By This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it HSO Contributor
It was the first public test for Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano. On Christmas Day, a suicide bomber with suspected al-Qaeda ties boarded a Detroit-bound plane and tried to detonate the military-grade explosives he'd brought on board. Intelligence gathering had failed. Airport screening had failed. Inter-government cooperation had failed. In the end, it was up to the passengers to save themselves.
But rather than acknowledge those failings, Napolitano defended her department, announcing on national television "the system worked really smoothly." The fact that she repeated that message throughout the day, then waited a full day to retract the statement, suggests that the DHS has not yet learned the art of public relations.
Weeks later, she is still taking criticism for her response to the incident. Calls for her resignation continue to be heard in Congress, while conservative television pundits and Internet bloggers assail her handling of the near-disaster.
This isn't the first time the department has taken the route of self-preservation over honest public communications. Since its inception, the DHS has been a bureaucracy more concerned with protecting itself than with fulfilling its mission of protecting the American public, and by extension, of instilling confidence in its competency to do so. It's become an old saw for the agency: something goes wrong and the fact that it is discovered means success.
DHS spokespeople use those dubious successes to smooth over political failings, from corruption within the department itself to its mismanagement of disasters like Hurricane Katrina and now, 23-year-old Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's attempt to bomb a plane filled with passengers.
Despite Napolitano retraction of her statement that the system worked the following day on the Today Show, the damage had already been done.
"Secretary Napolitano's job is to help protect our homeland, not defend the administration's system of failure," said Kansas Republican Todd Tiahrt, one several members asking for her resignation.
Like previous incidents of failure, the message communicated by DHS was the expeditious one, rather than a well thought-out strategy, say image and marketing consultants.
" Go back a little to the summer of 2003 when the Eastern US suffered a blackout, " says Lawrence Husick, a Senior Fellow in the Foreign Policy Research Institute's Center on Terrorism, Counter-Terrorism and Homeland Security. " Within 25 minutes of the blackout, a number of government officials all the way up to the White House were on the media assuring everyone that this was not a terrorist action. What they wanted to do was find some way to reassure everybody that everything's all right. 'We're doing our job. Go about your normal activities.'"
It would have been far better to approach the bombing attempt with a frequent, consistent message that the DHS is still looking for answers than rush to soothe the American public, says Michael Robinson, senior vice president of Levick Strategic Communications, a public relations firm that specializes in crisis communications. " You want to deactivate any criticism so you can focus on the going-forward element," he said. " You need to establish a communications predicate: 'thank God nobody was hurt,' thank the passengers, 'I'll be coming back in 30 days with specific recommendations,' this sort of thing. "
The alternative, which Napolitano is now discovering, is having to devote attention to congressional criticism instead of the job at hand. " If you say the system worked, when clearly it didn't, it's Washington, people are going to question that," Robinson said.
In short, words matter.
And from our national security officials, they matter a lot, Robinson said.
Michel Marizco is an organized crime reporter in Arizona and northern Mexico. He runs the news and intelligence web site, www.BorderReporter.com, in Tucson.
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