When Terror Is The Foil

“It is a mistake to believe there is no threat to the United States of America ,” President Bush said on Thursday between—what else—campaign stops on behalf of mid-termers. “And that is why we have given our officials the tools they need to protect our people.” He was brandishing his straw men, of course. No one has ever said that there is no threat to the nation. But the moment Bush declared his so-called war on terror, turning the national security state into an instrument of power more far-reaching and unchecked than it ever was during the cold war, the question has always been: threat from whom? And almost from the start, the threat from the Bush administration and its complicit Congress has far outweighed anything terrorists could do, blowing planes out of the sky included. Terrorism is by definition a spectacular one-time event, sometimes serialized, always limited by its very strength: it’s only as effective as its intended target permit it to be. Short of nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists, the downing of planes, the suicide explosions, the hostage-taking is all as immediately disturbing as it is ultimately no more consequential than accidental tragedies that end lives in myriad other ways, but without altering democratic institutions and the constitutional functioning of society. As we now know, as we knew even in 2001 had it not been for the infighting of intelligence agencies and their criminal turf battles, it is also extremely difficult to pull of a spectacular terrorist event. It takes enormous planning and a concurrence of circumstances that hinges almost on lottery-like luck. It takes the somnolent complicity of the very forces designated to prevent those attacks. http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0812-20.htm

Note: http://www.commondreams...