Page 1 of
2 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA Paying the bin Laden
tax By Tom Engelhardt
Consider Inauguration Day, more than two
weeks gone and already part of our distant past.
In its wake, President Barack Obama was hailed (or
reviled) for his "liberal" second inaugural
address. On that day, everything from his
invocation of women's rights ("Seneca Falls"), the
civil rights movement ("Selma"), and the gay
rights movement ("Stonewall") to his wife's new
bangs and Beyonce's lip-syncing was fodder for the
media extravaganza. The president was even
praised (or reviled) for what he took pains not to
bring up: the budget deficit. Was anything, in
fact, not grist for the media mill, the hordes of
talking heads, and the chattering classes?
One subject, at least, got remarkably
little attention during the inaugural blitz and,
when mentioned, certainly struck few as odd or
worth dwelling on. Yet nothing better caught our changing
American world. Washington,
after all, was in a lockdown mode unmatched by any
inauguration from another era - not even Lincoln's
second inaugural in the midst of the Civil War, or
Franklin Roosevelt's during World War II, or John
F Kennedy's at the height of the Cold War.
Here's how NBC Nightly News described some
of the security arrangements as the day
approached:
[T]he airspace above Washington...
[will be] a virtual no-fly zone for 30 miles in
all directions from the US capital. Six miles of
the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers will be shut
down, with 150 blocks of downtown Washington
closed to traffic, partly out of concern for car
or truck bombs... with counter-snipers on top of
buildings around the capital and along the
parade route... [and] detectors monitoring the
air for toxins... At the ready near the capital,
thousands of doses of antidotes in case of a
chemical or biological attack… All this security
will cost about $120 million for hundreds of
federal agents, thousands of local police, and
national guardsmen from 25
states.
Consider just the money. It's
common knowledge that, until the recent deal over
the renewal of the George W Bush tax cuts for all
but the richest of Americans, taxes had not been
raised since the read-my-lips-no-new-taxes era of
his father. That's typical of the way we haven't
yet assimilated the new world we find ourselves
in. After all, shouldn't that $120 million in
taxpayer money spent on "safety" and "security"
for a single event in Washington be considered
part of an ongoing Osama bin Laden tax?
Maybe it's time to face the facts: this
isn't your grandfather's America. Once,
prospective Americans landed in a New World. This
time around, a new world's landed on us.
Making fantasy into reality Bin
Laden, of course, is long dead, but his was the
9/11 spark that, in the hands of George W Bush and
his top officials, helped turn this country into a
lockdown state and first set significant portions
of the Greater Middle East aflame. In that sense,
bin Laden has been thriving in Washington ever
since, and no commando raid in Pakistan or
elsewhere has a chance of doing him in.
Since the al-Qaeda leader was aware of the
relative powerlessness of his organization and its
hundreds or, in its heyday, perhaps thousands of
active followers, his urge was to defeat the US by
provoking its leaders into treasury-draining wars
in the Greater Middle East. In his world, it was
thought that such a set of involvements - and the
"homeland" security down payments that went with
them - could bleed the richest, most powerful
nation on the planet dry. In this, he and his
associates, imitators, and wannabes were
reasonably canny. The bin Laden tax, including
that $120 million for Inauguration Day, has proved
heavy indeed.
In the meantime, he - and
9/11 as it entered the American psyche - helped
facilitate the locking down of this society in
ways that should unnerve us all. The resulting
United States of Fear has since engaged in two
disastrous more-than-trillion dollar wars and a
"Global War on Terror" that shows no sign of
ending in our lifetime. (See Yemen, Pakistan, and
Mali.) It has also funded the supersized growth of
a labyrinthine intelligence bureaucracy; that
post-9/11 creation, the Department of Homeland
Security, and, of course, the Pentagon and the US
military, including the special operations forces,
an ever-expanding secret military elite cocooned
within it.
Given the enemy at hand - not a
giant empire, but scattered jihadis and minority
insurgencies in distant lands - all of these
institutions, which make up the post-9/11 National
Security Complex, expanded in ways that would have
boggled the minds of previous generations (as
would that most un-American of all words,
"homeland"). All of this, in turn, happened in a
poisonously paranoid atmosphere in Washington, and
much of the rest of the country.
Even if
you ignore that Inauguration Day no-boating zone
or the 30-mile no-fly zone (the sort of thing the
US once imposed on enemy lands and now imposes on
itself), consider those "thousands of doses of
antidotes in case of a chemical or biological
attack". Just about nothing on this planet is
utterly inconceivable, but it's worth noting that,
as far as we know, the national security
bureaucracy made no preparations for an unexpected
tornado on Inauguration Day. Given recent extreme
weather events, including tornado warnings for
Washington, that would at least have been a
plausible scenario to consider.
Certainly,
a biological or chemical attack is a similarly
imaginable possibility. After all, it actually
happened in Tokyo in 1995, when followers of the
Aum Shinrikyo cult set off Sarin gas in that
city's subway system, killing 11. But the
likelihood of any conceivable set of Islamic
terrorists attacking those inaugural crowds with
either chemical or biological weapons was, to say
the least, microscopic. As something to protect
Washington visitors against, it ranked at least on
a par with the (non-existent) post-9/11 al-Qaeda
sleeper cells and sleeper-assassins so crucial to
the plot of the TV show Homeland.
And yet, in these years, what might have
remained essentially a nightmarish fantasy has
become an impending reality around which the
national security folks organize their lives - and
ours. Ever since the now largely forgotten anthrax
mail attacks that killed five soon after 9/11 -
the anthrax in those envelopes may have come
directly from a US bioweapons laboratory - all
sorts of fantastic scenarios involving biochemical
attacks have become part and parcel of the
American lockdown state.
In the Bush era,
for instance, among the apocalyptic dream scenes
the president and his top officials used to panic
congress into approving a much-desired invasion of
Iraq were the possibility of future mushroom
clouds over American cities and this claim: that
Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein had drones (he
didn't) and the means to get them to the East
Coast of the US (he didn't), and the ability to
use them to launch attacks in which chemical and
biological weaponry would be sprayed over US
cities (he didn't). This was a presidentially
promoted fantasy of the first order, but no
matter. Some senators actually voted to go to war
at least partially on the basis of it.
As
is often true of ruling groups, Bush and his
cronies weren't just manipulating us with the fear
of nightmarish future attacks, but themselves as
well. Thanks to New Yorker journalist Jane Mayer's
fine book The Dark Side, for instance, we
know that Vice President Dick Cheney was always
driven around Washington with "a duffel bag
stocked with a gas mask and a biochemical survival
suit" in the backseat of his car.
The
post-9/11 National Security Complex has been
convulsed by such fears. After all, it has funded
itself by promising Americans one thing: total
safety from one of the lesser dangers of our
American world - "terrorism". The fear of
terrorism (essentially that bin Laden tax again)
has been a financial winner for the Complex, but
it carries its own built-in terrors. Even with the
$75 billion or more a year that we pump into the
"US Intelligence Community", the possibility that
it might not discover some bizarre plot, and that,
as a result, several airliners might then go down,
or a crowd in Washington be decimated, or you name
it, undoubtedly leaves many in the Complex in an
ongoing state of terror. After all, their jobs and
livelihoods are at stake.
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
