The United States of Fear (6 page)

Just stop a moment to take that in. And then let this sink in as well: whatever any one of those employees does inside that national-security world, no matter how “illegal” the act, it’s a double-your-money bet that he or she will never be prosecuted for it (unless it happens to involve letting Americans know something about just how they are being “protected”).

The Intelligence Community, the National Security Complex, including the Pentagon and that post-9/11 creation, the Department of Homeland Security, and the imperial executive have thrived in these years. They have all expanded their powers and prerogatives based largely on the claim that they are protecting the American people from potential harm by terrorists out to destroy our world. Above all, however, they seem to have honed a single skill: the ability to protect themselves, as well as the lobbyists and corporate entities that feed off them. They have increased their funds and powers, even as they enveloped themselves as institutions in a penumbra of secrecy. The power of this complex of institutions is still on the rise, even as the power and wealth of the country it protects is visibly in decline.

The question Is it legal is obviously inapplicable in a land where the rule of law no longer applies to everyone. If you are an ordinary citizen, of course, it still applies to you, but not if you are part of the state apparatus that officially protects you. The institutional momentum behind this development is simple enough to demonstrate: it hardly mattered that, after George W. Bush took off those gloves, the next president elected was a former constitutional law professor. The National Security Complex is the King George of the present moment. In the areas that matter to that complex, Congress has ever less power and is generally ever more ready to cede what power it has left.

Democracy? The people’s representatives? How quaint in a world in which our real rulers are unelected, shielded by secrecy, and supported by a carefully nurtured, almost religious attitude toward security and the U.S. military.

The National Security Complex has access to us, to our lives and communications, though we have next to no access to it. It has, in reserve, those enhanced interrogation techniques and when trouble looms, a set of what might be called enhanced legal techniques as well. It has the ability to make war at will (or whim). It has a growing post-9/11 secret army cocooned inside the military: twenty thousand or more troops in special operations outfits like the SEAL team that took down Osama bin Laden, also enveloped in secrecy. In addition, it has the CIA and an expanding fleet of armed drone aircraft ready to conduct its wars and operations globally in semisecrecy, without the permission or oversight of the American people or their representatives. And war, of course, is the ultimate aphrodisiac for the powerful.

Theoretically, the National Security Complex exists only to protect you. Its every act is done in the name of making you safer, even if the idea of safety and protection doesn’t extend to your job, your foreclosed home, or aid in disastrous times.

Welcome to post-legal America. It’s time to stop wondering whether its acts are illegal and start asking: Do you really want to be this “safe”?

Here’s a scenario to chill you to the bone:

Without warning, the network—a set of terrorist super cells—struck in northern Germany and Germans began to fall by the hundreds, then thousands. As panic spread, hospitals were overwhelmed with the severely wounded. More than twenty of the victims died.

No one doubted that it was al-Qaeda, but where the terrorists had come from was unknown. Initially, German officials accused Spain of harboring them (and the Spanish economy promptly took a hit). Then, confusingly, they retracted the charge. Alerts went off across Europe as fears spread. Russia closed its borders to the European Union, which its outraged leaders denounced as a “disproportionate” response. Even a small number of Americans visiting Germany ended up hospitalized.

In Washington, there was panic, though no evidence existed that the terrorists were specifically targeting Americans or that any of them had slipped into this country. Still, at a hastily called news conference, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano raised the new terror alert system for the first time from its always “elevated” status to “imminent” (that is, “a credible, specific, and impending threat”). Soon after, a Pentagon spokesman announced that the U.S. military had been placed on high alert across Europe.

Commentators on Fox News, quoting unnamed FBI sources, began warning that this might be the start of the “next 9/11”—and that the Obama administration was unprepared for it. Former vice president Dick Cheney, in a rare public appearance at the American Enterprise Institute, denounced the president for “heedlessly putting this country at risk from the terrorists.” In Congress, members of both parties rallied behind calls for hundreds of millions of dollars of supplementary emergency funding for the Department of Homeland Security to strengthen airport safety. (“In such difficult economic times,” said House Speaker John Boehner, “Congress will have to find cuts from nonmilitary discretionary spending at least equal to these necessary supplementary funds.”)

Finally, as the noise in the media echo chamber grew, President Obama called a prime-time news conference and addressed the rising sense of hysteria in Washington and the country, saying: “Al-Qaeda and its extremist allies will stop at nothing in their efforts to kill Americans. And we are determined not only to thwart those plans, but to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat their networks once and for all.” He then ordered a full review of U.S. security and intelligence capabilities and promised a series of “concrete steps to protect the American people: new screening and security for all flights, domestic and international; . . . more air marshals on flights; and deepening cooperation with international partners.”

The first part of this scenario is, of course, a “terrorist” version of the 2011
E. coli
outbreak in Germany—the discovery of an all-new, antibiotic-resistant “super-toxic variant” of the bacteria that caused death and panic in Europe. Although al-Qaeda and
E. coli
do sound a bit alike, German officials initially (and incorrectly) accused Spanish cucumbers, not terrorists in Spain or German bean sprouts, of causing the crisis. And the “disproportionate” Russian response was not to close its borders to the European Union, but to ban EU vegetables until the source of the outbreak was iscovered.

Above all, the American overreaction was pure fiction. In fact, scientists here urged calm and midlevel government officials issued statements of reassurance on the safety of the country’s food supply system. No one attacked the government for inaction. Cheney did not excoriate the president, nor did Napolitano raise the terror alert level. And Obama’s statement, quoted above, was actually given on January 5, 2010, in the panicky wake of the “underwear bomber’s” failed attempt to blow a hole in a Christmas Day plane headed from Amsterdam to Detroit.

Ironically, non-super-toxic versions of
E. coli
now cause almost as much damage yearly in the United States as the super-toxic strain did in Europe. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have estimated that earlier in the decade about sixty Americans died annually from
E. coli
infections and ensuing complications, and another 2,000 were hospitalized. More recently, the figure for
E. coli
deaths has dropped to about twenty a year. For food-borne disease more generally, the CDC estimates that 48 million (or one of every six) Americans get sick yearly, 128,000 are hospitalized, and about 3,000 die.

By comparison, in the near decade since 9/11, while hundreds of Americans died from
E. coli
, and at least 30,000 from food-borne illnesses generally, only a handful of Americans, perhaps fewer than twenty-five, have died from anything that might be considered a terror attack in this country, even if you include the assassination attempt against Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and the Piper Cherokee PA-28 that a disgruntled software engineer flew into an Austin, Texas, building containing an IRS office, killing himself and an IRS manager. (“Well, Mr. Big Brother IRS man, let’s try something different; take my pound of flesh and sleep well,” he wrote in his final note.)

In other words, in terms of damage since 9/11, terror attacks have ranked above shark attacks but below just about anything else that could possibly be dangerous to Americans, including car crashes, which have racked up between 33,800 and 43,500 deaths a year since 2001.

While
E. coli
deaths have dropped in recent years, no one expects them to get to zero, nor have steps been taken that might bring us closer to the 100 percent safety mark. As Gardiner Harris of the
New York Times
wrote, “A law passed by Congress last year gave the Food and Drug Administration new powers to mandate that companies undertake preventive measures to reduce the likelihood of such outbreaks, and the law called for increased inspections to ensure compliance. The agency requested additional financing to implement the new law, including hiring more inspectors next year. Republicans in the House have instead proposed cutting the agency’s budget.”

Here, then, is one of the strange phenomena of our post-9/11 American age: in only one area of life are Americans officially considered 100 percent scared, and so 100 percent in need of protection: terrorism.

No one has been urging that a Global War on Food-Borne Illnesses be launched. In fact, at this moment, six strains of
E. coli
that do cause illness in this country remain unregulated. Department of Agriculture proposals to deal with them are “stalled” in the Office of Management and Budget. Meanwhile, the super-toxic
E. coli
strain that appeared in Europe remains officially unregulated here. On the other hand, send any doofus America-bound on a plane with any kind of idiotic device, and the politicians, the media, and the public promptly act as if the sky were falling or civilization itself were at risk.

This might be of only moderate interest if it weren’t for the U.S. national security state. Having lost its Communist superenemy in 1991, it now lives, breathes, and grows on its self-proclaimed responsibility to protect Americans 100 percent of the time, 100 percent of the way, from any imaginable terror threat. The National Security Complex has, in fact, grown fat by relentlessly pursuing the promise of making the country totally secure from terrorism, even as life grows ever less secure for so many Americans when it comes to jobs, homes, finances, and other crucial matters. It is on this pledge of protection that the complex has managed to extort the tidal flow of funds that have allowed it to bloat to monumental proportions and encase itself in a cocoon of self-protective secrecy and immunity.

In the days after 9/11, Vice President Cheney proposed a new formula for American war policy. Its essence was this: even a 1 percent chance of an attack on the United States, especially involving weapons of mass destruction, must be dealt with as if it were a certainty. Journalist Ron Suskind dubbed it “the one percent doctrine.” It may have been the rashest formula for “preventive” or “aggressive” war offered in the modern era and, along with the drumbeat of bogus information that Cheney and crew dished out about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, it was the basis for the Bush administration’s disastrous attempt to occupy that country and build a
Pax Americana
in the Greater Middle East.

There was, it turns out, a “homeland” equivalent, never quite formulated or given a name, but remarkably successful at feeding an increasingly all-encompassing domestic war state. Call it the 100 percent doctrine (for total safety from terrorism). While the 1 percent version never quite caught on, the 100 percent doctrine has already become part of the American credo. Thanks to it, the National Security Complex is a self-reinforcing, self-perpetuating mechanism. Any potential act of terrorism simply feeds the system, creating new opportunities to add yet more layers to one bureaucracy or another, or to promote new programs of surveillance and control—and the technology that goes with them. Every minor deviation from terror safety, even involving plots that failed dismally or never had the slightest chance of success, is but an excuse for further funding.

Meanwhile, the complex continually “mans up” (or drones up) and, from Pakistan to Yemen, launches attacks officially meant to put terrorists out of action but that create more of them in the process. In other words, consider it a terrorist-creating machine that needs—what else?—repeated evidence of or signs of terrorism to survive and thrive.

Though few here seem to notice, none of this bears much relationship to actual American security. But if the National Security Complex doesn’t make you secure, its 100 percent doctrine is by no means a failure. On the basis of ensuring your security from terror, it has managed to make itself secure from bad times, the dangers of downsizing, most forms of accountability, or prosecution for acts that once would have been considered crimes.

In fact, terrorism is anything but the greatest of our problems or threats, which means that acquiescing to a state dedicated to expansion on the principle of keeping you safe from terror is like making a bargain with the devil.

So suck it up. Nothing is secure. No one is safe. Now eat your sprouts.

George W. who? I mean, the guy is so over. When he turned the big six-five, it was barely a footnote in the news. And Dick Cheney, tick-tick-tick. Condoleezza Rice? She’s already onto her next memoir, and yet it’s as if she’s been wiped from history. As for Donald Rumsfeld, he published his memoir in February 2011 and it hit the bestseller lists, but months later, where is he?

And can anyone be surprised? They were wrong about Afghanistan. They were wrong about Iraq. They were wrong about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. They were wrong about what the U.S. military was capable of doing. The country imploded economically while they were at the helm. Geopolitically speaking, they headed the car of state for the nearest cliff. In fact, when it comes to pure wrongness, what weren’t they wrong about?