ross
It was a familiar, and nerve-wracking, scenario: ABC News investigative reporter Brian Ross announced earlier this week that two Yemeni men had been detained after a flight from Chicago to Amsterdam on suspicion of conducting a "dry run" for a possible airborne terrorist attack.
Within a manner of days, however, the reported threat fell apart, and Dutch authorities released the two detained men without charges.
As Salon's Justin Elliott has reported, Ross broke the Amsterdam plot as an "ABC News exclusive" on Monday. He reported that American law enforcement officials said that two Yemeni men arrested by Dutch officials were engaged in "preparation of a terrorist attack" and had traveled from Chicago to Amsterdam in what "was almost certainly a dry run, a test."
Officials first became suspicious of one of the men, a Detroit resident named Ahmed Mohamed Nasser al Soofi, when airport screeners in Birmingham, Ala., discovered $7,000 in cash and taped-together cell phones — one of them taped to a Pepto-Bismol bottle — in his checked baggage. Nameless U.S. officials described these items to Ross as "mock bombs." Al Soofi later checked the bag on a flight to Dubai, but missed that flight and boarded one for Amsterdam along with another Yemeni. American officials asked Dutch police to pick up the men up when that flight landed.
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The story made the ABC Nightly News, and received prominent placement on the Drudge Report. But within 24 hours, the truth emerged: The men didn't know one another, and had no connection to terrorism.
It turns out that Al Soofi taped the items together because they were packages for different relatives in Yemen, where cell phones and over-the-counter heartburn medicine are tough to come by. And ABCNews.com added this update to Ross's initial, breathless story: "Editor's Note: The two men were released Wednesday without being charged when Dutch authorities could find no evidence of ties to a terror plot." It was all a mix-up — one that other news outlets, Elliott points out, initially covered with a dose of skepticism, in marked contrast to Ross's simple recitation of law enforcement conjecture.
To his credit, Ross did post a lengthy mea culpa of sorts for the Amsterdam botch in an online-only story — headlined "False Alarm" — examining how and why U.S. authorities got it wrong and featuring an interview with al Soofi's Dutch attorney. You can watch the full segment below (video courtesy of ABC News):
Ross defended his reporting to Elliott, saying he can only report what his intelligence sources are telling him. "Sometimes when these things break you sort of have to report what you know, adding the best you can that there may be another explanation," he said. "As long as we're current and accurate, that's the best that you can do."
Elliott also found another wrinkle in this latest Ross scoop: On Tuesday, as the Amsterdam story was falling apart, Ross published a follow-up of sorts on the ABC News website that seemed to corroborate his scoop, claiming that law enforcement was "on a heightened state of alert to a possible hijacking of U.S. carrier flights from the Middle East." But that story simply disappeared from the site, with no clarification, retraction, or indication of whether ABC News continues to stand by it. An ABC News spokesman told Elliott that "the story was overwritten and overtaken by the changing story about the Yemeni men in custody," but that ABC News does indeed stand by the "heightened alert" claim.
This wasn't the first time that Ross muffed a murky emerging story about a potential threat. And on those past occasions, Ross's reports followed the same basic pattern: Alarming suggestions that a global terrorist plot came very close to executing a dangerous plot, followed by the revelation that the big promised scoop is actually less than the sum of its parts. So it turns out that the 2001 anthrax attacks did not involve special spores that could only have come from Iraq, that Nidal Hasan did not reach out to multiple al-Qaida figures before he shot up Ft. Hood, and that last year's Christmas bombing was not planned by former Guantanamo Bay inmate Abu al-Hareth Muhammad al-Oufi.
In his interview with al Soofi's attorney, Ross asked what lessons law enforcement could take away from a case like this. "Maybe you should ask someone first for an explanation before you throw him in prison. Of course, when it comes to terrorism everyone is frightened — easily frightened," the lawyer said. "But you should not let fear rule your decisions."
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