The Late News---Very Late


This Sunday the San Francisco Chronicle Insight section published three related essays under the headline of THE WAR ON HYPE. Ben Friedman's began:

Conventional wisdom says that none of us is safe from terrorism. The truth is that almost all of us are.

The rest is just as succinct and pointed. He continues:

U.S. homeland security policy conjures up a flawless enemy that could strike at any moment, in any place. That policy institutionalizes the fears terrorists created and harms liberal values. Most homeland security experts say that Hurricane Katrina's flooding of New Orleans shows how vulnerable we are to terrorists. In fact, it shows that most Americans have better things to worry about.

Friedman points out that the supposedly massive spending on homeland security "pales in comparison to increases" in U.S. military spending, mostly for Iraq. But Congress has appropriated some $207 billion to fight terrorism, according to Veronique de Rugy and Nick Gillespie's piece, with homeland security dispersing some $50 billion just this year. And on what? Their piece begins:

Rest easy, America. As a response to the Sept. 11 attacks, the Princeton, N.J., Fire Department now owns Nautilus exercise equipment, free weights and a Bowflex machine. The police dogs of Columbus, Ohio, are protected by Kevlar vests, thank God. Mason County, Wash., is the proud owner of a half-dozen state-of-the-art emergency radios (never mind that they are incompatible with existing county radios).

All of these crucial purchases -- and many more like them -- were paid for with homeland security grants. Doesn't it make you feel more secure that $100,000 in such money went to fund the federal Child Pornography Tipline? That $38 million went to cover fire claims related to the April 2001 Cerro Grande fire in New Mexico?

Their conclusion:

Indeed, as the above examples suggest, states and cities are spending federal homeland security grants on pet projects that have little or nothing to do with security. State and local officials fight over who will get the biggest share of the money, regardless of whether they have a legitimate claim to it. Hence, of the top 10 grant recipients, only the District of Columbia also appears on a list of the 10 places most at risk of attack... And don't think high-risk cities necessarily spend their money wisely...

This of course is in addition to the utterly dumbfounding news of the past few days--that the Bushites turned over operation of major U.S. commercial ports to Dubai Ports World, a state-owned business in the United Arab Emirates, with the state in question implicated in supporting terrorists (including 9-11 highjackers) and facilitating Iran's nuclear program.

But the stupidity is even more widespread than the pork:

When Congress isn't doling out cash indiscriminately, it's overreacting to yesterday's attacks instead of concentrating on cost-effective defenses against the most likely current threats.


The third article, by James A. Lewis, concludes that even these threats are way overblown.
Americans receive a steady stream of warnings and alarms about new and horrific perils that await them. Pandemics, dirty bombs, cyber attacks, bioterror and other exotic threats are always on the verge of being unleashed onto a shamefully unprepared republic. Yet, judging from statistics on life expectancy, violent deaths and war, we live in much less perilous times than any generation before us.

Or as Ben Friedman put it:

By any statistical measure, the terrorist threat to America has always been low. As political scientist John Mueller notes, in most years allergic reactions to peanuts, deer in the road and lightning have all killed about the same number of Americans as terrorism.

But of course, you don't scare the shit out of an apparently cowardly nation by declaring a war on allergic reactions to peanuts.

The fact that Insight put this page together is laudable. (I say this with the pride of a contributor, to a similiar Insight thematic section on the 60th anniversary of Hiroshima.) But that this might still be considered a daring act is ultimately very depressing.

There is nothing about the terrorist threat said here that could not have been said in late 2001--and essentially it was said in blogs like this one. There is nothing about the forms of threats and the scandal of homeland security spending that couldn't have been said three years ago.

To decide on the right course of action to protect America required a correct assessment of the threat, not to mention some glimmer of an idea of the causes of terrorism, a bit more to the point than "they hate our freedom." But we were steered into blind fear, and like trembling sheep we followed, uttering pieties for our brave leaders.

By diverting us from understanding the real problems and devising and implementing real solutions, with real scrutiny of the results, while addressing other problems with the proportionate seriousness they deserve, panic has made us far less safe. Not just from terrorism. From every conceivable threat--from a Climate Crisis storm, from a flu epidemic, from dying because we don't have health insurance, you name it.

And so for nearly five years our media has apparently been paralyzed by the same gutlessness with which we as a society faced an unfamiliar (but hardly new) threat to our denial more than our lives. Or maybe it was because at least some in the media knew what would not be heard. We said it here then; no one listened. Maybe no one could hear, until now. And the sad thing is, how many even now can hear it?