©2003, UrbisMedia
It is now almost ten years since I posted “Are You Terrorized Yet?” in these pages. I went back to look at it because I think I might be closer to an answer now. Here’s what I wrote then.
(11.25.2003) It has been over two years now since 9-11 and while I still marvel at the event that has etched that date in our collective consciousness I still wonder whether I am, as I believe was the intent of that heinous act, “terrorized.”
I look out from my deck that overlooks San Diego harbor, home to some US aircraft carriers, nuclear subs, and assorted other military hardware and now I wonder how easy to would be to bring a container ship in (in which scarcely two percent of containers are inspected), and detonate a nuclear device amidst the nuclear-powered Navy fleet.
I watched as fires consumed hundreds of thousands of acres of land and thousands of buildings in a few days, presumably set off by a single stupid act, and wonder how easy it would be to repeat it with a few well-placed acts of terrorist arson.
When I see how helpless we become at a simple power outage when we are deprived of communication and transportation by some mishap that turns out to be so simple, I wonder at how vulnerable we our with our dependence on technology.
Is this what it means to be “terrorized”? When I drive past the nuclear power plant at San Onofre and think such thoughts, or over the California aqueduct and imagine how easy it would be for someone to drop some horrible, deadly chemical or bio-agent into it, is that what Osama wants me to be thinking about?*
Is that how I should be thinking? Should I be on “orange” level alert all the time, checking to see if there are any suspicious characters while the airport authorities are checking my shoes and confiscating my nail clippers. (How many nail clippers have they confiscated? Did it occur to them that now terrorists might decide to claw flight crews into submission with their lethally long, unclipped nails?)
Well, by now anyone might conclude that I am indeed terrorized. Which I guess is normal under the circumstances. It’s what one does with being terrorized that matters. I have little personal power to do much other than be alert and not compromise what we now call “homeland security.” I don’t mean stupid like putting a couple of those window flagpoles on our SUVs and roaring around yelling how proud we are to be Americans.
Maybe what doesn’t kill you makes you more alert, if it doesn’t make you stronger. That must have been Al Qaeda’s point. To let us know that we’re vulnerable, that we’re not really safe and secure anywhere.
But I think there might be more to it than that. Maybe Osama thinks that the real effectiveness of terrorizing us is that he won’t have to do all that much and we will start acting irrationally, making stupid decisions, flailing about with ham-handed preemptive wars so that we will do as much, or more, damage to ourselves by alienating allies and making new terrorists.
Then again, reflecting back on what wrote in 1995 we might have even more to worry about than Osama bin Laden.** [END 2003]
[2013] I have revisited some of these issues on and off in the intervening years but the opening bracket above provides a benchmark against which the current state of affairs can be compared.
Have we made any progress with this issue? We have launched ourselves into two preemptive wars that have cost us considerably in our national wealth (contributing to the debt problem that most of the politicians bewailing our debt problem but who supported these wars in the first place), killed and maimed a lot of our military, and a lot more of the people in Iraq and Afghanistan who we were putatively rescuing from tyranny and religious oppression. Our naïveté and our failures have not deterred us from conducting drone wars in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia.
Amazingly, although we have whacked bin Laden, we carry on his work for him, establishing huge expensive structures and homeland security and in the NSA and TSA that promise to become permanent bureaucracies for mis-conceived policies like the war on drugs that has become a system for incarcerating minority young men in prisons that have become a new private industry that lobbies against marijuana legalization because it is pot convictions that filled her cells.
It might be some gauge of the extent to which the public in general perceives our homeland security policies and our drug in prison policies make us any safer that we cannot even pass a law that might through background checks prevent some maniacs (and terrorists, too) from acquiring assault weapons and huge supplies of ammunition to slaughter schoolchildren, or to retain the annual statistical over 30,000 gun deaths, a large number of them suicides.
Many of us thought that seeing the end of the dimwitted president who either inaugurated such policies or extended them with the unprecedented expansion of executive authority, and his replacement by an intelligent constitutional lawyer, would make a difference. It has, and it has not. Obama has become somewhat of an enigma. We are blessed that he is not George W. Bush, and we were blessed again that he was not Mitt Romney. But neither is he FDR. It is painfully clear that there is a powerful and insistent racism that undergirds all of the attempts to stifle and repeal his social legislation and policies. His progressive posture of “yes we can” has been countervailed with a strategy of “no you won’t” by political opposition that has not had a new or viable policy notion for over thirty years.
Yet at the same time, it appears that the most powerful politician on the face of the earth has been terrorized by a dead Muslim warlord, with the assistance of his riught-wing political adversaries. Obama seems unable, or unwilling, to dial back the executive authority as applied to foreign military incursions or domestic security measures that his predecessor arrogated to himself, out of fear that should there be any repetition of a terrorist attack, he would be blamed for it. As though he would not be blamed for it under any circumstances! (Never mind that his predecessor managed not to take the blame for being inattentive to national security warnings of an impending attack, and reading children’s stories to kindergartners as it occurred.) Unfortunately, it seems that President Obama has either bought into, or been terrorized into, perpetuating the same foolish, expensive, counterproductive, and national terror inducing policies of his predecessor.
The most recent expression of the effectiveness of bin Laden at terrorizing an entire nation is the insidious self-destruction of our own national principles in the form of our own domestic espionage apparatus. In true Orwellian fashion it blunts the abilities of any auspices of oversight that asks if it’s efficacy can be documented with the “catch 22” reply that such information is “classified.” And so we are left with the insult, our Constitutional Fourth Amendment rendered the “Forfeit Amendment,” that “if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear.” It’s the new Constitutional hydraulics of privacy and security. Thank you, constitutional lawyer.
The perverse truth is that despite the fact we are paying for this latest handover of our public fisc to private offshore bank accounts, it’s the people, at the local level, alert and vigilant who will probably do much more to stem terrorist attacks than a bunch of Booz Allen Hamilton hackers sitting in some building in Washington (and one in a hotel room in Hong Kong).***
Terror is officially part of the national corporate model. And frightened people are its best customers, whether they want to be or not. Of course, that’s what fascism is all about. (Didn’t somebody once say, “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”?)
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© 2003 and 2013, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 6.14.2013)
*San Onofre, which has had technical problems that required its shutdown for almost 2 years, has now been taken completely off-line and will no longer be a threat either by way of its equipment failures or by terrorists (although its fuel needs to be dealt with.)
**Of course BHO has since knocked off OBL, who now sleeps with the fishes.
***Excepting George Bush, of course. You could go to him and announce: “I am a terrorist and have a bomb in my butt and I am going to blow us and the whole White House to pieces.” And he would say, “You wanna wait ‘til I finish reading ‘The Hungry Caterpillar’?”