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2 DISPATCHES FROM
AMERICA Real money for an imaginary
war By Stephan Salisbury
At the height of the Occupy Wall Street
evictions, it seemed as though some diminutive
version of "shock and awe" had stumbled in from
Baghdad, Iraq, to Oakland, California. US police
forces had been "militarized", many commentators
worried, as though the firepower and callous
tactics on display were anomalies, surprises
bursting upon us from nowhere.
There
should have been no surprise. Those flash grenades
exploding in Oakland and the sound of cannons on
New York's streets simply opened small windows on
to a national policing landscape long in the
process of militarization - a bleak domestic no
man's land marked by tanks and drones, robot bomb
detectors, grenade launchers, Tasers and, most of
all, interlinked
video surveillance
cameras and information databases growing quietly
on unobtrusive server farms everywhere.
The ubiquitous fantasy of "homeland
security", pushed hard by the federal government
in the wake of September 11, 2001, has been widely
embraced by the public. It has also excited
intense weapons- and techno-envy among police
departments and municipalities vying for the
latest in armor and spy equipment.
In such
a world, deadly gadgetry is just a grant request
away, so why shouldn't the 14,000 at-risk souls in
Scottsbluff, Nebraska, have a
closed-circuit-digital-camera-and-monitor system
(cost: US$180,000, courtesy of the Homeland
Security Department) identical to the one up and
running in New York's Times Square?
So
much money has gone into armoring and arming local
law-enforcement since September 2001 that the
federal government could have rebuilt post-Katrina
New Orleans five times over and had enough money
left in the kitty to provide job training and
housing for every one of the record 41,000-plus
homeless people in New York City. It could have
added in the growing population of 15,000 homeless
in Philadelphia, my home town, and still have had
money to spare. Add disintegrating Detroit and, in
New Jersey, Newark and Camden to the list. Throw
in some crumbling bridges and roads, too.
But why drone on? We all know that
addressing acute social and economic issues here
in the homeland was the road not taken. Since the
September 11 attacks, the Department of Homeland
Security alone has doled out somewhere between $30
billion and $40 billion in direct grants to state
and local law enforcement, as well as other first
responders.
At the same time, defense
contractors have proved endlessly inventive in
adapting sales pitches originally honed for the
military on the battlefields of Iraq and
Afghanistan to the desires of police on the
streets of San Francisco and Lower Manhattan.
Oakland may not be Basra but (as former defense
secretary Donald Rumsfeld liked to say) there are
always the unknown unknowns: Best be prepared.
All told, the federal government has
appropriated about $635 billion, accounting for
inflation, for homeland-security-related
activities and equipment since the September 11
attacks. To conclude, though, that "the police"
have become increasingly militarized casts too
narrow a net. The truth is that virtually the
entire apparatus of government has been mobilized
and militarized right down to the university
campuses.
Perhaps the pepper spray used on
Occupy demonstrators last November at the
University of California-Davis wasn't directly
paid for by the federal government. But those who
used it work closely with Homeland Security and
the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) "in
developing prevention strategies that threaten
campus life, property and environments", as UC
Davis's Comprehensive Emergency and Continuity
Management Plan puts it.
Government
budgets at every level now include allocations
aimed at fighting an ephemeral "war on terror" in
the United States. A vast surveillance and
military buildup has taken place nationwide to
conduct a pseudo-war against what can be imagined,
not what we actually face. The costs of this
effort, started by the administration of George W
Bush and promoted faithfully by the administration
of President Barack Obama, have been, and continue
to be, virtually incalculable. In the process,
public service and the public imagination have
been weaponized.
Farewell to peaceful
private life We're not just talking about
money eagerly squandered. That may prove the least
of it. More important, the fundamental values of
US democracy - particularly the right to lead an
autonomous private life - have been compromised
with grim efficiency. The weaponry and tactics now
routinely employed by police are visible evidence
of this.
Yes, it's true that Montgomery
county, Texas, has purchased a weapons-capable
drone. (They say they'll only arm it with Tasers,
if necessary.) Yes, it's true that the Tampa,
Florida, police have beefed the force up with an
8-ton armored personnel carrier, augmenting two
older tanks the department already owns. Yes, the
Fargo, North Dakota, police are ready with
bomb-detection robots, and Chicago boasts a
network of at least 15,000 interlinked
surveillance cameras.
New York City's
34,000-member police force is now the ground zero
of a growing outcry over rampant secret spying on
Muslim students and communities up and down the US
east coast. It has been a big beneficiary of
federal security largesse. Between 2003 and 2010,
the city received more than $1.1 billion through
Homeland Security's Urban Areas Security
Initiative grant program. And that's only one of
the grant programs funneling such money to New
York.
The Obama White House itself has
directly funded part of the New York Police
Department's anti-Muslim surveillance program. Top
officials of New York's finest have, however,
repeatedly refused to disclose just how much
anti-terrorism money it has been spending, citing,
of course, security.
Can New York City
ever be "secure"? Mayor Michael Bloomberg boasted
recently with obvious satisfaction: "I have my own
army in the NYPD, which is the seventh-largest
army in the world." That would be the Vietnamese
army actually, but accuracy isn't the point. The
smugness of the boast is. And meanwhile the money
keeps pouring in and the "security" activities
only multiply.
Why, for instance, are New
York cops traveling to Yale University in New
Haven, Connecticut, and Newark, New Jersey, to spy
on ordinary Muslim citizens, who have nothing to
do with New York and are not suspected of doing
anything? For what conceivable purpose does Tampa
want an 8-ton armored vehicle? Why do Texas
sheriffs north of Houston believe one drone - or a
dozen, for that matter - will make Montgomery
county a better place? What manner of thinking
conjures up a future that requires such hardware?
We have entered a dark world that demands an
inescapable battery of closed-circuit, networked
video cameras trained on ordinary citizens
strolling Michigan Avenue.
This is not
simply a police issue. Law-enforcement agencies
may acquire the equipment and deploy it, but city
legislators and executives must approve the
expenditures and the uses. State legislators and
bureaucrats refine the local grant requests.
Federal officials, with endless input from
national security and defense vendors and
lobbyists, appropriate the funds.
Doubters
are simply swept aside (while legions of security
and terrorism pundits spin dread-inducing
fantasies), and ultimately, the American people
accept and live with the results. We get what we
pay for - Mayor Bloomberg's "army", replicated
coast to coast. Budgets tell the
story Militarized thinking is made manifest
through budgets, which daily reshape political and
bureaucratic life in large and small ways. Not
long after the September 11 attacks, then-attorney
general John Ashcroft, appearing before the Senate
Judiciary Committee, used this formula to define
the new American environment and so the thinking
that went with it: "Terrorist operatives
infiltrate our communities - plotting, planning,
and waiting to kill again." To counter that, the
government had urgently embarked on "a wartime
reorganization", he said, and was "forging new
relationships of cooperation with state and local
law enforcement". While such visionary
Ashcroftian rhetoric has cooled in recent years,
the relationships and funding he touted a decade
ago have been institutionalized throughout
government - federal, state and local - as well as
civil society. The creation of the Department of
Homeland Security, with a total 2012 budget of
about $57 billion, is the most obvious example of
this.
That budget only hints at what's
being doled out for homeland security at the
federal level. Such monies flow not just from
Homeland Security, but from the Justice
Department, the Environmental Protection Agency,
the Commerce Department, the Department of
Agriculture, and the Department of Defense.
In 2010, the Office of Management and
Budget reckoned that 31 separate federal agencies
were involved in homeland security-related funding
that year to the tune of more than $65 billion.
The Census Bureau, which has itself been
compromised by "war on terror" activities -
mapping Middle Eastern and Muslim communities for
counterterrorism officials - estimated that
federal homeland-security funding topped $70
billion in 2010. But government officials
acknowledge that much funding is not included in
that compilation. (Grants made through the $5.6
billion Project BioShield, to offer but one
example, an exotic vaccination and medical program
launched in 2004, are absent from the
total.)
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