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There was an excruciating moment in Diane Sawyer's sitdown with top homeland security officials about preventing domestic terrorism. James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, responded with befuddled silence when the ABC anchor asked him about the possibility of bomb plots originating in Britain. Sawyer was so stunned that Clapper did not know what she was talking about that she came back to the question later in the q-&-a.
"London, how serious is it? Any indication that it was coming here?" was the question that stumped Clapper. Sawyer later told Clapper that she was referring to that morning's arrest of a dozen suspected plotters by British police. She was surprised that he was not informed. He apologized and acknowledged that he had not been; John Brennan, the White House advisor on counterterrorism, told Sawyer that he had been briefed. In Clapper's defense, his office later pointed out that Sawyer's question had been "ambiguous" and it claimed that Clapper had "profound and multidimensional" knowledge of "threat streams in Europe."
So did she expose a deplorable state of ignorance where there should be intelligence? Or was this just gotcha journalism?
First, Sawyer's question was clumsy, to say the least. The major news from London that morning was the closing of Heathrow Airport and the halting of all airline traffic. Given that she had just asked about the bungling underwear bomber in a jetliner last Christmas, she could have been understood to be asking whether the lack of airline traffic from London posed such a threat--a question that would have befuddled anyone.
Second, London was not the location of most of the arrests in the bomb plot. They were in Birmingham, Stoke and Cardiff, so using "London" as shorthand for a police round-up that mostly took place outside of London would be a second source of logical befuddlement.
Third, the fact that ABC News treated the arrests as a cause for alarm is no guarantee that they were. ABC's Jim Sciutto covered the arrests Monday with the claim that "this plot may have been in its final stages." CBS' Elizabeth Palmer had a different take: that the arrest was made to protect an undercover informant not to prevent imminent bombings. Palmer also reported that the alleged plot was an internal British affair, targeting shopping districts and government buildings. She mentioned no transAtlantic angle. NBC did not treat the round-up as newsworthy enough to warrant a correspondent.
Nevertheless, Sawyer did expose the fact that Clapper's daily briefing had not included news of these arrests. Her inartful questioning was not the reason Clapper was confused--although inartful it certainly was. He was confused because of his lack of knowledge. Should his briefing have included the arrest of a dozen ethnic Bangladeshis in three English cities and one in Wales? Only if it was part of that so-called "threat stream." ABC's decision to give the arrests prominence is no proof that it was.
Clapper's aides may have been correct not to have wasted his time by putting these arrests on his agenda. It may have been ABC that made the mistake, treating a domestic round-up by British police as a transAtlantic cause celebre. Without knowing whether the underlying story was legitimate or hyped, it is impossible to judge whether Sawyer's journalism was legitimate or gotcha.
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