The Culture of Fear (37 page)

In the years that followed, America’s culture of fear evolved in a number of ways. First, as I mentioned at the top of this chapter, the basic fear narrative shifted from “there are monsters among us” to “foreign terrorists want to destroy us.” In the first weeks after 9/11, the homegrown scares of the previous three decades about crime, teenagers, drugs, metaphorical illnesses, and the like seemed trivial, obsolete, beside the point. The nation’s collective fear sensibly coalesced against a hard target: Osama bin Laden and his organization, al Qaeda.

The administration of President George W. Bush quickly redirected that fear, however, to what they dubbed the “worldwide war on terror,” a war and associated enemies similar in their vagueness to those denoted in previous decades by the “war on drugs” and the “war on crime.” From those earlier wars, American journalists and their audiences had been conditioned to treat more seriously than they ought shocking statistics that were not fully explained or verified; dire warnings that flared and faded, often without any actual effect on our daily lives; and testimony from self-appointed experts with vested interests in whipping up anxieties. Following 9/11 and throughout the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the same patterns ensued, only this time the statistics, warnings, and expert testimony came almost entirely from the administration. A study found, for example, that more than 90 percent of news stories about Iraq on NBC, ABC, and CBS during a five-month period in 2002—03 came from the White House, Pentagon, or State Department.
⁴⁶

Following the attacks of 9/11, journalists dared not question the White House’s interpretation of events. “It starts with a feeling of patriotism within oneself,” explained CBS anchorman Dan Rather, speaking with a British journalist in May 2002. “It carries through with a certain knowledge that the country as a whole—and for all the right reasons—felt and continues to feel this surge of patriotism within themselves. And one finds oneself saying, ‘I know the right question, but you know what? This is not exactly the right time to ask it.”’
⁴⁷

Wearing flag label pins and crying on camera, journalists suspended even the pretense of objectivity as they affirmed the administration’s claim that the attacks of 9/11 constituted a fundamental turning point in human history.
“The world
is
different,”
a phrase repeated endlessly in late 2001 and 2002, became a kind of password that opened the door for an extraordinary degree of fear mongering on the part of the administration, as would its successor adage,
“9/11 can happen again.”
⁴⁸

This wasn’t the first time a White House had been behind a massive and expensive fear campaign. As we saw earlier in this book, other such efforts—the war on drugs, in particular—dragged on for years, consuming many millions of dollars. But it is difficult to find an earlier example where an administration amassed so much machinery to the cause.

Before we review that machinery, let us consider the premise upon which it was based.
Was
the world so different after 9/11? Certainly the average citizen and even the average journalist could be forgiven for feeling frightened and disoriented after September 11. At first, the estimated loss of life at the Twin Towers was reported to be as high as 50,000 (the actual death toll was 2,752). No one knew if other cities would be hit within days. Throughout the fall of 2001, anthrax-laced letters threatening the United States were mailed to various news organizations and political offices. Though the letters were later traced to a U.S. military laboratory and ascribed to an American biodefense researcher, at the time they were understandably assumed to be the work of foreign terrorists.
⁴⁹

But by the end of 2001, no attacks other than the anthrax letters had occurred in the United States. According to figures published by the U.S. State Department, the total number of deaths from terrorist attacks worldwide in 2001 was 3,547, more than three-quarters of which were on 9/11. About the same number of Americans died that year from drowning. Nearly three times as many died from gun-related homicides, and five times as many in alcohol-related motor vehicle accidents. In
Overblown,
a book on America’s response to 9/11, John Mueller, a professor of political science at Ohio State University, notes that over the last four decades, lightning has killed as many Americans as have terrorists.
⁵⁰

Even if terrorist acts in the United States had increased significantly, the risk to an average citizen of serious harm or death would have been less than from everyday dangers such as accidents and hypertension. In a worst-case scenario, if a terrorist group were to somehow detonate a nuclear bomb in a major U.S. city, the highest casualty rate is predicted to be around 250,000. As gruesome as that would be, the nation has borne worse. The influenza epidemic of 1918 killed 600,000.
⁵¹

Post-9/11 and throughout the first decade of the twenty-first century, although terrorists continued to attack various targets around the world, no major events took place in the United States. Those that occurred elsewhere, while deplorable, were nowhere near the magnitude of 9/11. Wars, genocide, famines, and economic crises unfolded with depressing regularity, but little changed as a result of September 11 apart from what the Bush administration and its allies generated through a tireless campaign that kept large numbers of Americans alarmed, confused, and vulnerable to manipulation, and parts of the world under attack by U.S. forces.

From the beginning, the language of the administration was apocalyptic. “Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign unlike any other we have ever seen,” President Bush proclaimed in late September 2001. The following January, in his State of the Union Address, he announced that our enemies were not only bin Laden and al Qaeda, but an “axis of evil” consisting of Iraq, Iran, and Korea, as well as any nation that harbored terrorists. At home, Americans should brace themselves for attacks by members of al Qaeda sleeper cells who lived among us, as the 9/11 terrorists had, and could strike at any moment.
⁵²

The administration began warning of a far more distant danger as well. Throughout 2002, they claimed that Iraq had aided bin Laden and was building weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Those claims have since proved false, but the administration used them to garner broad support from Congress, pundits, and the public for its 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq. And over the next five years, as casualties
mounted and the financial costs of Bush’s self-described “crusade” soared to several trillion billion dollars, it was crucial to the administration that Americans remain frightened about possible terrorist attacks on U.S. soil so that they would continue to support the Iraq war and broader “war on terror.”

As time passed and such attacks did not occur, skeptics began to ask the obvious questions: Why hadn’t terrorists blown up freeways and bridges? Poisoned the water supply? Gassed the subways? Grabbed an automatic weapon and shot up a mall? The most reasonable conclusion was that sleeper cells full of impassioned, highly trained terrorists did not exist. How, then, to keep the fears alive?

In large measure, the Bush administration relied on an entity of its own founding, whose very existence suggested both imminent and never-ending dangers. Formed in 2002, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) placed a number of federal agencies under one umbrella organization created “to secure our country against those who would disrupt the American way of life.” The mission of the DHS was to prevent and respond to terrorist attacks in the United States, because “today’s terrorists can strike at any place, at any time and with virtually any weapon.”
⁵³

One of the DHS’s first creations was a color-coded terror alert chart that reflected what the department deemed the degree of risk at any given time. An ingenious mechanism for fear mongering, the color chart reminded the populace, graphically and continually, that they were in danger. Sometimes the risk was greater, sometimes lesser, but always there was danger.

Between its inception in March 2002 and June 2003, government officials repeatedly issued terror alerts, citing “code orange”—a “high” risk—eight times. In each instance, a public official such as the attorney general or the director of Homeland Security appeared before the press, promised that the alert was based on “credible” or “reliable” sources, and offered no further information. No attacks occurred, but the Bush administration benefited from the scares. A study published in 2004 in the journal
Current Research in Social Psychology
found that when the terror warnings increased, so did Bush’s approval rating—an
effect that was not lost on the administration. In a memoir published after Bush left office, Tom Ridge, the first director of the Department of Homeland Security, reported that senior members of the administration had pressured him to raise the terrorism threat level at key moments during Bush’s re-election campaign of 2004.
⁵⁴

When it comes to sustaining fear, one scare supports another. The administration and Homeland Security rolled out alerts, warnings, and predictions of various types of attacks steadily throughout the decade. Some were laughable from the start, as when the government advised citizens in late 2001 to stockpile duct tape and rolls of plastic in order to seal their homes against chemical weapon attacks—despite the fact that experts knew these measures were probably pointless (when chemical agents are released outdoors, they are almost immediately diluted by the wind). Since the risk of dying in a chemical weapon attack is far less than a million to one, a person is more likely to die in a car accident en route to purchase the duct tape, as one clear-eyed journalist noted in the
New York Times.
Paradoxically, when fearful people buy guns, drive instead of fly, or isolate themselves in their homes, their risk from these more prosaic dangers increases.
⁵⁵

The DHS hyped as well the threat of bioterrorism, warning of the intentional release of anthrax or smallpox, though the only actual incident, the anthrax attack mentioned earlier, killed only five people. The danger of a smallpox epidemic was even more remote, as the disease is rarely fatal and must be spread from person to person. Any release of smallpox into a population would probably be limited in scope and quickly isolated by public health authorities. But armed with eerie images and chilling scenarios of poxed populations from the past, the administration’s mouthpieces got plenty of attention in the print and electronic media.
⁵⁶

Then there was the ominously named “dirty bomb,” a conventional explosive spiked with radioactive isotopes that got depicted as a rogue-style nuclear weapon. The real damage by such a bomb would be in the explosion, not the radioactivity, some media eventually noted, albeit too late to prevent bad dreams by Americans who heard Attorney General John Ashcroft’s announcement on June 8, 2002, of “an unfolding
terrorist plot to attack the United States by exploding a radioactive ‘dirty bomb.’” His remarks set off a fresh run on duct tape and plastic, and a number of federal agencies began stockpiling potassium iodide pills, which can protect against radiation. (The terrorist plot, it turned out, was no more than “some fairly loose talk,” Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz subsequently admitted.)
⁵⁷

By the time George Bush’s re-election campaign got under way in 2004, there was little doubt he’d make terrorism the focal point of all of his speeches and press conferences. His surrogates went farther still, overtly portraying a vote for his Democratic rival, Senator John Kerry, as an invitation to annihilation. “If we make the wrong choice,” Vice President Dick Cheney warned a Des Moines audience, “the danger is that we’ll get hit again—that we’ll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States.” In May, just prior to the Democratic Convention, Attorney General John Ashcroft announced that al Qaeda’s preparations for an attack were 90 percent complete; immediately after the convention, the Department of Homeland Security issued yet another terrorist alert, which diverted America’s attention away from Kerry and back to the “wartime” president, George Bush.

The strategy worked. Bush won re-election in November 2004, and in the four years that followed the administration followed the lead of music groups who survive year after year by performing extended versions of their only hit song. The Bush administration kept droning on about 9/11, clear to their final days in Washington.

Among their latter-day ploys, used multiple times, was the purportedly leaked report. In 2005, for instance, the DHS issued a report, “National Planning Scenarios,” that they said was never intended for public view—thereby making it seem particularly portentous. Somehow it got posted on a Hawaii state government website and picked up by the
New York Times.
Among the plan’s twelve possible terror scenarios were attacks using plague, blister agent, dirty bombs, food contamination, nerve agents, toxic chemicals, and a chlorine tank explosion. Not surprisingly, the report’s disclaimer—in a small paragraph on page iv—got considerably less play than the horrifying
what ifs:
“Neither the Intelligence Community nor the law enforcement community is aware of any
credible specific intelligence that indicates that such an attack is planned, or that the agents or devices in question are in possession of any known terrorist group.”
⁵⁸

As Josef Joffe, editor of the German newspaper
Die Zeit,
noted in an op-ed in the
Washington Post,
“The demand for security is like an obsession, spreading relentlessly, for which there is no rational counterargument. DHS always asks, ‘What if?’—which always trumps ‘Why more?’”
⁵⁹