FEAR & LOATHING
The Politics of Terror
This Sunday night we drove back to our apartment in New York from my parents' house in the Jersey suburbs. This involved our car being in close proximity to, if not on, the Prudential complex in Newark, the George Washington Bridge, the Citicorp Building, and the Triborough Bridge.
So it was with some trepidation that I read Tom Ridge's warning: "reports indicate that al Qaida is targeting several specific buildings, including the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in D.C.; Prudential Financial in Northern New Jersey; and Citigroup buildings and the New York Stock Exchange in New York."
I also watched Howard Dean on CNN that night. When asked about the new warnings, here's what he said:
"I am concerned that every time something happens that's not good for President Bush he plays this trump card, which is terrorism. His whole campaign is based on the notion that 'I can keep you safe, therefore at times of difficulty for America stick with me,' and then out comes Tom Ridge. It's just impossible to know how much of this is real and how much of this is politics, and I suspect there's some of both in it."
Gee whiz, I said to myself, why can't this guy put politics aside? Our lives are at risk! We're in danger!
Then I read the news this morning. Guess what? The reports Ridge cited in his alarmist address on Sunday are old—collected some four years ago. This is not according to Dean. This is according to Ridge's security advisor Frances Townsend.
"Compared to previous threat reporting," Ridge had said Sunday, "these intelligence reports have provided a level of detail that is very specific. The quality of this intelligence, based on multiple reporting streams in multiple locations, is rarely seen and is alarming in both the amount and specificity of the information."
Of course it's specific. We have very specific information about Nazi secret operations now, too.
Townsend added, presumably in jest, that the decision to issue the warnings now, four years late, had "nothing to do with the Democratic National Convention."
The Washington Post corroborated her story with a handful of other insiders, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity.
"There is nothing right now that we're hearing that is new," one senior law enforcement official who was briefed on the alert told the paper. "Why did we go to this level? . . . I still don't know that."
Howard Dean knows.
"When you're going to run on inspiring fear in American people," he told CNN, "that's politics. And there's no way you can get out of accusations and discussions about the relationship between politics and protecting us against terrorism in an election year when the President of the United States is avowedly running his political re-election campaign on the notion that he can protect us better from terrorism than John Kerry can."
So Bush is manipulating the fears of the American people in order to further his political ambitions, in effect scaring us into believing, against all objective evidence to the contrary, that he is making America safer.
There's a word for a political system in which terror is used to keep a dissenting populace in line.
That word is Fascism.
—Greg Olear
Editor, LARGEREGO
August 3, 2004
Editor, LARGEREGO
August 3, 2004
"We are a nation in danger." |