it would have taken place without the active encouragement of groundless fears by public officials.

The lesson in all this for the Bush administration should be obvious: The American public is at its worst when it is egged into a state of fearfulness by its own government, and may even be induced into committing travesties of justice for its own "self-protection".

The administration also needs to consider the nature of the public's typical reaction to such dire warnings, which inspired in 1941 a deluge of red herrings and misinformation that wound up impeding law enforcement from performing its regular important work. Ashcroft's warning is more likely than not to inspire precisely the same kind of overload, swamping officers and switchboards with reports of impending terrorist acts, while diluting the ability of those personnel to respond to genuine threats.

The Unhappy Scenarios

If the warning is a success, and a terrorist threat is actually prevented, then Ashcroft's decision to raise the fear level among the general public will have proven correct. But the likelihood of that happening is relatively slim - and that is the only scenario under which raising these kinds of alarms makes sense.

If, for instance, terrorists pull off a successful attack in spite of the warning, then the federal powers in charge of preventing this will look even more impotent. And then the fear level of Americans will skyrocket, because it will be clear to them that even intense scrutiny will not make them safe.

On the other hand, if an act of terrorism is prevented silently - that is, its would-be perpetrators are forced to retrench and wait - then the only thing gained is time. The likelihood of its eventual enactment will remain the same; those terrorists are still free to act, perhaps at a time when Americans' guards are let down, especially if nothing happens during the week ahead.

Indeed, that is the most likely scenario, and the most problematic. If the week in fact goes by and no terrorist acts occur, then the credibility of the government will take a terrific hit on the domestic front. If the administration attempts to claim the fact that no terrorism occurred actually justifies its warning, it will risk looking like those apocalyptic cults who have at various times announced the impending end of the world and then, when such doom fails to materialize, credited the prayers of its followers for saving mankind.

At the same time, a non-event will only perpetuate a rising perception among the public that Ashcroft and other top officials may lack the competence to do this job properly. Like the villagers who heard the shepherd boy cry "wolf" once too often, there is a grave danger that Americans will be lulled by these warnings into a refusal to respond when the threat is real.