Meanwhile the drumbeat warnings of a possible chemical or biological attack upon the United States grow louder with each passing week. Police, fire and health agencies go through regular exercises with all manner of sophisticated equipment. Active-duty Army and Marine Corps personnel are engaged in the same. The FBI has an extensive hazardous materials unit ready to rush to the scene of an attack. And now the National Guard has joined the frenzy, outfitted in full-body protective suits with air tanks. The General Accounting Office (GAO) has argued that the National Guard units are redundant and their mission poorly defined. The Washington Post reported that In fact, some critics regard the [Guard] teams largely as an effort to find a new mission for the Guard and help it avoid deeper budget cuts in the post-Cold War era. 40 As noted, the same can be said about other elements of the National Security State.

In October 1999, ABCs Nightline program ran a five-part series in which it simulated a biological weapons attack on a large American city, featuring a squad of terrorists releasing anthrax spores into the subway system, complete with panic, death and rampant chaos. Ted Koppel made the explicit pronouncement that such an attack was bound to take place in the US at some future time. As one would expect, the programs were long on sensationalism and short on science. This was spelled out later by the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies.41 Ironically, the fact that such a center exists is another sign of the ( threatening ) times.

Shortly after this the FBI announced that the Washington area had become the number one target in the world for possible terrorist attacks. How did they know? Well, downtown Washington receives three to six suspicious packages a day . Anything actually terroristic in any of these packages? Apparently not. 42

All this in response to actual chemical, biological or radiological weapon attacks of-at last count-zero. But there have been many false anthrax reports, no doubt largely inspired by all the scare talk; talk which never gives the public a clue to how extremely difficult and unpredictable it actually would be to create and deliver a serious anthrax attack, particularly over a wide area; scare talk that also makes more credible and acceptable the US 1998 bombing of a Sudanese pharmaceutical plant on the (false) grounds that it was making chemical and biological weapons.

Air travel is another area where the threat mentality looms larger than life, and common sense. A flight from Atlanta to Turkey, August 4, 1999, that was about to take off was halted by the FBI; all 241 passengers were forced to leave the plane, some of them were questioned, one man was detained; all the luggage was unloaded and each piece painstakingly matched to a passenger; bomb-sniffing dogs and explosive experts were rushed in, and the flight was held up for more than four hours. The reason? The FBI had received word that one of the passengers might be a potential threat to national security . And the reason for that? The man had paid for his ticket in cash. 43

Three weeks later, at Chicagos OHare Airport, a man was seen running the wrong way into a passageway normally used by those exiting the terminal. He disappeared into the

crowded concourse. Neither he nor anything suspicious was found. For all anyone knew, the man had simply forgotten something somewhere or had a very urgent need to get to what he thought was the closest bathroom. Whatever, as a result of this threatening situation, 6,000 passengers were evacuated, at least 120 flights were canceled, and air traffic was disrupted across the country for several hours.44

With all the scare talk, with all the threats , what exactly has taken place in the real world? According to the State Department, in the period of 1993-1998 the number of actual terrorist attacks by region was as follows:

Western Europe 766, Latin America 569, Middle East 374, Asia 158, Eurasia 101, Africa 84, North America 14 45

It is now well known how during the Cold War the actual level of Soviet military and economic strength was magnified by the CIA and Defense Department, how data and events were falsified to exaggerate the Russian threat, how worst-case scenarios were put forth as if they were probable and imminent, even when they failed to meet the demands of plausibility.46 One of the most enduring Soviet-threat stories-the alleged justification for the birth of NATO-was the coming Red invasion of Western Europe. If, by 1999, anyone still swore by this fairy tale, they could have read a report in The Guardian of London on newly declassified British government documents from 1968. Among the documents was one based on an analysis by the Foreign Office joint intelligence committee, which the newspaper summarized as follows:

The Soviet Union had no intention of launching a military attack on the West at the height of the Cold War, British military and intelligence chiefs privately believed, in stark contrast to what Western politicians and military leaders were saying in public about the Soviet threat .

The Soviet Union will not deliberately start general war or even limited war in Europe, a briefing for the British chiefs of staff-marked Top Secret, UK Eyes Only, and headed The Threat: Soviet Aims and Intentions-declared in June 1968.

Soviet foreign policy had been cautious and realistic , the department argued, and despite the Vietnam War, the Russians and their allies had continued to make contacts in all fields with the West and to maintain a limited but increasing political dialogue with

NATO powers .47

Subtlety is not the order of the day. In 1998, the Pentagon created a new bureaucracy: the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, a budget already in the billions, personnel numbered in the thousands, and made up primarily of agencies founded to reduce the threat posed by the Soviet Union . 48 Its called recycling.

The Soviet threat, the terrorist threat, the new enemies, the same old same old, feverishly fostered at home and abroad, the mentality that the Pentagon, the CIA, the FBI, et al. have had critical, life-saving, catastrophe-preventing missions thrust upon them, here,

there, and everywhere, and we rein these saviors in on pain of national and world disaster.. .working the old protection racket again.

I think we are already at war, CIA Director George Tenet told the Senate in 1997. We have been on a war footing for a number of years now. 49

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence, clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken, 1920

Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear-kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor-with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible eviL.to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant funds demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real.

General Douglas MacArthur, speaking of large Pentagon budgets, 1957 50

The political spectrum and conspiracies

Its ironic, but the far right in the United States is more open to believing the worst about American foreign policy than are most liberals. This may be because those on the far right, being extremists themselves, do not instinctively shy away from believing that the government is capable of extreme behavior, at home or abroad. The radical left and right share a profound cynicism about their governments very intentions. But those in between the two poles do not naturally come by such views.

To many of the latter, the statements here about the United States not meaning well may sound like an example of that frequent object of ridicule, the conspiracy theory . They hear me saying (snicker) that our leaders have gotten together, covertly, in some secluded safeAhouse, to maliciously plan their next assault on everything holy, while throwing out signals intended to confuse and to obscure their real intentions.

But if our leaders strive for unambiguous righteousness, is it not a conspiracy? Dont they meet to plan how theyre going to do nice things? Or perhaps they dont have to do this so formally because since they all mean nice to begin with, it thus happens quite automatically, naturally, built into the system-the government system, the corporate system, the military system, the intelligence system, the government-corporate-military-intelligence nexus.

But why, then, wouldnt it be the same with meaning bad?