Information as a Weapon Against Terrorism   

Casualty of War: The Bush Administration’s Assault on a Free Press

By David Dadge
Prometheus Books
350 pages; $26

The theme of David Dadge's book, pointedly expressed in its subtitle, probably won't surprise many readers. But the tone might. It is firm but not shrill, accusatory but not hysterical. Most interesting, once Dadge has moved beyond the list of particulars and outrages, he turns the book into something unexpectedly positive: a cogent, compelling argument that a free flow of information may itself be a partial antidote to terrorism.

"Why do terrorists choose to bear arms and kill innocent people?" asks Dadge. "One of the reasons is perhaps that they feel they have no other viable methods of expression.... The greater the access to information, the greater the belief of belonging to a particular society.... Without information, individuals are totally incapable of taking part in the society they see around them--they are voiceless. It is exactly at this nexus point that feelings of disenchantment and powerlessness arise."

Democratic governments need to acknowledge, Dadge continues, that "the media and...information are actually a fundamental part of the war on terrorism."

By the time he reaches this point, Dadge has delivered example after example of how the Bush administration has constricted the information flow at home and overlooked serious abuses abroad. An editor for the Austria-based International Press Institute, Dadge offers a broader perspective on these matters than Americans sometimes get.

The September 11 terrorist attacks "opened up a second front," Dadge writes, "a war of words...over how many of our basic freedoms citizens are prepared to forgo in order to feel secure."

Clearly, Americans felt vulnerable. Dadge quotes one poll showing that 80 percent were willing to trade personal liberties for greater safety. He contends the Bush administration capitalized on these insecurities by pressuring journalists, chilling dissent and imposing misguided restrictions on information, access and expression.

Early on, for instance, the State Department tried to prevent the Voice of America from airing an interview with a Taliban leader (see Free Press, December 2001). One VOA journalist called the move "a totally unacceptable assault on our editorial independence, a frontal attack on our credibility."

The interview aired, but Dadge says the episode emboldened the administration. Then came another State Department effort, this time asking the Qatari government to help "tone down" reporting by Al Jazeera. The International Press Institute protested "the attempt to curtail the news reporting of an independent television station, based in another country."

In late September 2001, then White House spokesman Ari Fleischer made remarks that Dadge calls "deeply damaging to the concept of free speech." Attacking televised comments by talk-show host Bill Maher that were critical of Bush, Fleischer declared, "they're reminders to all Americans that they need to watch what they say.... This is not a time for remarks like that."

TV networks took an even tougher punch when National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, in a conference call with media executives, asked them to remove "inflammatory language" from broadcasts of al Qaeda tapes and messages. In what Dadge calls unprecedented action, the network executives agreed to run only abbreviated versions of al Qaeda tapes and to accompany them with suitable context.

Dadge blasts a CNN executive's memo appearing to require reporters to balance news of casualties in Afghanistan by stressing the Taliban's harboring of terrorists and the Pentagon's commitment to minimizing damage. Dadge brands this memo "one of the most abject statements ever handed down to the news staff of a television organization."

And he finds it particularly ominous that Rice's pressure came at a time the FCC was considering network-supported changes relaxing cross-ownership rules (see "News Blackout," December/ January). The administration's potential to exploit "the entangled relationship between the major television networks and government" created severe conflicts, he says, for the "ethical duties and obligations" of TV journalists.

Dadge also presents a forceful, timely defense of freedom of information laws, which he calls "pivotal to the success of any society." These laws have been increasingly ignored at the federal, state and local levels (see "The Information Squeeze," September 2002).

All these concerns build to the climactic passage of the Patriot Act, an omnibus expansion of government power.

Finally, Dadge catalogs how, inspired by U.S. crackdowns, countries around the globe "stretched the definition of terrorism to include their own domestic terrorists, and used the tragedy to introduce new laws suppressing political dissidents."

It all led to a warning from U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan that "in the name of anti-terrorism, principles and values that were decades, even centuries, in the making may be put at risk."

This is an exhaustive, alarming litany, though Dadge is not the first to notice. Many similar points were raised last fall in veteran civil libertarian Nat Hentoff's book, "The War on the Bill of Rights and the Gathering Resistance."

It also must be said that terrorism is a brutally real danger, that hijackers, suicide bombers and other lunatics stand incontestably ready to murder randomly, and that government faces an excruciatingly hard job of balancing security and freedom. In the face of exploding buildings and mangled innocence, in the fear of nukes and anthrax outbreaks, Dadge's worries can seem aloof and airy.

But that is exactly why discussing them seems vital. In an understandable attempt to protect ourselves and those we love, we risk inflicting, or simply tolerating, long-term blows to freedom. Here, Dadge's positive comments become his most memorable. In the battle against terrorism, an open flow of information and a high tolerance for debate and dissent are not simply abstractions. They are powerful weapons of mass protection. And they are on our side.