Tom Engelhardt - The United States of Fear

Ironically, non-super-toxic versions of E. coli now cause almost as much damage yearly in the United States as the super-toxic strain did in Europe. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have estimated that earlier in the decade about sixty Americans died annually from E. coli infections and ensuing complications, and another 2,000 were hospitalized. More recently, the figure for E. coli deaths has dropped to about twenty a year. For food-borne disease more generally, the CDC estimates that 48 million (or one of every six) Americans get sick yearly, 128,000 are hospitalized, and about 3,000 die.

By comparison, in the near decade since 9/11, while hundreds of Americans died from E. coli , and at least 30,000 from food-borne illnesses generally, only a handful of Americans, perhaps fewer than twenty-five, have died from anything that might be considered a terror attack in this country, even if you include the assassination attempt against Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and the Piper Cherokee PA-28 that a disgruntled software engineer flew into an Austin, Texas, building containing an IRS office, killing himself and an IRS manager. (“Well, Mr. Big Brother IRS man, let’s try something different; take my pound of flesh and sleep well,” he wrote in his final note.)

In other words, in terms of damage since 9/11, terror attacks have ranked above shark attacks but below just about anything else that could possibly be dangerous to Americans, including car crashes, which have racked up between 33,800 and 43,500 deaths a year since 2001.

While E. coli deaths have dropped in recent years, no one expects them to get to zero, nor have steps been taken that might bring us closer to the 100 percent safety mark. As Gardiner Harris of the New York Times wrote, “A law passed by Congress last year gave the Food and Drug Administration new powers to mandate that companies undertake preventive measures to reduce the likelihood of such outbreaks, and the law called for increased inspections to ensure compliance. The agency requested additional financing to implement the new law, including hiring more inspectors next year. Republicans in the House have instead proposed cutting the agency’s budget.”

Here, then, is one of the strange phenomena of our post-9/11 American age: in only one area of life are Americans officially considered 100 percent scared, and so 100 percent in need of protection: terrorism.

No one has been urging that a Global War on Food-Borne Illnesses be launched. In fact, at this moment, six strains of E. coli that do cause illness in this country remain unregulated. Department of Agriculture proposals to deal with them are “stalled” in the Office of Management and Budget. Meanwhile, the super-toxic E. coli strain that appeared in Europe remains officially unregulated here. On the other hand, send any doofus America-bound on a plane with any kind of idiotic device, and the politicians, the media, and the public promptly act as if the sky were falling or civilization itself were at risk.

This might be of only moderate interest if it weren’t for the U.S. national security state. Having lost its Communist superenemy in 1991, it now lives, breathes, and grows on its self-proclaimed responsibility to protect Americans 100 percent of the time, 100 percent of the way, from any imaginable terror threat. The National Security Complex has, in fact, grown fat by relentlessly pursuing the promise of making the country totally secure from terrorism, even as life grows ever less secure for so many Americans when it comes to jobs, homes, finances, and other crucial matters. It is on this pledge of protection that the complex has managed to extort the tidal flow of funds that have allowed it to bloat to monumental proportions and encase itself in a cocoon of self-protective secrecy and immunity.

In the days after 9/11, Vice President Cheney proposed a new formula for American war policy. Its essence was this: even a 1 percent chance of an attack on the United States, especially involving weapons of mass destruction, must be dealt with as if it were a certainty. Journalist Ron Suskind dubbed it “the one percent doctrine.” It may have been the rashest formula for “preventive” or “aggressive” war offered in the modern era and, along with the drumbeat of bogus information that Cheney and crew dished out about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, it was the basis for the Bush administration’s disastrous attempt to occupy that country and build a Pax Americana in the Greater Middle East.

There was, it turns out, a “homeland” equivalent, never quite formulated or given a name, but remarkably successful at feeding an increasingly all-encompassing domestic war state. Call it the 100 percent doctrine (for total safety from terrorism). While the 1 percent version never quite caught on, the 100 percent doctrine has already become part of the American credo. Thanks to it, the National Security Complex is a self-reinforcing, self-perpetuating mechanism. Any potential act of terrorism simply feeds the system, creating new opportunities to add yet more layers to one bureaucracy or another, or to promote new programs of surveillance and control—and the technology that goes with them. Every minor deviation from terror safety, even involving plots that failed dismally or never had the slightest chance of success, is but an excuse for further funding.

Meanwhile, the complex continually “mans up” (or drones up) and, from Pakistan to Yemen, launches attacks officially meant to put terrorists out of action but that create more of them in the process. In other words, consider it a terrorist-creating machine that needs—what else?—repeated evidence of or signs of terrorism to survive and thrive.

Though few here seem to notice, none of this bears much relationship to actual American security. But if the National Security Complex doesn’t make you secure, its 100 percent doctrine is by no means a failure. On the basis of ensuring your security from terror, it has managed to make itself secure from bad times, the dangers of downsizing, most forms of accountability, or prosecution for acts that once would have been considered crimes.

In fact, terrorism is anything but the greatest of our problems or threats, which means that acquiescing to a state dedicated to expansion on the principle of keeping you safe from terror is like making a bargain with the devil.

So suck it up. Nothing is secure. No one is safe. Now eat your sprouts.

George W. who? I mean, the guy is so over. When he turned the big six-five, it was barely a footnote in the news. And Dick Cheney, tick-tick-tick. Condoleezza Rice? She’s already onto her next memoir, and yet it’s as if she’s been wiped from history. As for Donald Rumsfeld, he published his memoir in February 2011 and it hit the bestseller lists, but months later, where is he?

And can anyone be surprised? They were wrong about Afghanistan. They were wrong about Iraq. They were wrong about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. They were wrong about what the U.S. military was capable of doing. The country imploded economically while they were at the helm. Geopolitically speaking, they headed the car of state for the nearest cliff. In fact, when it comes to pure wrongness, what weren’t they wrong about?

Americans do seem to have turned the page on Bush and his cronies. (President Obama called it looking forward, not backward.) Still, glance over your shoulder and, if you’re being honest, you’ll have to admit that one thing didn’t happen: they didn’t turn the page on us.

They may have disappeared from our lives, but the post-9/11 world they had such a mad hand in creating hasn’t. It’s not just the Department of Homeland Security or that un-American word homeland , both of which are undoubtedly embedded in our lives forever. Or the Patriot Act, now as American as apple pie. Or Guantánamo which, despite a presidential promise, may never close. Or all the wild, overblown fears of terrorism and the new security world that goes with them, neither of which shows the slightest sign of abating. Or the National Security Agency’s surveillance of and spying on Americans which, as far as we can tell, is ongoing. No, it’s scores of Bush policies and positions that will clearly be with us until hell freezes over. Among them all, consider the Obama administration’s updated version of that signature Bush invention, the Global War on Terror.