NBC depicts the foiling of “ISIS-inspired July 4 attacks” with a photo of a New York City cop guarding Coney Island. (photo: Andrew Kelly/Reuters)
On the Monday before the Independence Day weekend, several mainstream media outlets repeated the latest press release by the FBI that the country was under a new “heightened terror alert” from “ISIL-inspired attacks” “leading up to the July 4 weekend.”
Former CIA director (and consultant at DC PR firm Beacon Global Strategies) Michael Morell went on CBS This Morning (6/29/15) and scared the bejesus out of everyone by saying he “wouldn’t be surprised if we were sitting [in the studio] next week discussing an attack on the US.”
The ominous FBI (or Department of Homeland Security) “terror warning” has become such a staple of the ongoing, seemingly endless “war on terror,” we hardly even notice it any more. The specter of the impending “attack” is part of a broader white noise of fear that never went away after 9/11.
Indeed, the verbiage employed by the FBI in this latest warning—“we’re asking people to remain vigilant”—implies no actual change of the status quo, just an hysterical nudge to not let down our collective guard.
There was only one problem: These warnings had never actually come to fruition. Not rarely, or almost never, but never. No attacks, no arrests, no suspects at large.
A casual search revealed the FBI and DHS were a pitiful 0-for-40 warning of terror attacks. The actual terror attacks carried out on US soil—the Times Square bomber, “underwear bomber,” Boston bombing and Garland attacks—were accompanied by no such warnings. (Nor were the often deadlier terrorist attacks by right-wing white terrorists–but terrorism in this category is rarely if ever the subject of FBI warnings.)
Some skeptical journalists also noted the FBI’s habit of issuing pointless terror warnings, including FireDogLake‘s Kevin Gosztola (7/5/15), The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald (7/6/15) and The Guardian’s Trevor Timm (7/6/15). There was a general sense among many that the July 4 “warning” was just another empty terror warning meant to scare, provide CYA for the FBI and ultimately fizzle out like so many before.
And, in fact, the holiday weekend came and went, with the FBI “terror warning” hyped by the media foreshadowing nothing more than two false alarms and a handful of canceled Fourth of July plans.
So it was curious, to say the least, when on July 9 the FBI asserted to CNN’s Jim Sciutto that “a number” of “ISIS-inspired” terror plots had been “thwarted” from “coast to coast” over the Fourth of July weekend:
US law enforcement efforts thwarted a number of terror threats in the last two weeks, including plots timed to the July 4 holiday weekend, US officials tell CNN on Thursday. The thwarted plots included targets “coast to coast.” In fitting with calls by ISIS to attack in any way possible, the attempted plots were unsophisticated, including guns, knives and other weapons.
The evidence for these plots? As usual, none was provided. Just the word of “US officials.” Or as Sciutto put it, “No further details were immediately available about how the plots were thwarted.”
About an hour later, USA Today and others would report FBI Director James Comey making similar claims:
FBI Director James Comey said Thursday that federal authorities disrupted an undisclosed number of plots timed to the July 4 holiday to “kill people in the United States.” The plots, Comey said, were linked to the Islamic State terror group.
More than 10 people have been arrested in the past four weeks on charges related to their association with ISIL. Some of those, Comey said, involved plots timed to July 4. Comey declined to elaborate on the nature of the plots or where they were targeted.
Notice the weasel phrasing the media uncritically allow Comey to engage in: “timed to the July 4 holiday”; “related to their association with ISIL.”
You get more of a sense of what actually was going on from Pete Williams’ NBC News report, if you read a little between the lines:
Comey added that those inspired by ISIS don’t make elaborate plans and often act on the spur of the moment.
“It’s actually hard to figure out when they’re trying to kill somebody,” Comey said. “And you cannot say, ‘Well, we’ve got to do it on the Fourth.’ Because you know you have people who are motivated to kill people, and they are unreliable in terms of when they’re going to act.”
So the arrests were of people without “elaborate plans” who are “unreliable in terms of when they’re going to act.” It’s not even clear that they were intending to act, since it’s “hard to figure out when they’re trying to kill somebody.” But not hard to get the media to report as fact that these plan-less, unreliably scheduled suspects who may or may not have been trying to kill anybody had “ISIS terrorist plots linked to the Fourth of July holiday.”
Adam Johnson is an associate editor at AlterNet and writes frequently for FAIR.org. You can follow him on Twitter at @adamjohnsonnyc.
