Disaster Twitter, a New Wrinkle

Of all the iconic images associated with the attacks of September 11, 2001, the footage of then-President Bush’s fuck-me stare — delivered, now-infamously, as he was about to grace an audience of Florida school children with his best reading voice — is perhaps the most honest summation of the mixture of horror and panic that most of his fellow citizens felt as they watched the World Trade Center crumble on national television: At least for a day — and, in most cases, probably longer than that — U.S. nationals were left in the very unfamiliar position of post-national-trauma lockdown. And, though the news media did its best to service us — parked as we were in front of our TVs, with little else to do but wonder about when the next plane would hit — with a stream of reliable information, there were, naturally, a few rumor-fed hiccups in those confusing first few hours.

Lucky for us, there was no Twitter. Or Facebook. Or any other web 2.0 gadget that might have been used to turn what was already an uncomfortable level of panic into something that might have, in its ability to undo civil order, made us long for the likes of Al Haig.

Picture this: The 9/11 sequel hits. Old media either waits to source unconfirmed reports or runs them in a crush to beat both their competitor networks and the social-media machine. By now, the latter group has already produced a collective avalanche of tweets and status updates, which — in their first-person anecdotal nature — are generally inaccurate and vague, but are, nonetheless, submitted for network-viewer consumption. And as the whole thing starts to spin out of control, the first victim post shows up. Maybe it’s a heart-rending farewell. Maybe it’s a horrifying call for help. Maybe it’s a citizen’s APB for a possible attacker. Whatever it is, it gets tweeted and retweeted. And picked-up by blogger after press agency after network until the thing is ringing in the collective heads of an already frightened public. But this time it’s not a report of one-last-cell-phone-call from a doomed plane; it’s the actual thing — and it’s happening in real time.

A small-scale example of the sort of frenzy that our new media reality can create was blogged about on TechDigest this past April. There, Daniel Sung reported on the information spread associated with DIY swine-flu reporting. “There’s been a Chinese whispers effect whereby a host of tweets built around anecdotal evidence, to put it kindly, have produced a mixed bag of misinformation and hysteria,” Sung wrote. “My personal favourites [sic] are the opportunist: ‘Simple cure for the new BHS (Bird/Human/Swine flu) as reported on TV last night is the drug Tamiflu…already a prescription on the market’ and the poetic: ‘In the pandemic Spanish flu of 1918-19, my Grandfather said bodies were piled like wood in our local town…swine flu = danger.’”

This is not an argument for some sort of disaster-sensitive Twitter censorship. That sort of thing would only serve to compound such a tragedy. Instead, this should be taken as a neurotically instructive take on the relationship between new media and the stuff so many seem to be ready to (at least) supplement it with: If you find yourself still marveling at what you believed on the afternoon of September 11, 2001, maybe you should reconsider your need for instant information.

As you’ve no doubt read by now, this weekend brought fresh allegations about former Vice President Dick Cheney and his seeming unending capacity for evil-doing.

Dicking Around: Cheney's Policies Could Help the Dems Achieve Their Goals

But, just in case: According to the New York Times, “[t]he Central Intelligence Agency withheld information about a secret counterterrorism program from Congress for eight years on direct orders from former Vice President Dick Cheney, the agency’s director, Leon E. Panetta, has told the Senate and House intelligence committees….” As the posturing about investigations and culpability began on the Sunday morning talk shows, the Times hadn’t yet been able to track Cheney down for a quote. This is, of course, nothing more than par for the veteran pol, whose resume includes less snarly stints in the Ford and Bush senior administrations, before he grimaced his way to that undisclosed location on September 11, 2001 — and who seemed to treat every interview like a hostile interrogation. And while we’d love (for entertainment’s sake) for him to return to the public eye with some sort of grand vinegar-y denial, the man is probably more interested in playing out the string in friendly Wyoming than returning to his position as Bush administration fall guy. Besides, despite the occasional jab at the current administration, he’s got no motivation for a comeback tour: His play — returning what he deems to be adequate executive power to the office of the president, what seems to be his singular political motivation for his actions from 2001-2008 — has already been made. And maybe we should stop busting on him for it.

In 2005, the Washington Post offered up a piece that discussed the history of Cheney’s efforts to strengthen the power of the Executive Branch of the U.S. Government. According to reporters Peter Baker and Jim VandeHei, he told the Air Force Two press gang that “the period after the Watergate scandal and Vietnam War proved to be ‘the nadir of the modern presidency in terms of authority and legitimacy’ and harmed the chief executive’s ability to lead in a complicated, dangerous era.” Given the chance by Bush to affect some sort of change in the way the U.S. bureaucracy functions, he snapped it up, taking multiple opportunites to find legal conflicts where the Bush administration could broaden the scope of the President’s power. So successful had these efforts been that Cheney could, four years before Barack Obama would take the oath of office, claim to Baker and VandeHei that  “I do think that to some extent now we’ve been able to restore the legitimate authority of the presidency.”

The statement turned out to be somewhat premature. Scandals over wire-tapping, torture, and other abuses of power would cloud the rest of the Bush presidency and perhaps help pave the way for the massive GOP failure this past November. Among Obama’s first acts was the symbolic rejection of the Bush/Cheney core philosophy. And though the shuttering of Guantanamo may never quite take effect, the new administration deemed the issue important enough to the nation’s psyche that it tried its best to close the facility within hours of taking office. But then it seemed to take a breath. And as it did it seemed to realize the benefits of the Cheney era: Attorney General Eric Holder invoked the State Secrets provision in a law suit against the Boeing corporation, which may have participated in the Bush/Cheney extraordinary rendition program — an action that seemed to defend the removal of terrorism suspects to countries where they might be better … interrogated. The administration’s lawyers also sought to dismiss a law suit against the telecommunications companies that had participated in the secret NSA wire-tapping program – a seeming nod to the idea that it was okay for their predecessors to demand data in a way that was eventually ruled to be unconstitutional. And they further received a friendly judicial ruling which allowed it to, according to the Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder, “indefinitely detain several classes of belligerents,” a seemingly Cheney-ian violation of Habeas Corpus – and a convenient way to avoid dealing with the issues of what to do with some hardcore detainees who can’t be tried under normal U.S. law.

Indeed, though the current administration has yet to publicly produce any John Yoo-type interpretations of executive power, they seem to be benefiting from the same sort of thinking that Cheney is being so lambasted for. So why not ride this sucker as far as it’ll take them? Why not find a lawyer (maybe David Addington?) who might be willing to draft a few memos about how poverty in the United States is a threat to national security? Have him cite the Cheney doctrine — that in such times as the President deems necessary, he can take extraordinary steps to protect his country. Have him find a reason for the President to, say, nationalize health care or raise taxes without the consent of Congress. Offer a year’s worth of amnesty to delinquent mortgage payers. Legalize drugs.

The fact is that this is an opprotunity. So drop the Cheney hate — the man (and his lawyers) found a way to streamline the policy-making process, and instead of taking heaps of abuse from the so-called left, he should be receiving flowers and cupcakes. Better yet, should the Obama administration tack in this direction, Cheney just might be remembered as the man who saved the United States.