BY GLENN GREENWALD
Wikipedia
GLENN
GREENWALD
MONDAY, AUG 29, 2011 10:30 ET
The decade's biggest scam
The Los Angeles Times examines the staggering sums of money
expended on patently absurd domestic "homeland security"
projects: $75 billion per year for things such as a Zodiac boat with
side-scan sonar to respond to a potential attack on a lake in tiny
Keith County, Nebraska, and hundreds of "9-ton BearCat armored
vehicles, complete with turret" to guard against things like an attack
on DreamWorks in Los Angeles. All of that -- which is independent of
the exponentially greater sums spent on foreign wars, occupations,
bombings, and the vast array of weaponry and private contractors to
support it all -- is in response to this mammoth, existential, the-singlegreatest-
challenge-of-our-generation threat:
"The number of people worldwide who are killed by Muslim-type
terrorists, Al Qaeda wannabes, is maybe a few hundred outside of war zones. It's basically the same number of
people who die drowning in the bathtub each year," said John Mueller, an Ohio State University professor who
has written extensively about the balance between threat and expenditures in fighting terrorism.
Last year, McClatchy characterized this threat in similar terms: "undoubtedly more American citizens died overseas
from traffic accidents or intestinal illnesses than from terrorism." The March, 2011, Harper's Index expressed
the point this way: "Number of American civilians who died worldwide in terrorist attacks last year: 8 -- Minimum number
who died after being struck by lightning: 29." That's the threat in the name of which a vast domestic Security State is
constructed, wars and other attacks are and continue to be launched, and trillions of dollars are transferred to the private
security and defense contracting industry at exactly the time that Americans -- even as they face massive wealth inequality --
are told that they must sacrifice basic economic security because of budgetary constraints.
Despite these increasing economic insecurities -- actually, precisely because of them -- the sprawling domestic Security State
continues unabated. The industry journal National Defense Magazine today trumpets: "Homeland Security Market
‘Vibrant’ Despite Budget Concerns." It details how budget cuts mean "homeland security" growth may not be as robust
as once predicted, but "Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Boeing and Northrop Grumman . . . have been winning more
contracts from DHS"; as a Boeing spokesman put it: "You’ll still continue to see domestically significant investment on the
part of the government and leveraging advances in technology to stand up and meet those emerging threats and needs.”
Of course, the key to sustaining this Security State bonanza -- profit for private industry and power for Security State officials
-- is keeping fear levels among the citizenry as high as possible, as National Defense expressly notes, and that is
accomplished by fixating even on minor and failed attacks, each one of which is immediately seized upon to justify greater
expenditures, expansion of security measures, and a further erosion of rights:
Polls still show that there is increasing public concern about another terrorist attack. It is this fear and an
unrealistic American perception of risk that will continue to propel some aspects of the market,
analysts say. . . .
Small-scale attacks, whether successful or not, will continue to prompt additional spending, the market
analysts at Homeland Security Research Corp. say. They point to the failed 2009 Christmas plot of a man trying to blow
up a flight to Detroit with explosives sewn into his underwear and the attempted car-bombing in Times Square early the
next year. Though unsuccessful, these events led to immediate White House intervention, congressional hearings and
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2011/08/29/terrorism
an airport screening upgrade costing more than $1.6 billion.
The LA Times, while skillfully highlighting these wasteful programs, depicts them as some sort of unintended inefficiencies.
That is exactly what they are not. None of this is unintended or inefficient but is achieving exactly the purposes for which it is
designed. That's true for two reasons.
First, this wastefulness is seen as inefficient only if one falsely assumes that its real objective is to combat Terrorist
threats. That is not the purpose of what the U.S. Government does. As Daniel Weeks explains today, the Congress --
contrary to popular opinion -- is not "broken"; it is working perfectly for its actual owners. Or, as he puts it, "Washington
isn't broken -- it’s fixed":
Our problem today is not a broken government but a beholden one: government is more beholden to special-interest
shareholders who fund campaigns than it is to ordinary voters. Like any sound investor, the funders seek nothing more
and nothing less than a handsome return -- deficits be darned -- in the form of tax breaks, subsidies and government
contracts.
The LA Times, and most people who denounce these spending "inefficiencies," have the causation backwards: fighting
Terrorism isn't the goal that security spending is supposed to fulfill; the security spending (and power vested by
surveillance) is the goal itself, and Terrorism is the pretext for it. For that reason, whether the spending efficiently addresses
a Terrorism threat is totally irrelevant.
Second, while the Security State has little to do with addressing ostensible Terrorist threats, it has much to do with targeting
perceived domestic and political threats, especially threats brought about by social unrest from austerity and the growing
wealth gap. This Alternet article by Sarah Jafee, entitled "How the Surveillance State Protects the Interests Of the Ultra-
Rich," compiles much evidence -- including what I offered two weeks ago -- demonstrating that the prime aim of the
growing Surveillance State is to impose domestic order, preserve prevailing economic prerogatives and stifle dissent and
anticipated unrest.
Pointing out disparities between surveillance programs and the Terrorist threat is futile because they're not aimed at that
threat. The British Government, for instance, is continuing its efforts to restrict social media in the wake of the povertyfueled
riots that plagued that country; as The New York Times reports today, it is secretly meeting with representatives
of Twitter, Facebook, and the company that owns Blackberry "to discuss voluntary ways to limit or restrict the use of social
media to combat crime and periods of civil unrest." That revelation prompted taunting condemnations of British tyranny
from China and Iran, both of which have been routinely excoriated for surveillance abuses and Internet suppression of the
type increasingly common in the West.
Meanwhile, much of the anti-Terrorism weaponry in the U.S. ends up being deployed for purposes of purely domestic
policing. As the LA Times notes: those aforementioned BearCats are "are now deployed by police across the country; the
arrests of methamphetamine dealers and bank robbers these days often look much like a tactical assault on
insurgents in Baghdad." Drones are used both in the Drug War and to patrol the border. Surveillance measures
originally justified as necessary to fight foreign Terrorists are routinely turned far more often inward, and the NSA --
created with a taboo against domestic spying -- now does that regularly.
Exaggerating, manipulating and exploiting the Terrorist threat for profit and power has been the biggest scam of the decade;
only Wall Street's ability to make the Government prop it up and profit from the crisis it created at the expense of everyone
else can compete for that title. Nothing has altered the mindset of the American citizenry more than a decade's worth of fearmongering
So compelling is fear-based propaganda, so beholden are our government institutions to these private Security
State factions, and so unaccountable is the power bestowed by these programs, that even a full decade after the only Terrorist
attacks on U.S. soil, its growth continues more or less unabated.
-- Glenn Greenwald