The Anthrax Attacks and the Costs of 9/11
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Since September 11, 2001, weapons of mass destruction have been dealt with purely as a danger from the peripheries, not as a heartland issue. In fact, the Bush administration has successfully focused all our WMD attention and fears out there, not in here. The Iranian bomb -- at best, years away according to the latest National Intelligence Estimate -- has been the singular focus of the world's attention; while the nuclearized "global strike force" the Pentagon has been preparing for future use in Iran, North Korea, or elsewhere is barely attended to.
Now, here's the interesting thing: Because this administration had its eyes set on the Middle East from the beginning, it essentially chose its terror war from column A (the September 11th attacks), not column B (the anthrax attacks, once it became clear that they were connected not to al-Qaeda but the American arsenal). Hence our control group. Here, for instance, is a very partial list of actions not taken by this administration in relation to the anthrax attacks:
Our President never swore to get the killer(s), "dead or alive." He kept no profile of the possible killer or killers in his desk drawer, so he could cross him/them off when caught. The President, Vice President, National Security Adviser, and others did not warn the public and Congress regularly of the possibility of "clouds of anthrax" being released in our major cities (though this had, after a fashion, already happened) even as they were issuing dire warnings about fantasy Iraqi unmanned aerial vehicles or UAVs that might at any time spray biological or chemical weapons over east coast cities. (Democratic Senator Bill Nelson of Florida, for example, said that he voted for the administration's resolution authorizing force in Iraq because "I was told not only that [Saddam had weapons of mass destruction] and that he had the means to deliver them through unmanned aerial vehicles, but that he had the capability of transporting those UAVs outside of Iraq and threatening the homeland here in America, specifically by putting them on ships off the eastern seaboard.") No American planes swooped down to bomb the weapons labs of Fort Dietrich or the Dugway Proving Grounds; the only suspect publicly identified, while hounded for a period, was never declared an "enemy combatant." No one seized and rendered him; no CIA agents swept him from the street, cut off his clothes, shot him up with drugs, slipped him into an orange jumpsuit, whisked him onto an unregistered plane, and took him to a secret prison in Egypt or elsewhere to have "the truth" beaten or waterboarded or otherwise tortured out of him. Nor did he end up incarcerated in Guantanamo for years, trial-less and beyond the reach of the courts. Quite the opposite, Hatfill is suing former Attorney General John Ashcroft, the Justice Department, and others for violating his constitutional rights and the New York Times for defaming him.
Nor, in the wake of the anthrax attacks, was any kind of global war declared on the killer or killers, or troops deployed anywhere. In fact, no drastic actions of any sort were taken. In the wake of the attack, the post office became more careful; U.S. weapons labs were assumedly better secured; and remind me what else occurred in response to one of the most dangerous attacks in our history? Beyond the dead and injured, the panic of the moment, and the monumental costs of cleaning up congressional offices, newsrooms, and post offices, what were the costs?
As it turns out, the Bush administration acted in response to 9/11 in every wild and extraordinary way -- and in response to the anthrax attacks in next to no way at all. Put the two together and what you can see is the degree to which the costs of 9/11, whether in Iraq or at home, are the responsibility not of the attackers, whose damaging acts were violent in the extreme, spectacular, and limited, but the Bush administration.
Embedded World
It's an irony of our world that neither Osama bin Laden, nor the anthrax killer(s) have been apprehended. By now, bin Laden has, in fact, disappeared into something like the kind of anonymity the anthrax killer had from the beginning. Whether in the mountains of Afghanistan or the exurbs of America, the search for the perpetrators of the two greatest terrorist attacks in our history -- the Twin Terrors -- was not expanded until success was achieved, but downsized. When it came to the hunt for bin Laden, this happened way back in 2002 when the Bush administration began switching key personnel out of Afghanistan to prepare for its long-desired invasion of Iraq. Both are now cold cases.
You might think that this administration, supposedly dedicated above all else to protecting the United States from terrorism in its newly formed Homeland Security State, would have devoted resources above all else to the task of implacably hunting down these particular terrorists, wherever they might be; that dead-ends met would have only led to redoubled efforts. That would have been, if not a "war" on terrorism, then at least a police action of note. Instead, with thousands of Americans and Iraqis now dead and an actual weapon of mass destruction still potentially loose in our land, the inability to focus all resources on real terrorists and bring them to justice seems but another cost of George Bush's "war on terror."
The saddest story is this: If tomorrow, George Bush, Dick Cheney and their cohorts were somehow tossed out on their ears -- call it indictment, impeachment, or something else -- what they, not Osama bin Laden or the anthrax terrorists will have cost us, in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness will still be incalculable. Among the greatest costs will be the way administration officials used the 9/11 attacks (and buried the anthrax ones) in order to breach so many levees of our world.
What they have embedded in our lives since 9/11 -- from Northcom to our newest pinheaded giant bureaucracy, the Homeland Security Department, from the Patriot Act to ever increasing domestic spying by the Pentagon and the National Security Agency among other organizations -- will be with us long after they are gone. Just imagine a political change of fortunes in our country in which the Democrats take Congress in 2006 and the White House in 2008. Then ask yourself a single question: What will the Democrats do with Guantánamo. Unfortunately, you already know the answer.
Now, let that pause button go and watch not just the Twin Towers but so much else in our world tumble down one more time.
Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of American triumphalism in the Cold War. His novel, The Last Days of Publishing, has just come out in paperback.
This piece first appeared at Tomdispatch.com.
