| After Two Years
Real Dangers and False Solutions in the Age of Terrorism
http://www.zmag.org
September 2003
By Stephen R. Shalom
Kenneth Adelman, a former Reagan administration official and
close
associate of the ruling neoconservatives, has offered his
advice to the
Bush administration for securing its re-election. "We should
not try to
convince people that things are getting better," he said.
"Rather, we
should convince people that ours is the age of terrorism."[1]
The fact that upgradings of the color-coded terror alert
frequently seem
to coincide with some scandal or bad news that the Bush
administration
would like to keep off the front page, makes us all cynical
about the
terrorism threat. But manipulation of terror warnings should
not obscure
the very real dangers that terrorism poses.
So now, two years after the horrors of 9-11, given the fact
that this
administration has staked its future on making its citizens
safe from
terrorism, it's reasonable to ask what it has actually done to
reduce
the threat of anti-U.S. terrorism.
In March 2003, Bush's special adviser for counter-terrorism,
Rand Beers,
resigned. In June he charged that the "war on terrorism" was
"making us
less secure, not more secure."[2] The Bush administration, he
said, put
too much emphasis on attacking terrorists overseas: "There's
not enough
focus on defense and dealing with the basic sources of
humiliation and
despair that exist in large segments of the Islamic
population."[3]
Beers is no starry-eyed liberal. He was a 20-year veteran of
the
National Security Council, where he had loyally carried out
atrocious
policies under Reagan and Bush Senior, as well as Clinton.
Just last
year, to help get a judge to dismiss a lawsuit opposing Plan
Colombia --
the multi-billion dollar U.S. aid program -- he submitted a
deposition
stating that Colombian guerrillas had received training in al
Qaeda
camps in Afghanistan, a claim he was later forced to retract
as
baseless.[4] Nevertheless, in his limited way Beers points to
the real
problem. The key to reducing terrorism against the United
States is to
eliminate as much as possible those "basic sources of
humiliation and
despair." So how successful has the Bush administration been
when it
comes to those "large segments of the Islamic population"?
Consider the findings of the Pew Global Attitudes Project,
which
interviewed some 16,000 respondents around the world:
"The bottom has fallen out of support for America in most
of the
Muslim world. Negative views of the U.S. among Muslims, which
had been
largely limited to countries in the Middle East, have spread
to Muslim
populations in Indonesia and Nigeria. Since last summer,
favorable
ratings for the U.S. have fallen from 61% to 15% in Indonesia
and from
71% to 38% among Muslims in Nigeria.... In the wake of the
war, a
growing percentage of Muslims see serious threats to Islam.
Specifically, majorities in seven of eight Muslim populations
surveyed
express worries that the U.S. might become a military threat
to their
countries.... Support for the U.S.-led war on terrorism also
has fallen
in most Muslim publics. Equally significant, solid majorities
in the
Palestinian Authority, Indonesia and Jordan and nearly half of
those in
Morocco and Pakistan say they have at least some confidence in
Osama bin
Laden to 'do the right thing regarding world affairs.'"[5]
In Pakistan, virulently anti-American Islamicists won local
elections in
two out of four of the country's provinces and are now the
third largest
party in the national parliament, their best showing ever. For
the first
time, their support comes not just from the areas bordering
Afghanistan,
but even from urban areas. In Kuwait, elections in July
returned Islamic
traditionalists and supporters of the royal family, while
liberals
suffered a severe defeat. And in Indonesia, the New York
Times' Jane
Perlez reports, "Jemaah Islamiyah was only the most extreme of
a number
of groups that were galvanized by the events of 9/11 and the
American
response in Afghanistan."[6]
What is the impact of this growing anti-Americanism in the
Islamic
world? The London-based World Markets Research Center, which
assesses
terrorism threats for top corporate clients, now ranks
Colombia, Israel,
and Pakistan as the only countries with a greater terror risk
than the
United States. "Another Sept. 11-style terrorist attack in the
United
States is highly likely," they warned in August 2003.
"U.S.-led military
action in Afghanistan and Iraq has exacerbated anti-U.S.
sentiment."[7]
Many al Qaeda members have been killed or captured, but the
expert
consensus is not sanguine. The conservative but often canny
International Institute for Strategic Studies concluded in May
2003 that
al Qaeda was "more insidious and just as dangerous" as it was
before
September 11, 2001. Jason Burke, author of a forthcoming book
on al
Qaeda, has written "That the conflict in Iraq led to a rise in
recruitment for radical groups is now so clear that even U.S.
officials
admit it. This is a huge setback in the 'war on terror.'"[8]
Rohan Gunaratna, a Southeast Asian expert on al Qaeda, reports
that the
organization has had no trouble in recruiting fresh members
among
Muslims whose anti-Western passions have been fueled by the
war in Iraq.
"For every three to five members, they have five to ten more
recruits.
As a result, active terrorist groups will be able to grow and
become
more powerful and influential." Gunaratna told the National
Commission
on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States that outside of
Palestine
less than 20% of the population of any Muslim country actively
supports
terrorism. But, he continued, "This may change with time. This
may
change, especially after 9/11, especially after U.S.
intervention in
Iraq." "America has taken a country that was not a terrorist
threat" --
Iraq -- "and turned it into one," notes Jessica Stern, author
of Terror
in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill.[9]
The Bush administration, which warned so vociferously that
Saddam
Hussein might pass weapons of mass destruction on to al Qaeda
or other
terrorists, has now created a situation where such fantasies
could
become realities. After all, the terrorists now collecting in
Iraq
potentially have access to the looted radioactive material and
nuclear
waste from Iraqi facilities at Tuwaitha and elsewhere, left
unguarded by
U.S. forces in the postwar weeks. These were not weapons
facilities, but
some of the missing materials could be used to make a "dirty
bomb."[10]
Bush always exaggerated the danger that would ensue if
Saddam's Iraq had
acquired weapons of mass destruction. There is no reason to
think that
deterrence wouldn't have applied to his regime as much as it
did to
Stalin's or Mao's. But there is no doubt that the more
countries that
have such weapons, the more dangerous a place the world
becomes. So it
is reasonable to ask what the impact has been of Bush foreign
policy on
the dangers of proliferation. The consequence of the Iraq war
in this
regard is not likely to be positive.
As Joseph Cirincione, author of Deadly Arsenals: Tracking
Weapons of
Mass Destruction and a senior associate at the Carnegie
Endowment, has
written:
"U.S. officials report that North Korea is accelerating its
nuclear
program, not abandoning it. Iran, too, has consciously raised
the public
profile of its ostensibly civilian nuclear program and
insisted that it
would acquire full nuclear fuel-cycle capability, thus
enabling it to
enrich uranium to weapon-grade levels and reprocess plutonium
from
reactor fuel. Like India's army chief of staff after the first
Iraq war,
officials in Pyongyang and Tehran may believe that if one day
you find
yourself opposed by the United States, you'd better have a
nuclear
weapon."[11]
Convincing countries opposed by the United States to submit to
UN
weapons inspections will no doubt become more difficult than
ever, given
that when Iraq grudgingly accepted inspectors, allowed them to
destroy
some of its missiles, and subjected itself to U.S. spying, it
was
attacked anyway.
More generally in terms of our safety two years after
September 11, the
United States has worked hard to create a more dangerous
globe. It has
blocked efforts to improve compliance with the Biological and
Toxin
Weapons Convention and has insisted on a reservation to the
Chemical
Weapons Convention allowing the President the right to refuse
an
inspection of U.S. facilities on national security
grounds.[12] With
regard to nuclear weapons, the Bush administration has refused
to ratify
the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and has stated that it can't
rule out
a resumption of nuclear testing. It has declared that it might
use
nuclear weapons in response to chemical or biological threats
and that
new nuclear weapons are needed to target chemical and
biological weapons
sites in potential enemy countries, as well as deeply buried
and
hardened command posts. It has begun research on modifications
of two
types of existing nuclear bombs and has proposed the repeal of
a
ten-year old ban on low-yield nuclear weapons research and
development.
As the mainstream Arms Control Association has noted,
"Coming from the United States, the world's pre-eminent
military and
political power, such policies undermine nonproliferation
efforts by
suggesting to other states that nuclear weapons are legitimate
and
necessary tools that can achieve military or political
objectives. Such
an approach, if implemented, only increases the odds that
another
country or group will race to acquire -- and perhaps someday
use -- the
destructive power of these terrible weapons."[13]
If the Bush administration's foreign policy destabilizes the
world at
every level, what of its domestic policies?
Under the Patriot Act and prior legislation, the Justice
Department has
certainly arrested or simply incarcerated in one way or
another large
numbers of people, actions that have endangered civil
liberties, while
doing little to address the actual threat of terrorism. It is
conceivable, in fact, that, Attorney General Ashcroft's boasts
aside, it
is even increasing the menace of terrorism at home.
The danger to basic freedoms is so clear that one doesn't have
to go to
the ACLU or other left-liberal sources for substantiation. A
survey of
corporate chief security officers by their professional
magazine found
31 percent believing that the United States is in jeopardy of
becoming a
police state. Leading conservative ideologue and former House
majority
leader Dick Armey warned that the Justice Department was "out
of
control" and "the most dangerous agency of government." Three
U.S.
states, including Republican-controlled Alaska, and 157
cities, towns,
and counties have passed resolutions challenging the Patriot
Act.[14]
In return for this loss of civil liberties, there has been at
best a
negligible gain in security. In the weeks following 9-11,
hundreds of
people were secretly arrested. Virtually all arrested were
cleared of
any connection to terrorism, yet the average clearance took 80
days,
during which time they were confined under harsh, sometimes
abusive
conditions, according to the Justice Department's own
Inspector General.
As law professor David Cole has noted, "Ashcroft greatly
exaggerates
his 'successes.' He claims to have brought 255 criminal
charges in
terror investigations, but the vast majority of those charges
were
pretextual criminal charges (like credit card fraud or lying
to an FBI agent)
used to justify holding people who turned outto have no
connection with terrorism. Similarly, he claims to have
deported 515 people in the investigation but fails to mention
Justice Department policy that authorized deportation only
after the FBI cleared
immigrants of involvement in terrorism."[15]
In some of the few cases where individuals were convicted of
charges
relating to terrorism, there is reason to believe that guilty
pleas were
obtained not by any real involvement in violent acts, but by
the
outrageous threat to treat the defendants as "enemy
combatants," and
hence beyond the protection of basic rights.[16]
Dealing appropriately with terrorism does not require the
added powers
of the Patriot Act, let alone the even more extensive powers
of the
proposed Patriot Act II. But this legislation is of obvious
value to
officials intent on gathering unlimited information on our
citizenry.
(Well, not quite unlimited. Ashcroft wants records on gun
sales in a
federal data base to be destroyed after 24 hours and to bar
their use in
terrorism investigations.[17])
Police-state practices are not merely ineffective and unjust:
they may
also be counterproductive. A crucial requirement for
uncovering any
hidden terrorist cells in the United States is having the
support of
immigrant communities. But this support is undermined by the
Justice
Department's ethnic profiling, high-pressure interviewing,[18]
secret
arrests, and general mistreatment of the country's Muslim
communities.
There are in fact a great many measures that can and should be
undertaken domestically to reduce the threat of terrorism,
many of which
measures are actively opposed by the Bush administration
because they
require regulating private corporations or call for the kinds
of
government spending that might preclude tax cuts for the rich.
Consider chemical plants. According to the Environmental
Protection
Agency, there are 123 U.S. chemical facilities where a release
of
chemicals could threaten at least one million people; another
700 that
could threaten more than 100,000 people; and 3,000 at least
10,000
people. Since October 2001, legislation has been proposed
setting
minimal security standards for these plants, but the industry
and the
White House have insisted on only "voluntary compliance." To
take just a
single example of the problems of depending on corporate
voluntarism, in
July 2003, the New York Daily News found there to be no
security at all
at the Matheson Tri-Gas facility in East Rutherford, NJ, a
release from
which could put up to 7.3 million people in the metropolitan
New York
area at risk.[19]
Or consider nuclear power plants. Perhaps even more vulnerable
than a
plant's reactor core are its waste pools where spent fuel is
stored. A
terrorist-caused rupture in these tanks could start a fire
leading to
the release of a radiation plume that, according to a study by
physicist
Frank N. Von Hippel, "would contaminate eight to 70 times more
land than
the area affected by the 1986 accident in Chernobyl." A study
by
Brookhaven National Laboratory showed that a pool fire in a
metropolitan
area could lead to 140,000 cancer deaths and cause over half a
trillion
dollars in off-site property damage alone.
These waste pools are currently extremely insecure. There is a
fairly
inexpensive technological solution to the problem: for about
$45 million
a year per plant, the pools can be converted to dry storage
areas,
making them much less vulnerable target for terrorists. Yet
the Bush
administration has not pursued this or any other solution that
might
cost the industry any money.[20]
In May Secretary of Transportation Mineta identified maritime
ports as
the most vulnerable part of the nation's transportation
system. "With
the number of containers coming into this country, we really
don't have
a good handle on what's in those containers. And to me that is
one that
we still haven't really been able to put our hands on." Just
recently a
Newsweek reporter was able to drive "straight into the truck
lanes of
the Port of Baltimore -- which U.S. Customs officials say is
one of the
nation's best protected -- without being stopped, [and] then
spent two
hours wandering, unnoticed, among stacked shipping containers.
'You just
happened to pick a day when a lot of our normal people were
out,' port
spokeswoman Darlene Frank explained."[21]
When it comes to planning for responding to a terrorist act --
no less
crucial to our safety -- the record is no better. The Rand
Corporation
conducted a survey for the Centers for Disease Control of
emergency
workers in 40 cities and towns, and found a majority feeling
underprepared and underprotected. And a July report from the
staid
Council on Foreign Relations concluded that "Although in some
respects
the American public is now better prepared to address aspects
of the
terrorist threat than it was two years ago, the United States
remains
dangerously ill prepared to handle a catastrophic attack on
American
soil."[22]
Of course, Americans are hardly the only victims of terrorism
and if the
U.S. government were genuinely concerned with reducing the
global
problem of terrorism it would cease its support for states
that carry
out terror against their own populations -- such as Indonesia,
Colombia,
and Turkey. It would cease as well its own long-time policies
of
terrorism -- whether against Cuba over many decades or
Nicaragua in the
1980s, or the economic sanctions that took such a horrific
toll on Iraqi
civilians, or the dropping of cluster bombs in civilian areas
of
Afghanistan and Iraq.
The hypocrisy of the U.S. "war on terrorism" is quite
shameless --
though this doesn't mean that anti-U.S. terrorism is a myth.
It's a
deadly serious matter that requires a serious response. The
Bush
administration has indeed responded -- with foreign invasions,
high
profile arrests that lead nowhere in particular, the black
hole of
Guantanamo Bay, endless hyped alerts, and the Patriot acts --
that is,
with publicity and fear. But looked at practically, its "war
on
terrorism" is a fraud. It has only increased the dangers of
terrorism
abroad without protecting us from terrorism at home. It has
used the
issue of terrorism and the "war on terrorism" to further
concentrate
power and wealth in the hands of the few. Ashcroft has
declared that
those who criticize the Patriot Act are aiding terrorism.[23]
Bush says
we are either with him or against him in his "war on
terrorism." If we
care about our safety, not to mention justice and liberty,
we'd better
be against him.
Notes
[1] Dana Milbank and Mike Allen, Washington Post (WP),
8/22/03, p. A01.
[2] Laura Blumenfeld, WP, 6/16/03, p. A01.
[3] Thomas Frank, Newsday, 6/25/03, p. A35
[4] P. Mitchell Prothero, "Claim of FARC-Al Qaida link
rescinded,"
United Press International, 8/9/02.
[5] The Pew Global Attitudes Project, Views Of A Changing
World, June
2003, p. 3,
http://people-press.org/reports/pdf/185.pdf.
[6] David Rohde, New York Times (NYT), 10/11/02, p. A13;
10/13/02, p.
I:8; 1/17/03, p. A8; John Kifner, NYT, 7/7/03, p. A6; Perlez,
NYT,
9/3/03, p. A6.
[7] Don Van Natta Jr., NYT, 8/17/03, p. I:9.
[8] Michael Evans, The Times (London), 5/14/03, p. 16; Burke,
Observer,
5/18/03, p. 17.
[9] Robin Gedye, Daily Telegraph, 5/22/03, p. 4; Hearing of
the National
Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States,
"Terrorism, Al
Qaeda, And The Muslim World," 7/9/03, p. 13,
http://www.911commission.gov/; Stern, NYT, 8/20/03, p.
A21.
[10] Bob Drogin, Los Angeles Times, 6/6/03, p. I:10.
[11] Foreign Policy, July-Aug. 2003, p. 68.
[12] Jonathan Tucker, "The Fifth Review Conference of the
Biological and
Toxin Weapons Convention," Feb. 2002,
http://www.nti.org/e--research/e3--7b.html; Amy E.
Smithson, "U.S.
Implementation of the CWC," in Jonathan B. Tucker, The
Chemical Weapons
Convention: Implementation Challenges and Solutions, Monterey
Institute,
April 2001, pp. 23-29,
http://cns.miis.edu/pubs/reports/tuckcwc.htm.
[13] Christine Kucia, "For Second Year Running, U.S. a No-Show
at CTBT
Conference," Arms Control Today, Sept. 2003; Arms Control
Association,
"New Nuclear Policies, New Weapons, New Dangers," April 2003,
http://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/newnuclearweaponsissuebrief.asp?pr
int.
[14] CSO press release, "Chief Security Officers Reveal
Concerns About
U.S. Government Security Measures," 5/12/03,
http://www.csoonline.com/releases/-05120369--release.html;
Armey quoted
in Nat Hentoff, Village Voice, 4/25/03,
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0318/hentoff.php;
http://www.bordc.org/OtherLocalEfforts.htm.
[15] U.S. Dept. of Justice, Office of the Inspector General,
The
September 11 Detainees: A Review of the Treatment of Aliens
Held on
Immigration Charges in Connection with the Investigation of
the
September 11 Attacks, April 2003, released June 2003; Cole,
The Nation,
9/22/03, p. 26.
[16] See Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, "LCHR Rebuts
Attorney
General's Speech on USA PATRIOT ACT," 8/25/03,
http://www.lchr.org/media/2003--alerts/0825.htm.
[17] Eric Lichtblau with Adam Liptak, NYT, 3/15/03, p. A1.
[18] See GAO, Justice Department's Project to Interview Aliens
after
September 11, 2001, GAO-03-459, April 2003, p. 16.
[19] GAO, Voluntary Initiatives Are Under Way at Chemical
Facilities but
the Extent of Security Preparedness Is Unknown, GAO-03-439,
March 2003,
p. 4; "Fact Sheet on Senator Corzine's Chemical Security
Legislation,"
http://corzine.senate.gov/priorities/chem--sec.html,
visited 9/9/03.
[20] Stanley A. Goff, Predeployed Radiological Weapon:
Reducing the
Targetability of Shearon Harris Nuclear Plant and the Risk to
the North
Carolina Public, Durham, NC: North Carolina Waste Awareness
and
Reduction Network, 5/1/03,
http://www.ncwarn.org.
[21] Hearing of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks
Upon the
United States, Civil Aviation Security, 5/23/03, p. 10;
Michael Hirsh,
Newsweek, 9/15/03, p. 46.
[22] Philip Shenon, NYT, 8/21/03, p. A14; "Emergency
Responders:
Drastically Underfunded, Dangerously Unprepared," Report of an
Independent Task Force, Sponsored by the Council on Foreign
Relations,
Warren B. Rudman, Chair, July 2003,
http://www.cfr.org/pdf/Responders--TF.pdf.
[23] Neil A. Lewis, NYT, 12/7/01, p. A1.
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