By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
08 October 14
t happened so fast that, at first, I didn’t even take it in.
Two Saturdays ago, a friend and I were heading into the Phillips Museum in Washington, D.C., to catch a show of
neo-Impressionist art
when we ran into someone he knew, heading out. I was introduced and
the usual chitchat ensued. At some point, she asked me, “Do you live
here?”
“No,” I replied, “I’m from New York.”
She smiled, responded that it, too, was a fine place
to live, then hesitated just a beat before adding in a quiet, friendly
voice: “Given ISIS, maybe neither city is such a great place to be right
now.” Goodbyes were promptly said and we entered the museum.
All of this passed so quickly that I didn’t begin
rolling her comment around in my head until we were looking at the
sublime pointillist paintings of Georges Seurat and his associates. Only
then did I think: ISIS, a danger in New York? ISIS, a danger in
Washington? And I had the urge to bolt down the stairs, catch up to
her, and say: whatever you do, don’t step off the curb. That’s where
danger lies in American life. ISIS, not so much.
The Terrorists Have Our Number
I have no idea what provoked her comment. Maybe she was thinking about a story that had
broken
just two days earlier, topping the primetime TV news and hitting the
front pages of newspapers. On a visit to the Big Apple, the new Iraqi
prime minister, Haider al-Abadi,
claimed
that his intelligence services had uncovered a plot by militants of the
Islamic State (IS, aka ISIS or ISIL), the extremists of the new
caliphate that had gobbled up part of his country, against the subway
systems of Paris, New York, and possibly other U.S. cities.
I had watched Brian Williams report that
story
on NBC in the usual breathless fashion, along with denials from
American intelligence that there was any evidence of such a plot. I had
noted as well that police patrols on my hometown’s subways were
nonetheless quickly reinforced, with extra contingents of
bomb-sniffing dogs
and surveillance teams. Within a day, the leading officials of my
state, Governor Andrew Cuomo and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio,
were denying that they had any information on such a plot, but also
taking very public rides on the city’s subways to “reassure” us all.
The threat didn’t exist, but was also well in hand! I have to admit
that, to me, it all seemed almost comic.
In the meantime, the background noise of the last 13
years played on. Inside the American Terrordome, the chorus of
hysteria-purveyors, Republican and Democrat alike, nattered on, as had
been true for weeks, about the "direct," not to say apocalyptic, threat
the Islamic State and its caliph posed to the American way of life.
These included
Senator Lindsey Graham (“This president needs to rise to the occasion before we all get killed here at home"); Majority Leader John Boehner, who
insisted
that we should consider putting American boots on Iraqi and perhaps
even Syrian ground soon, since “they intend to kill us”; Senator Dianne
Feinstein, who
swore that “the threat ISIS poses cannot be overstated”; Senator Bill Nelson, who
commented
that “it ought to be pretty clear when they... say they’re going to fly
the black flag of ISIS over the White House that ISIS is a clear and
present danger.” And a chorus of officials, named and anonymous, warning
that the terror danger to the country was “
imminent,” while the usual set of pundits chirped away about the potential destruction of our way of life.
The media, of course, continued to report it all with a kind of eyeball-gluing glee. The result by the time I met that woman:
71% of Americans believed ISIS had nothing short of sleeper cells in the U.S. (shades of “Homeland”!) and at least the
same percentage,
if not more (depending on which poll you read), were ready to back a
full-scale bombing campaign, promptly launched by the Obama
administration, against the group.
If, however, you took a step out of the overwrought
American universe of terror threats for 30 seconds, it couldn’t have
been clearer that everyone in the grim netherworld of the Middle East
now seemed to have our number. The beheading videos of the Islamic
State had clearly been meant to cause hysteria
on the cheap in this country -- and they worked. Those first two videos somehow committed us to a war now
predicted to last for years, and a never-ending bombing campaign that we know perfectly well will
establish
the global credentials of the Islamic State and its mad caliph in
jihadist circles. (In fact, the evidence is already in. From
North Africa to
Afghanistan to
Pakistan, the group is suddenly a brand name, its black flag something to hoist, and its style of beheading something to be imitated.)
Now, the Shia opponent of those jihadists had taken
the hint and, not surprisingly, the very same path. The Iraqi prime
minister, whose intelligence services had only recently been blindsided
when IS militants captured huge swaths of his country, claimed to have
evidence that was guaranteed to set loose the professional
terror-mongers and hysterics in this country and so, assumedly, increase
much-needed support for his government.
Or perhaps that woman I met had instead been struck by
the news, only days earlier, that in launching a bombing campaign
against the militants of the Islamic state in Syria, the Obama
administration had also hit another outfit. It was called -- so we were
told -- the Khorasan Group and, unlike the IS, it had the United States
of America, the “homeland,” right in its bombsites. As became clear
after the initial wave of hysteria swiftly passed, no one in our world
or theirs had previously heard of such a group, which may have been a
set of individuals in a larger al-Qaeda-linked Syrian rebel outfit
called the al-Nusra Front who had no such name for themselves.
Whatever the case, it seemed that the Obama
administration and connected intelligence outfits had our number, too.
Although Khorasan was reputedly plotting against airplanes, not subways,
transportation systems were evidently our jugular when it came to such
outfits. This group, we were told in leaks by unnamed American
intelligence officials, was made up of a “
cadre” or “
collection”
of hardened, “senior” al-Qaeda types from Afghanistan, who had settled
in Syria not to overthrow Bashir al-Assad or create a caliphate, but to
prepare the way for devastating attacks on the American “homeland” and
possibly Western Europe as well. It was, as Director of National
Intelligence James Clapper put it, “potentially yet another threat to
the homeland,” and it was “imminent.” As U.S. Central Command insisted
in announcing the bombing strikes against the group, it involved “
imminent attack planning.”
The Khorasan Group was, said Lieutenant General William Mayville,
director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “in the final
stages of plans to execute major attacks against Western targets and
potentially the U.S. homeland."
Had we not hit them hard, they would be -- so American
intelligence officials assured us -- on the verge (or at least the
verge of the verge) of developing bombs so advanced that, using
toothpaste tubes, rigged electronic devices, or possibly clothes soaked
in explosives, their agents would be able to pass through airport
security undetected and knock plane after plane out of the sky.
Civilization was in peril, which meant that blazing headlines about the
plot and the group mixed with shots of actual bombs (ours) exploding in
Syria, and a sense of crisis that was, as ever, taken up with gusto by
the media.
As Glenn Greenwald and Murtaza Hussain pointed out in a
devastating report at the
Intercept,
the whole Khorasan story began to disassemble within a day or so of the
initial announcement and the bombing strikes in Syria. It took next to
no time at all for that “imminent threat” to
morph into “
aspirational”
planning; for reporters to check with their Syrian sources and find
that no one knew a thing about the so-called Khorasan Group; for the
taking down of those airliners to gain an ever more distant (and
possibly even fictional) look. As ever, however, pointing out the real
dangers in our world was left largely to
non-mainstream sources, while the threat to our way of life, to Washington and New York, lingered in the air.
Terror-Phobia and a Demobilized Citizenry
This sort of soundtrack has been the background noise
in our lives for the last 13 years. And like familiar music (or Muzak),
it evokes a response that’s almost beyond our control. The terror
about terror, sometimes quite professionally managed (as in the case of
the Khorasan Group), has flooded through our world year after year after
year. ISIS is just a recent example of the way the interests of a
group of extremists in making themselves larger than life and the
interests of groups in this country in building up or maintaining their
institutional power have meshed. Terror as the preeminent danger to our
American world now courses through the societal bloodstream, helped
along by regular infusions of fear from the usual panic-meisters.
On that set of emotions, an unparalleled
global security state has been built (and funded), as well as a military that, in terms of its destructive power, leaves the
rest of the world
in the dust. In the process, and in the name of protecting Americans
from the supposedly near-apocalyptic dangers posed by the original
al-Qaeda and its various wannabe successors, a new version of America
has come into being -- one increasingly willing to
bulldoze the most basic liberties, invested in the spread of
blanket secrecy over government actions, committed to wholesale surveillance, and dedicated to a full-scale loss of privacy.
You can repeat until you're blue in the face that the dangers of scattered terror outfits are
vanishingly small in the “homeland,” when
compared to
almost any other danger in American life. It won’t matter, not once
the terror-mongers go to work. So, in a sense, that woman was right.
For all intents and purposes, without ever leaving Iraq and Syria, ISIS
is in Washington -- and New York, and Topeka, and El Paso (or, as local fear-mongers in Texas
suggest,
ready to cross the Rio Grande at any moment), and Salt Lake City, and
Sacramento. ISIS has, by now, wormed its way inside our heads. So
perhaps she was right as well to suggest that Washington and New York
(not to speak of wherever you happen to live) are not great places to be
right now.
Let’s be honest. Post-9/11, when it comes to our own
safety (and so where our tax dollars go), we’ve become as mad as loons.
Worse yet, the panic, fear, and hysteria over the dangers of terrorism
may be the only thing left that ties us as a citizenry to a world in
which so many acts of a destructive nature are being carried out in our
name.
The history of the demobilization of the American
people as a true force in their own country’s actions abroad could be
said to have begun in 1973, when a draft army was officially put into
the history books. In the years before that, in Vietnam and at home,
the evidence of how such an army could
vote with its feet
and through its activism had been too much for the top brass, and so
the citizen army, that creation of the French Revolution, was
ended with a stroke of the presidential pen. The next time around, the ranks were to be filled with “volunteers,” thanks in part to
millions of dollars sunk into Mad Men-style advertising.
In the meantime, those in charge wanted to make sure
that the citizenry was thoroughly demobilized and sent home. In the
wake of 9/11, this desire was expressed particularly vividly when
President George W. Bush
urged
Americans to show their patriotism (and restore the fortunes of the
airlines) by visiting Disney World, vacationing, and going about their
business, while his administration took care of al-Qaeda (and of course,
invaded Afghanistan and Iraq).
In the ensuing years,
propaganda
for and an insistence that we “support,” “thank,” and adulate our
“warriors” (in ways that would have been inconceivable with a citizen’s
army) became the order of the day. At the same time, that force morphed
into an ever more “professional,” “expeditionary” and “foreign” (as in
Foreign Legion-style)
outfit. When it came to the U.S. military, adulation was the only
relationship that all but a tiny percentage of Americans were to be
allowed. For those in the ever-expanding U.S.
military-industrial-homeland-security-intelligence-corporate complex,
terror was the gift that
just kept giving,
the excuse for any institution-building action and career enhancement,
no matter how it might contravene previous American traditions.
In this context, perhaps we should think of the
puffing up of an ugly but limited reality into an all-encompassing,
eternally “imminent” threat to our way of life as the final chapter in
the demobilization of the American people. Terror-phobia, after all,
leaves you feeling helpless and in need of protection. The only
reasonable response to it is support for whatever actions your
government takes to keep you "safe."
Amid the waves of fear and continual headlines about
terror plots, we, the people, have now largely been relegated to the
role of so many frightened spectators when it comes to our government
and its actions. Welcome to the Terrordome.
mid
concerns that the spreading fear of Ebola has become a greater threat
than the virus itself, a new poll shows that a majority of Americans
favor a quarantine of the CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer.
esterday
morning, on Sunday October 12, the Sunday internet edition of The New
York Times – a newspaper which under certain circumstances follows the
political line most convenient to its country’s interests – published an
article entitled “Obama should end the embargo on Cuba;” with opinions
as to how, in its view, the country should proceed.
ast December, Jon Cowan and Jim Kessler of the 
