Well, now we know. Scientists have documented that the Bush/Cheney administration has been a greater threat to Americans’ health and safety than Osama Bin Laden and his terror band.
Specifically, The New York Times, in its science section today, reports that a new study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry has found that while the risk to Americans of dying at the hands of a terrorist was roughly equal to the chance of “drowning in a toilet,” the risk of cardiovascular disease among people who are frightened about the threat of terrorism is 300-500% higher than for people who are not worried.
What this means is that the Bush/Cheney administration, by constantly hyping the nation’s fears of terror through the use of everything from daily color-coded terror alerts, to absurd inspection procedures at airline terminals and parcel post restrictions, is actually scaring some of us to death.
And for what?
From the moment those planes hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon back in September 2001, Bush, Cheney and their allies—Republican and Democrat—in Congress and the media have been peppering us with warnings that the “bad guys” are out to kill us, to destroy our way of life, and to defeat America.
It has been a ludicrous idea from the start. The idea that small gang of guys from the Middle East could bring the mightiest nation that the world has ever known to its knees, or even significantly threaten the safety and security of the people of the United States is simply absurd and laughable. Why, even the detonation of a small smuggled nuclear device in or near an American city, should such a thing ever come to pass, would be less of a threat to the nation as a whole than the eruption of one of our many active volcanoes—say Mt. Rainier or Mt. Hood, or the Yellowstone caldera—or an 8 or 9-point earthquake in San Francisco or Los Angeles. And those natural disasters are probably more likely than the explosion of a terrorist nuke.
Yet Bush, Cheney and other charlatans like Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and the former senator and now Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Rick Santorum continue to do the scare routine, warning that we are in grave danger—from Al Qaeda or Iran getting The Bomb, to Venezuela buying military aircraft from Brazil, to Cuba manufacturing dangerous biological weapons.
I have been stunned at the response of my fellow Americans to this blatant nonsense. Shortly after the Twin Towers went down, my local school district announced the cancellation for the entire year of all school trips! There was a fear among parents and members of the local school authorities that the buses carrying them to museums or the zoo might pose tempting targets for terrorists! Our kids were also treated to scary “intruder lockdowns” where they’d be locked with their teachers in their classrooms while local cops dressed in black SWAT gear and armed with assault rifles played army in the hallways looking for imaginary terrorists.
I’ve gone on plane flights where I’ve had to wait in line for an hour while Transportation Security Administration guards check the tiny shoes of six-month-old infants to make sure they weren’t shoe bombs, and have had to surrender countless bottles of mouthwash and drinking water and tubes of toothpaste, all suspected of being smuggled explosives. (I was also honored with an “S” mark on my boarding pass a couple of times, which meant I was pulled aside for special inspection for fear I might be a terrorist myself.)
All of this nonsense, however, is coming with a price. I can laugh because I know it’s nonsense. But some people aren’t laughing. They’re living in fear. And that fear is causing them to suffer cardiovascular disease, according to this new study.
Of course, that’s only the tip of the iceberg, really, when it comes to the cost of the Washington terror scam.
American businesses have spent literally tens of billions of dollars—maybe hundreds of billions of dollars—on security measures, fearing terror attacks on their installations, or on their communications, or on Wall Street. Thousands of foreign science students and scientists have been banned from the US—or even deported--for fear they might be terrorists in training. Municipalities and states have spent billions in taxpayer dollars on security that they simply don’t need. My little town of Upper Dublin, just north of Philadelphia, with just some 26,000 people, has its own police SWAT team, for Pete’s sake, complete with a large gray SWAT vehicle—a panel truck loaded with heavy combat firepower capable of repelling a small third-world army. I wonder how many teachers that money could have hired? Maybe they wouldn’t have had to let the elementary music program go down the tubes.
I haven't mentioned the whole $1-2 trillion War in Iraq, which was all the result of presidential and vice presidential scare mongering.
And of course, that’s just the financial cost of scare mongering. We’ve also given up most of our Bill or Rights, and even some more ancient rights, like the right of Habeas Corpus. And we’re about to give up our entire right to privacy if the government gets its way and introduces a national identity card. How far away are we from having to get injected with identity chips?
All this panic and fear, and yet we still sing this national anthem that calls America “the home of the brave”?
Dave Lindorff, a columnist for Counterpunch, is author of several recent books ("This Can't Be Happening! Resisting the Disintegration of American Democracy" and "Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal"). His latest book, coauthored with Barbara Olshanshky, is "The Case for Impeachment: The Legal Argument for Removing President George W. Bush from Office (St. Martin's Press, May 2006). His writing is available at http://www.thiscantbehappening.net
Who are the Americans who are so frightened of terrorists that they'll allow the loss of our civil liberties, spend hundreds of billions of dollars for heightened security, and trillions on foreign wars? How many of you are there?
Please raise your hand so I know who you are.
Do you really believe statements like Mitt Romney's "The most fundamental civil right is the right to stay alive", because if you do and if you just want to stay alive there might be better ways to do it.
Is it that you're scared of dying, or are you just scared of dying from terrorists? I'd really like you to sort it out because you're costing the rest of us our civil liberties, a bunch of our money, and the lives of our loved ones that get sent off to war.
There are lots of ways to die and a terrorist attack is one of the least likely. Consider a visit to the Center of Disease Control website and a look at their list of the most common causes for death in America. It puts things in perspective.
For instance, #7 on their list shows that 65,000 people die each year from Alzheimer’s. How about we cure Alzheimer’s?As long as you're prepared to allow the government to borrow tons of money trying to keep you alive, do you think a 1,000 to 10,000 times increase in Alzheimer's research funding might just do it? You could start with, say, $500 billion, and if that doesn't work, throw a full trillion at it (I'd think you might seriously consider this, because 4 million of you are going to die from Alzheimer’s, and that's just NUMBER SEVEN on the list)
Automobile accidents killed 42,636 Americans last year. Their families were just as shocked and shattered as those families affected by 9/11. Did they have a fundamental right to stay alive? Do you think a reasonable course of action might be for everyone to give up driving and take a bright orange TSA bus to work? Or maybe that's too extreme; perhaps a reasonable compromise would be to just institute a national 35 MPH speed limit in order to protect American lives.
Of those auto accidents, about half were alcohol-related. Shouldn't we seriously consider repealing the 21st Amendment and allow the 18th to prevail again?
Or number #11 on the CDC list: 32,000 people commit suicide each year. I know your dilemma. There isn't really a very good way for the government to protect you from yourself, is there? You're just going to have to take on personal responsibility, because if you don't, you're just going to have to live with the fact that you're more likely to kill yourself than be killed by a terrorist.
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Robert Knowles (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 5 diaries, 24 comments)
on Tuesday, January 15, 2008 at 4:07:51 PM
NEOCONS on one side ENVIRONMENTAL RADICALS on the other...
Besides being told we are going to die in terrorist bomb blasts, being told by politicians that the government is wiretapping, our grocery lists, we also have people running around saying that we are all going to drown or be incinerated by the global warming issue!
so far, nothing has come of the search for weapons that could blow us to bits.... Politicians who said they never knew about wiretaps were and are briefed every day on the progress/LACK THEREOF... And while we keep reading how bad global warming is, we are also learning that the data the alarmists are using is faulty at best.
Why are they doing it? What could be so important that they keep the people of the US terrified? Could it be that our government wants us to give it more of our money? Give up more of our rights? Well, considering the head of the GAO has stated, point blank that the US keeps 3 sets of books, each with a part of the spending and borrowing.... Why? So that nobody can really find out what dire straites the US happens to be in Financially. The Republicans don't want to deal with it, because they like business as usual, and we can't stop spending on their pet projects, that would be unseemly... The DEMS are not interested in the republican spending issues, those should be cut, according to the DEMS.. HOWEVER, there is plenty of NEW spending that MUST be done instead....
The Repubs and Dems are basically driving the US economy into the ground, and once it is there, there will be no more anything!
Politicians are trying desperately to keep the people focused on so many different underhanded deals so that they can get away with what they want to do... HOWEVER, what they fail to realize, is that less than 7% of the people living in the US are actually interested SOMEWHAT in what is going on, and much less actually wants to do something about it.
People like Ron Paul, who are actually talking about it are being marginalized to the point where nobody is listening. People better start listening, and people better start holding the politicians accountable for destroying our financial future, as a nation, because long before anyone dies from global warming, people will begin starving from not being able to afford FOOD...
Ciao, CZ
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steve scheetz (1 articles, 0 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 406 comments)
on Tuesday, January 15, 2008 at 5:48:53 PM
September of 2005, marching in DC, becoming quite ill within 36 hrs of the march, violently ill within several days of the march and then continuosly ill for weeks on end after the march.
6 days after the march the CDC announces 6 of the 12 bio censors in the DC mall area went off the very day of the march for the very first time (ever to this day) for Tulemaria aka rabbit fever. The CDC's working theory was that all the feet on the ground kicked up all that dust, what they forgot to mention was it was raining (not puring, just raining) that day so there wasn't any dust.
The CDC still to this day says no one was reported ill with Tulemaria.
I was under the care of doctors and ingesting cipro for more than two months.
It's little things like that that make people afraid...lucky for me it didn't stop me, but I know several who it did stop. It actually made me stronger as an activist and I began using my real name and being as public about what I do as I can.
Oh, did I mention that was also the day the Government (after months of hyping a potential avian flu pandemic) began Operation Granite Shadow in the streets of DC; a drill enacting what to do in the event of a need for quarantine and marshal law...yeah we woke up to that lil announcement on CNN as we were getting ready to hit the streets.
It is our own Government we need to fear over any *terrorist*.
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Cheri Roberts-Piper (16 articles, 15 quicklinks, 9 diaries, 430 comments)
on Tuesday, January 15, 2008 at 7:53:13 PM
While I haven't read the actual research paper, the NYT's article seems to suggest that it was thorough. After reading the article, my only concern is how the researchers controlled for other stresses within the sample population. If you're a worrier by nature, terrorism is just another worry. But if you're generally not a worrier and you have a fear of terrorism, then the researchers' claims appear true. Still and as the article suggests, only 6% of the sample population fell into this "scared silly to the point of health compromise" category.
I think this thought within the NYT article is important:
"Of course, statistics of any sort, even when the numbers are rock solid, don't mean much to people when they're assessing threats. Risk researchers have found that even when people know the numbers, they're less worried about death tolls than about how the deaths occur. They have good reasons - called "rival rationalities" - for fearing catastrophes that kill large numbers at once because these events affect the whole community and damage the social fabric."
You can build an airplane that would survive a crash, but it would be very economical because the ticket price would be exorbitant. What the issue of terrorism and fear, like a great many other fears and concerns we might have, comes down to is our individual and collective acceptances of risk. Or put another way, "What size tragedy are we willing to endure given the relatively low probability of the risk being realized?"
And, thus, we enter the wonderful world of risk assessments – a statistician's (or bean counter's) Vision of Nirvana.
In response to the gist of the article (i.e., enough of this fear stuff because I'm not buying it and it's adversely impacting my health), I'll counter with a "what if" question, which I tend to ignore, but it seems relevant here:
What would your reaction be to an actual and successful terrorist attack on American soil and of the scope of 9/11?
This question presumes no government involvement that results in an "inside job" allegation. But I think many people would not just be fearful of what will happen next, but they'd also be saddened and (my guess) very, very angry. Why? They expected the government to protect them and not let such an attack happen again (even though the odds said it would happen). In almost an instant, what you'd see is a loose sense of fear (a malaise, of sorts) turn into rage and anger in the collective sense. "You knew that such a thing could happen and yet you did nothing to warn us about it?!?"
"The homeland security dilemma represents the post-9/11 equivalent for domestic politics in the war on terrorism. The paper's central argument can be summed up by the following counterintuitive thesis: the more security you have, the more security you will need. Not because enhancing security makes terrorism more likely (although the incentive for terrorists to attack may increase as extremists feel duty-bound to demonstrate their ongoing relevance), but because enormous investments in security inevitably raise public expectations and amplify public outrage after subsequent failures."
Therefore, the concern here is as much to do about fear as it does with our own expectations of others, following a future realization of a risk.
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Tom Murphy (2 articles, 3 quicklinks, 8 diaries, 1266 comments)
on Wednesday, January 16, 2008 at 10:04:06 AM
These are excellent points, but consider other countries
In Israel and Palestine, terror has been a routine part of life for generations. People don't run their lives around worrying about it. When a terrorist blows up a bus, people don't stop riding buses. When a terrorist blows up a nightclub, kids don't stop going to nightclubs. The government is expected to do something to defend people, but it doesn't do pointless, bothersome stuff just to make it look like it's doing something (for example, it puts armed marshalls on every El Al Flight, and that's not symbolism).
Similarly in Spain and in Northern Ireland. People in these places are used to a certain level of terrorist violence. They don't become catatonic over it.
The problem in the US is that some people want no risk (an impossibility), and they are willing to surrender much in a vain effort to get it. And the government is catering to that sentiment. Instead of telling people to buck up as the British did under the V-1, V-2 and bomber onslaught from Germany in WWII, our government tells people to be afraid.
And many people comply with that request.
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Dave Lindorff (293 articles, 0 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 141 comments)
on Wednesday, January 16, 2008 at 10:49:20 AM
