Paranoia

It is difficult to live in a nation of paranoids. This paranoia was evident when Bush went awol (absent without leave from military duty) on 9/11, which I always considered an act of supreme cowardice. It was evident when Cheney spent most of his time in office in an ‘undisclosed location’.

We have the largest, most heroic, and best equipped military in the world. That is what Republicans have always told us and it is largely true. We certainly are spending more than anybody else on defense. In combating terrorism we have the support of a large number of allies and friends.

In contrast, terrorist groups have perhaps a few thousand members, prepared and actively working to attack the United States. They have no heavy weapons, no air force, no drones. They have no intelligence service or electronic surveillance facilities; for communications they have to rely on cell phones and Skype. They have no money and no state support anywhere. They are amateurs. So where is the sense of proportion? What are we afraid of? What is Cheney afraid of?

Americans have a very disproportionate sense of risk. How many people die in terrorist attacks worldwide on the average per year? At most a few hundred. But 1.2 million die every year in traffic accidents. Yet nobody is afraid to step into a car while many are afraid of terrorists.

Nobody seems to appreciate how lucky the terrorists were on 9/11. They had no right to expect that they could hijack four planes simultaneously. Their pilots had never flown before, they had only trained on simulators in US flight schools. It was a miracle that they could even find their targets without navigation aids. Studies have shown that one of the planes attacking the World Trade Center was flying so fast and so tight a turn that it should have disintegrated under the stress, but didn’t. The terrorists could not expect that the towers would collapse and that we would fail to evacuate them immediately. And they could not expect that large numbers of firefighters and police were trapped inside. It was a shoestring operation, but the symbolic value of bringing the superpower to its knees, if only for a few days, was immense.

The claim by Cheney that torture in Guantanamo saved hundreds of thousands of lives is absurd. (Vice President Cheney, it should be remembered, was one of only four congressmen who voted to keep Nelson Mandela in his South African jail.) In the Middle Ages many women and men were persecuted as witches. Under torture most of them admitted to poisoning wells, sickening their neighbors livestock, and consorting with the devil. Would anybody believe these confessions.

The case against torture is moral as well as practical. Information extracted under duress tends to be unreliable and false. Information obtained with other means of suasion is often of higher quality. The moral case is simply that torture is illegal and incompatible with civilized society. It is even more reprehensible when the victims are indeed innocent, as many of the Guantanamo detainees are.

The degree of paranoia is evident in the story of Hardin, a small Montana town that built a $27 million prison two years ago, which has been standing empty ever since. In a move to provide some income and employment for the town, Hardin’s council passed a resolution to take Guantanamo detainees as the Guantanamo detention center was slated to be closed. This was quickly vetoed by the Montana congressional delegation, which said it would never happen. Montana’s Democratic Gov. Brian Schweitzer also opposed the move as did the people of Hardin. A young woman when interviewed said if that happened she would buy a gun.

Cheney claims that Bush’s policies prevented further attacks and kept America safe. This is not surprising once reasonable airport and border checks were instituted and notwithstanding the hysterical warnings and yellow threat levels. But it must be remembered that the Bush administration permitted this horrendous attack in the first place in spite of ample warnings, including a security briefing for the President that described the possibility of such an attack in detail, but was ignored.

It took Germany, Britain and Spain decades to fight attacks by homegrown terrorists. That did not make their people paranoid and they never felt their democracies endangered or a need for torture.

Could there be other attacks? Yes. There is no lack of opportunity. I live near a university and walk the campus nearly every day. It is wide open and could easily be attacked. In fact, not long ago the campus was closed because of a bomb threat from a group that opposes animal experimentation. On an ocean cruise I shipped my car for the trip. It was not examined and, if packed with explosives, could presumably have sunk the ship.

There is no War on Terror, at least not with arms and armies. The fear mongering Bush administration has exploited the confusion between the literal and metaphorical meanings of the word ‘war’ to sell the war in Iraq. The so-called War on Terror is a war in the same sense as the War on Poverty and the War on Drugs, but not in the literal sense. It can be won only by patient intelligence and police work in concert with our allies worldwide. The unnecessary and bloody war in Iraq has been a terrible distraction and has made America more despised and much less safe.