December 18, 2005
[Note: This is the second of two pieces focused on reevaluating the costs of the September 11 attacks. In the first, Shark-bit World, I took the New York Times
back to the week before September 11, 2001, time-machine style, and
found a forgotten world in which the Bush administration, with its poll
numbers dropping and congressional Republicans fretting, was drifting,
politically challenged, and besieged -- a moment not unlike our own. I
concluded: "Four long years to make it back to September 10th, 2001 in
an American world now filled to the brim with horrors, a United States
which is no longer a 'country,' but a 'homeland' and a Homeland
Security State." Tom]
It Should Have Been Unforgettable
The Anthrax Attacks and the Costs of 9/11
By Tom Engelhardt
Imagine, for a moment, that someone had a finger on a pause button just
after the attacks of September 11, 2001. That's not such a crazy
thought. After all, most Americans watched the attacks and their
aftermath on television; and, as coups de théâtre,
they were clearly meant to be viewed on screen. Of course, the
technology for pausing reality didn't quite exist then. But if someone
in that pre-TiVo age had somehow hit pause soon after the Twin Towers
came down, while the Pentagon was still smoking, when Air Force One was
carrying a panicky George Bush in the wrong direction rather than
towards Washington and New York to become the resolute war president of
his dreams, if someone had paused everything and given us all a chance
to catch our breath, what might we have noticed about the actual damage
to our world?
As a start, there were those two towers and so many of the people in
them (and those who came to rescue them) tumbling in that near-mushroom
cloud of smoke into one of the greatest piles of instant rubble and
powder in history. Even a few days later, glimpsed down various side
streets, the vision of destruction at the World Trade Center site --
those gigantic, jagged shards of left-over building -- were (I can
attest) more than worthy of some civilization-ending sci-fi film; of,
say, the final scene in the original Planet of the Apes
where the top of the off-kilter Statue of Liberty looms from the sand.
So, other than the loss of lives, the initial cost of 9/11 was two
large buildings and, in Washington, part of a third -- clearly
stand-ins for American financial and military power. (The fourth
hijacked plane, which went down in Pennsylvania, was surely on its way
to the capital to add political power to the ensemble, creating the
sort of triad that human beings seem eternally attracted to.)
Add four expensive planes (and their passengers and crews) to the list.
Add as well, the economic impact of the downtown of a great city left
in chaos; of the Stock Exchange halted; of destroyed businesses and
lost business; then include the whack the travel and tourism industry
took; and that's undoubtedly not a full list. None of this -- the lives
lost most of all -- was in any way minor. We were hurt, that's for
sure, though the economic impact of 9/11 would turn out to be closer to
hiccup than earthquake.
But there were other costs, so much harder to tabulate. After all,
Americans were not just hurt, but hurting. We had been robbed of
something that seemed quite real (if you didn't happen to live in the
vicinity of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City), something
missing from the lives of so many others on this planet -- a sense of
living in a safe and secure world. And the thieves had a
Hollywood-inspired sense of spectacle; they were scenario producers
who, with finances hardly suitable for a film noir,
created the look of a large-budget extravaganza (of a sort Americans
had long been familiar with in which towering infernos blazed, atom
bombs went off, and volcanoes erupted in urban downtowns). They managed
to mix "conventional" weaponry -- airplanes (that is, combustible
fuel), box cutters, and mace -- into a brew that, whether by plan or
simply luck, had the apocalyptic look of a weapon of mass destruction.
Because the damage at the Pentagon didn't have that look, it never
quite qualified for full membership in the 9/11 experience. On the
other hand, the spot where the Twin Towers collapsed was instantly and
universally dubbed "Ground Zero," a term previously reserved for the
place where an atomic test or, in the case of two Japanese cities,
atomic bombs went off.
Imagine, then, pushing that pause button just after the damage was done
but before the "response" could begin; then look -- with as cool an eye
as you can -- at the damage, wildly outsized compared to the group
initiating it, but limited and not world-ending in the least (certainly
not in a week in which our President estimated that 30,000 Iraqis,
"more or less," had already died in the war he launched). As with the
most successful terror attacks, the truly outsized thing was the
response provoked. After all, a Serbian nationalist with a pistol was
quite capable of assassinating an archduke of the Austro-Hungarian
Empire, but not of causing World War I. Only major powers could have
done that.
Most Americans responded not to al-Qaeda, but to a terrifying vision of world's end and to headlines that indicated another Pearl Harbor
had occurred, that we had been attacked by a new Evil Empire.
Unfortunately, that vision and the feeling that our very Greatness had
been assaulted fit all too comfortably with the apocalyptic religious and political visions -- world dominating and
world-ending -- that lay close to the hearts, minds, and long-range
plans of the tiny group then running an adrift administration for the
Earth's only superpower. In the endless rites that would follow as the
President launched his "Global War on Terror," we would seek a variety
of roles expansive enough to suit a wounded but globe-bestriding
colossus. We would become the planet's Greatest Victim, Greatest
Survivor, and Greatest Dominator, leaving only the role of Greatest
Evildoer up for grabs.
In the process, the horrific but actual scale of the damage would
disappear. It no longer mattered that the attacking group had been
relatively small, limited in its means (hence, four years without an
al-Qaeda-inspired terrorist incident in the U.S.), and massive only in
its luck and daring -- abetted by the fact that the Bush administration
was looking for nothing like such an attack, despite that CIA briefing handed to George on a lazy Crawford August day -- "Bin Laden determined to strike in US" -- and so many other clues.
Over four years later, a question of costs naturally arises from
Gitmo-ized, Patriot-Act-ified, Homeland-Security-ificated America, from
the country of more than two thousand dead and more than sixteen
thousand wounded, from the perspective of a war of choice that has
taken at least $250- 281
billion in chump change through fiscal year 2005. Our world has been
damaged in so many ways, many still not fully apparent, and one
question is: Who made us pay the price? What did they do to us and what did we do to ourselves? Or put another way, how much of the costs of 9/11 were costs of choice?
The Costs of an Imperial Presidency
We know now that, within five hours of the moment the Pentagon was hit, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had already asked his aides "to come up with plans for striking Iraq"; that within days, the President and his top officials were already considering launching the Middle Eastern war of their dreams.
We know that eight days
after the attacks, the complex 342-page Patriot Act had already been
hustled over to Congress by Attorney General John Ashcroft; that it
passed through a cowed Senate in the dead of night on October 11th, unread
by at least some of our representatives, and was signed into law on
October 26. The Act was officially a response to 9/11, but as its
instant appearance and rushed passage indicate, it was made up of a set
of already existing right-wing hobby horses, quickly drafted
provisions, and expansions of law enforcement powers taken off an FBI
"wish list" (previously rejected by Congress). All these were swept
together by people who, like the President's men on Iraq, saw their
main chance when those buildings went down. As such, it stands in for
much of what happened "in response" to 9/11, including the invasion of
Iraq that the administration spent so much time tying untruthfully to
that day.
9/11 was the necessary engine without which so many things wouldn't
have happened, but the storm that breached the weakened and leaky dikes
of the republic had been gathering since at least the first days of the
Reagan administration (as recently released memos by judges Roberts and
Alito remind us). In those years, rollback -- briefly in the 1950s the
foreign policy of choice of zealous anti-Communists -- became domestic
policy as well. To be rolled back was every modest breakwater against
an imperial presidency that had been erected in the wake of the
Watergate scandal and the Vietnam War; then every Great Society program
of the 1960s; and finally, someday, everything for which the Democratic
New Deal had stood.
The attacks of 9/11 gave the Bush administration an opening to attempt
to sweep away the last obstacles in the path of a presidency dedicated
to the idea that no prohibition of any sort should stand in its way (or
domestically in the way of the Republican Party). The real costs of
that day came from the leeway a frightened public, a feeble Congress,
and a cowed media gave a suddenly emboldened administration to set in
motion an aggrandizing vision of a militarily-enforced Pax Americana,
at home as well as abroad. (Remember, this was the first administration
to create a military command -- Northcom
-- responsible only for North America.) In other words, the most
devastating costs of "9/11" we inflicted on ourselves in a way al-Qaeda
was incapable of doing.
Normally, any such proposition faces a problem. Unlike in lab
experiments, there's never a control group in human life against which
to measure the nature of change. Oddly enough, though, that doesn't
hold when it comes to 9/11. There turns out to be something against
which to measure the Bush response -- the nearly forgotten case of the
anthrax killer (or killers), known in law enforcement circles as "the
Amerithrax case."
Lost in the Hills of America
The anthrax attacks of 2001 are now so out of memory that it's hard to
recall the panic and fear caused by the appearance of those first
envelopes, spilling deadly powder and containing threatening letters.
But according to a LexisNexis search, between Oct. 4 and Dec. 4, 2001,
389 stories appeared in the New York Times
with "anthrax" in the headline. In that same period, 238 such stories
appeared in the Washington Post. That's the news equivalent of an
unending, high-pitched scream of horror.
Looked at with a cool eye, this buried nightmare could be seen as the
more threatening of the two attacks that year. The 9/11 assaults were,
of course, vastly more costly in lives -- almost 3,000 dead against
just 5 from anthrax inhalation. On the other hand, the al-Qaeda strike
only simulated a weapon-of-mass-destruction attack. You had to use some
sci-fi-style imagining -- and perhaps your knowledge that the old
Soviet Cold War weapons labs and arsenals were now ill-tended and
leaking material -- to conjure up a situation in which Osama and crew
might get their hands on a real version of the same. (The
administration, of course, did exactly this -- from Attorney General Ashcroft's
sudden announcement in Moscow of the arrest of Jose ("dirty-bomb")
Padilla to those Iraqi mushroom clouds that went off rhetorically over
American cities in speeches by the National Security Adviser, the President, the Vice President, and other top officials before we launched our invasion of Iraq.
With the anthrax killer, no sci-fi imaginings were necessary. He (she,
them) used an actual weapon of mass destruction -- highly refined
anthrax, the Ames strain that almost certainly fell out of the not-so-perfectly guarded
American Cold War weapons labs. And then, after the series of postal
attacks ended, the anthrax killer(s) remained at large not in the
mountains of Afghanistan, but somewhere in the United States -- with no
evidence that the supply of anthrax had been used up. Who needs to
imagine al-Qaeda "sleeper cells" here in the U.S., when you have such a
live wire in the neighborhood?
Keep in mind that visions of anthrax-like weaponry would soon mobilize
a nation in fear and hysteria around orange alerts and duct tape,
smallpox-inoculations and finally a war lest any of this stuff, or
anything faintly like it, drip out of the hands of Saddam Hussein and
into those of terrorists heading our way. And yet, by early 2002, the
first WMD attack in the U.S. was already slipping out of the news and
drifting from memory. Here was the stuff of a terrifying made-for-TV
movie or simply a trailer for the end of the world. It should have been
unforgettable.
Had the anthrax attacks been -- as the threatening letters,
ominously dated "9/11/01," that accompanied them implied -- the work of
an Islamic terrorist group, we would probably still be talking about it
-- and we would have no control group to measure 9/11 against. But
let's briefly review what did happen.
Just a week after the Twin Towers went down, the first of seven letters
filled with anthrax arrived not from the distant outlands of the
planet, but from Trenton, New Jersey. This first wave was sent to a
potpourri of media outlets: ABC, NBC, and CBS news as well as the New York Post and the National Enquirer
in Florida. They proclaimed, "Death to America. Death to Israel. Allah
is great." Two more, also postmarked from Trenton and dated October 9,
2001, were sent to Democratic Senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy.
These letters emptied prime-time TV newsrooms and, for the first time
since the British burned Washington in 1814, cleared the halls of
Congress while it was still in session. It should have been
unforgettable.
The cast of characters would come to include bumbling or recalcitrant FBI agents, intrepid disease investigators, amateur sleuths,
heroic postal workers, a wounded child, brain-damaged survivors, TV
personalities like Tom Brokaw, the top politicians of our nation, and
the most secretive weapons scientists, labs, and arsenals of the Cold War. Just to make matters more interesting, Steven Hatfill,
a bioweapons expert and for some time the main (as the Attorney General
put it) "person of interest" in the investigation, had access to the
U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID)
in Frederick, Maryland at Fort Dietrich where some of the country's
most secret bioweapons work was done. It should have been the case of
the century. It should have been unforgettable.
September 11, 2002 rolled around amid weeks of ceremonies and rites,
interviews with survivors, and memorial articles galore, while TV shows
and books poured out. But where were the survivor interviews with those
victimized by the anthrax killer(s)? Where were the books, the dramas,
the movies, the TV shows? Four years later, the victims and heroes of
9/11 are still being written about; their "sacred" ground in New York
is still being bitterly fought over, but when was the last time you saw
anything about the victims or the heroes -- mainly postal workers -- of
the anthrax attacks?
Within the last year, the ongoing investigation of the case has, according to the Washington Post,
been significantly downsized. The number of FBI agents assigned to it
has dropped from 31 to 21 and postal inspectors from 13 to 9. Many of
those remaining are now said to be "in the process of taking inventory.
The FBI and postal inspectors have spent months piecing together a
voluminous internal report that will review the scope of the
investigation…" It has "cold case, dead file" written all over it.
When it comes to costs, according to the Post, "at least 17
post offices and public office buildings were contaminated. Including
cleanup costs, an FBI document put the damage in excess of $1 billion."
And that doesn't account for the more subtle costs such as the role the
attacks played in panicking Congress into an invasion of Iraq. Would
the administration's various bizarre fears and alarms about the dangers
to us of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction have had such a realistic
ring to them if our representatives hadn't actually experienced a
bioweapons attack? It should have been unforgettable, but by some
mysterious process that has yet to be considered, the attacks were, in
a sense, "disappeared."
A Terror War of Choice
If, as an editor of a major newspaper, you were to draw a single
conclusion from this horrifying episode, it might be: Despite what
we've heard, the greatest WMD danger to Americans comes not from
impoverished Third World or rickety Middle Eastern rogue states, but
from the arsenals and weapons labs of the two former Cold War
superpowers. But nothing in the media coverage since then has indicated
anything of the sort. While, prewar, reporters prowled Iraqi nuclear
facilities, wrote major pieces on Iraq's "Dr. Germ," and brought down whole forests of trees in the service of WMD programs at Iraq's Tuwaitha or North Korea's Yongbyan, or on gassed dogs
in Afghanistan and the Iranian bomb that also wasn't, the Soviet and
American weapons labs, the Soviet and American Dr. Germs, the Ames
anthrax strain, and the anthrax killer hardly took out a tree or two.
When was the last time you read a major report on the state of American
biowarfare work? When was the last time you encountered a significant
story about the weapons labs at Fort Dietrich in suburban Maryland
where the Ames strain was evidently first researched or the Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah where it was produced and tested? How much attention has been given to recent contracts linked to Dugway that signal a desire
on the part of the U.S. military to "buy large quantities of anthrax,
in a controversial move that is likely to raise questions over its
commitment to treaties designed to limit the spread of biological
weapons"? When was the last time you read an article on whether the
Homeland Security Department or the Pentagon is attending to the
potential dangers of the American WMD arsenal? How much attention has
gone into the decrepit system for locking down Russian WMD stocks? The
odd news piece, nothing more. And while this administration spends
about a billion dollars a week on its war in Iraq, it has hardly had the will or interest to raise the few billion dollars a year needed to help lock-down the Russian arsenal.
Imagine that. If, of course, the President had chosen to launch his
"war" on terror against the anthrax killers, this might have been our
top priority.
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.
Copyright 2005 Tom Engelhardt