The Terror Factory Read Online Free PDF Page A

skepticism, however, was evident in the news media’s initial coverage of the arrests. In one report, Rad Berky, a journalist for the Miami ABC affiliate, stood outside the group’s warehouse in Liberty City as the phrases “Terror Raid” and “Terror Arrests” flashed across the screen. Berky reported the government’s allegations in full, telling viewers that the seven men were preparing to launch attacks in Miami and Chicago. “There is also said to be audio- or videotape of the group members pledging support for violent holy war,” he said. Berky’s unquestioning, overhyped reporting of the government’s claims is emblematic of the lapdog approach the media has taken in covering federal terrorism cases since September 11, 2001.
    The main reason for this is cultural. After 9/11, there was a nearly unanimous belief at the FBI that terrorists were hiding in the United States, preparing to launch a second wave of attacks. Every current and former FBI agent I interviewed in researching this book told me they were certain that terrorist cells were embedded in the United States after September 11, 2001, and that the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks were just the beginning. “We were bracing for the next attack,” Dale Watson, the FBI’s assistant director for counterterrorism on 9/11, told me. This was a popular belief nationwide in the first few years after 9/11; the Showtimetelevision series Sleeper Cell , about a Muslim FBI agent who infiltrates a terrorist cell in Los Angeles, exemplified this national assumption that deadly terrorists were out there and we needed to find them before time ran out and innocent people were killed. The government’s story of seven guys plotting to blow up a skyscraper and an FBI office fit perfectly with this widespread public assumption. If the media and the public believe terrorists are out there, they aren’t likely to question the government about whether the men trotted out for the cameras are actual terrorists.
    This attitude, which is still prevalent today, provides the government with a public suspension of disbelief whenever officials announce terrorism-related arrests. During the first few days of any crime story, even those unrelated to terrorism, law enforcement has a unique ability to control the narrative. Whenever local, state, or federal police announce a highprofile indictment, they do so with the luxury of operating in an information vacuum, as most, if not all, of the initial information comes from the police or prosecutors—details of the crimes and the defendants’ backgrounds and motivations. It can take weeks, even months, before journalists are able to interview people related to the defendants or uncover information that provides a more nuanced view than the one law enforcement hand-fed to the media. By then, the story is off the front pages of newspapers and no longer the lead on the broadcast news. In the Liberty City Seven case, for example, four months passed from the day of the indictment before the Miami media were able to interview the primary defendant’s wife, who described a very different man from the one presented by the FBI and the Justice Department. 15
    This lack of any immediate doubt on behalf of the media was clear when the Justice Department held a news conferencein the U.S. attorney’s office in downtown Miami the day after the arrests of the Liberty City Seven. More than two dozen cameras were trained on a lectern crowded with microphones as media liaisons for the Justice Department passed out to reporters copies of a disc with photos of the accused terrorists. At 11:30 a.m.—about thirty minutes after then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had finished a news conference in Washington, D.C., in which he said the accused terrorists wanted to wage “a full ground war against the United States”—U.S. Attorney Alex Acosta stood behind the lectern.