[Peace-discuss] fanning anti-terrorism hysteria

[patton paul]

Scaring America Half to Death: Mixed Messages on Terrorism
by William Pfaff
  PARIS -- Foreign ministers of the Group of Eight leading industrial
nations met in Paris on Monday to affirm that terrorism remains a
"pervasive and global threat." Just three days earlier, the State
Department had announced that terrorism is at its lowest level in 33
years.

One wonders if anything would have changed had that news reached the G-8
foreign ministers. The war against terrorism, like the war against Iraq,
functions in all but total indifference to facts.

An unnamed "senior Bush administration official" told the press last
weekend that he would be amazed if weapons-grade plutonium or uranium were
found in Iraq. It was also unlikely, he said, that biological or chemical
weapons material would be found. He said that the United States never
expected to find such a smoking gun.

What was the Iraq war all about then? The official said that what
Washington really wanted was to seize the thousand nuclear scientists in
Iraq who might in the future have developed nuclear weapons for Saddam
Hussein. He described them as "nuclear mujahidin."

The preventive war, according to this redefinition, was not directed
against an actual problem, but one that might have appeared in the future.

One might have thought the official's statement merely an excuse for the
fact that no weapons of mass destruction have been found, but this time it
is President George W. Bush who seems not to have been told. He is still
assuring Americans that the illicit weapons will turn up.

In its annual report to Congress on terrorism, the State Department said
that the 199 recorded terrorist incidents last year represented a 44
percent drop from the previous year, and was the lowest total since 1969.

There were no terrorist attacks at all in the United States, five in
Africa and nine in Western Europe. Nearly all the rest were in Asia (99),
Latin America (50) and the Middle East (29). (Forty-one of the total 50
incidents reported as terrorism in all of Latin America last year were
bombings of a U.S.-owned oil pipeline in Colombia.)

What the report actually indicates is that virtually all the incidents
identified by the U.S. government as acts of "global terrorism" in 2002
occurred in four places: in Colombia; in Chechnya, with its separatist
war; in Afghanistan, with the continuing low-scale war; and with the
Palestinian intifada. Elsewhere, the Bali tourist bombing by Islamic
extremists caused some 200 deaths.

Before Sept. 11, 2001, virtually none of this would have been called
terrorism. It would have been called civil insurrection, or nationalist or
separatist violence.

Since September 2001, vast global significance has been attributed to such
episodes. They have been made the rationale for state mobilization and the
restrictions of civil liberties in the United States (and at the American
penal colony at Guant namo Bay).

Elsewhere, we have heard rationalizations of methods of state repression
that in the past might have won the concerned governments a place in
another annual report the State Department makes to Congress: on
international human rights violations.

The distorted account of terrorism has had extraordinary psychological
effect on many in the United States, causing them to think they are
exposed to a degree of personal risk that has virtually no foundation in
statistics, or indeed in common sense.

The New York writer who recently said that since the fall of Baghdad he
has, for the first time since 2001, felt himself secure from being blown
to bits by a terrorist bomb while crossing Times Square, is one such case.
Thousands of New Yorkers, acting on federal government warnings, this year
built themselves tape-sealed rooms stocked with provisions, water and gas
masks for a prolonged siege by terrorists.

Polls indicate that American voters no longer really care whether weapons
of mass destruction are found in Iraq. The victory was not over a threat
they really identified with Saddam Hussein. It was a victory over
"terrorism."

Now, in an official report few will read, or are expected to read, their
government admits that terrorism is at its lowest level in three decades,
and that the actual risk it poses is statistically negligible. At the same
time, the same government tells them they must live in fear of "appalling
crimes" and mass destruction. Where is this leading Americans?

Copyright  2003 the International Herald Tribune