04.15.10

The Fear Book Won’t Sell

Posted in Bioterrorism, War On Terror at 8:16 am by George Smith

ProPublica won a Pulitzer very recently for good reporting.

This next example, however, isn’t the same. It’s just a nuisance piece describing a book on fear furnsihed by another retiree from the CIA.

Writes Sebastian Rotella here:

During the years he dueled terrorists overseas as a top operative for the CIA, Charles S. Faddis came to see the world through the eyes of the enemy …

What he saw — despite a vast campaign to fortify the United States after the Sept. 11 attacks — scared him. In fact, he says it scared him so much that he has written a new book, Willful Neglect: The Dangerous Illusion of Homeland Security [1].

“Amazingly…as you tour this nation and examine the prime targets that beg to be defended from terrorist attack, what you find, eight years later, is that virtually nothing meaningful has been done,” Faddis writes. “True, large new bureaucracies have been created and shiny, new office buildings constructed, but in terms of concrete measures which will stand in the way of determined, evil men, there is very, very little.”

Rotella, incidentally, is a former LA Times reporter — one who left the ship, probably because of obvious Sam Zell/Tribune mismanagement. But that’s another story.

Back to Faddis.

Books like his have been a dime-a-dozen since 9/11. Everyone who comes out of the national security structure, or who works as a natsec consultant, seems to get charity-case book contracts for deadeningly repetitive tomes on how we’re still unprepared and everything is at risk.

And for years after 9/11 newspapers were filled with articles featuring literally hundreds of people proclaiming how easy it was for terrorists to infiltrate and attack — just about anything. There has never been a shortage of national security men working out in their heads what manner of badness terrorists can do, or walking and probing the countryside for vulnerabilities.

I’ve seen it firsthand.

I did a literature search on this a few years ago for purposes of outlining the nature of it. I’ll get to that in a minute.

Faddis’s book is probably not going to sell.

This is a good thing.

Americans have been burned out on fear. They’ve been abused by people who make simplistic arguments, who believe they should get some kind of award for making statements similar to this one, from Faddis:

[He] asserts, “long lines of railcars packed with the most dangerous substances on earth sit unattended all over our nation.”

What’s the answer then? Spend more money for armed guards on trains? Harden tank cars even more than they already are?

(Believe me, rail accidents are more likely to happen — and do happen — than terrorist attack. Chemical containers tend to be hardened so that they don’t all rupture catastrophically when a collision or derailment occurs. But sometimes they do and bad things happen. But it’s not often and there has never been a deadly Bhopal-scale disaster — not a rail car but a factory-size — release of toxic chemicals in this country.)

“When Faddis’ book was released in February, the reaction included accolades from nuclear safety watchdogs and from a security executive who met with Faddis to tell him the critique had been helpful,” writes Rotella.

Damned by faint praise, another harsh fact is that everyone has seen this stuff before, many times. At one point stories about attacking nuclear reactors, or being able to steal spent fuel rods which would cinder anyone getting near them trying to carry them away, were almost routine.

In real life, there isn’t anyone, who when presented with such a book as Faddis’, who won’t say ‘that’s helpful’ publicly.

What you don’t hear them say, sub-vocally, is: “Go away now. We’ve had enough.”

The method of writing a book on raging insecurity is lazy, even though Faddis did this:

For his new book, Faddis spent months on reconnaissance missions to likely terror targets in U.S infrastructure: dams, rail transportation, military bases, biological research labs and nuclear, chemical and liquid natural gas plants. He roamed along fences, visited authorized areas and otherwise tested security measures. Although his covert experience helped, he obeyed self-imposed ground rules and tried to maintain the perspective of an ordinary visitor.

The ProPublica article, for example, takes no account that there simply aren’t enough terrorists to take advantage of all the opportunities present in the book. Or that life, in general, is fraught with vulnerability. And that blowing up an office building won’t bring down the republic. Or that Biblical-scale disasters are, with the exception of Chernobyl, an exchange of nuclear weapons or WWII-style strategic incendiary bombing campaigns, almost purely only within the power of nature. You know — earthquakes, volcanoes, Katrinas — these sorts of things.

But hey, someone could walk into an office or federal building and just open fire! Or someone could crash a vehicle or airplane into the same! Or someone could take anthrax from a gold standard flask of anthrax spores at a top lab!

Oh, wait…

It also pays no mind to the idea that people and agencies are frequently resilient and valiant in the face of disasters. The only thing you have to know from guys like Faddis is that it’s a dangerous world and the government (and an entire laundry list of others) haven’t protected us well from the boogeymen who can do anything.

Remember, I said I’d get back to the vulnerability-everywhere meme, which was written about extensively years ago.

In August 2006, I reprinted this thing, a piece already a year old from Globalsecurity.Org:

The newsmedia, when dealing with potential problems, like the threats posed by terrorists . . . has an extremely poor track record. It does not ask hard questions of anyone. It simply acts as a conduit for the delivery of nightmare claims. Employing a Nexis search, [I] was able to quickly find around one hundred stories devoted to spreading permutations from the last two years containing some fashion of the assumption or assertion that “it’s easy for terrorists” to bring on calamity using a multitude of plans and practices.

Rail road yard security is a joke, it’s easy for terrorists to walk right in. .50 caliber sniper rifles, powerful enough to shoot down airplanes…are easy for terrorists to acquire [but even easier for Americans to get]. It’s [still] too easy for terrorists to get across the border. A new driver’s license bill is bad because it makes it easy for terrorists to have them. A blackout reveals how easy it might be for terrorists to knock down the electrical grid. Colorado is vulnerable to terror because federal focus on big cities has made it easy for terrorists to strike in landlocked states. It is easy for terrorists to contaminate water so [a scientist’s] new sensor system is a necessity. Be alert for farm terror because it is easy for the enemy to strike there. [A state] [leads or lags] in bioterror readiness and it’s a matter for concern because it is easy for terrorists … Assume a bioterror attack is coming because it is easy for terrorists…

By themselves, they occasionally appear lucid and reasonable. Pile them together and the aggregate is astonishing. The message is everything is vulnerable and terrorists are capable of anything. Because of one terrible day and the cliche “9/11 changed everything,” devastating terrorist strikes have been theorized as transferable to almost any imaginable attack scenario.

After I read a stack of these articles, I thought for a moment I was in the wrong business and should devote a couple months and publications to predicting the ways in which terrorists could attack. Terrorists could imitate the methodology of the Washington sniper and his accomplice. Why haven’t they? Terrorists could go into the forests and high chaparrals of southern California during fire season and ignite calamitous blazes, making national news and sewing panic. Local arsonists do it. It would be easy for terrorists. Gang members from central Los Angeles shoot into cars on the freeways. Surely that would be easy for terrorists… [Anti-terror celebrity Richard Clarke did do this in a long piece for the Atlantic Monthly. Clarke is actually now in the business of writing books about what terrorists can do, like clockwork, every two years. He alternates between fiction and non-fiction, the only difference between the two being there is more dialog in the former.]

It’s a good game. It needs to take no account of what terrorists are actually doing, no knowledge of what tough to get human intelligence sources and materials may show, or historically — what preferences, capabilities, experiences and limitations terrorists carry with them. It can assume that there are more terrorists expertly trained in many degrees and methods of mayhem and working themselves into place than there are actual terrorists. For the anti-terrorism effort, it is only necessary to assign a simple universality to fragility and vulnerability and degrees of omniscience and unlimited resources to the adversary. It is easy, so to speak, to think of things that are easy for terrorists to do.

. . . If one looks at an article published for the August/September 2005 edition of the American Journalism Review, one found a lamenting over the lack of good reporting on homeland security. But in the first few paragraphs, the article promptly fell into the same type of reporting it purported to criticize. The review delivered a titillating and speculative disaster porn scenario, trotting out a reporter to furnish claims about how easy it would be for a terrorist to kill — again thousands — by sabotaging a tank of anhydrous ammonia at a chemical plant.

“This particular killer goes for the eyeballs and turns skin into a gooey mass. Respiratory systems are paralyzed by excruciating pain,” wrote the publication. “…thousands of people would have died. I have no doubt of that,” said a journalist who was a source.

And “To attack [America’s electrical] grid, a terrorist need only study publicly available trade journals, which explain where new facilities are constructed,” again cried an op-ed piece in the New York Times on August 13, 2005. “A terrorist could then disable a particular system by destroying the computers and relays housed in the poorly protected building.”

Article after article can be found warning of dire consequences. No publication is too small, no facet of life too obscure.

The publication Arkansas Business, for example, furnished warning about attacks on rice.

“It would be very easy for terrorists to introduce anthrax or even something as simple as rat poison into rice being exported to the United States,” said a rice businessman for the paper.

“A shipload of contaminated rice, distributed throughout the nation, would be a security nightmare, creating not only a panic but possibly an economic meltdown.” (The subtext: Buy American grown rice, as only it can be guaranteed to be inspected, pure and clean.)

In any case, the hot button issue is again anthrax, the ultimate weapon, as has already been read, possibly to be blown through cities, worked into beef, poured into fruit juice, or also distributed in bags of rice.

And if not anthrax-tainted rice, how about lunches for school children?

At the end of July 2005, USA Today ran with the brief “School lunches a terrorist target? USDA calls meals ‘particularly vulnerable.'” “Currently, authorities are looking at how a popular lunchroom staple, chicken nuggets, may be susceptible to tampering,” wrote the newspaper. “Federal officials have distributed a food safety checklist to school lunch providers, who must show evidence of a food safety plan…”

Catastrophe-causing poisoning materials for terrorists are apparently available off the shelf everywhere, too, their capability facile.

“Robert Buchanan, a senior science adviser with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, said mounting an attack on the food system would not require a great deal of knowledge or sophistication, and the result could be catastrophic,” wrote the Birmingham Post-Herald in July 2005 in the article, “Experts say food supply could be hit.”

“The number of biological or chemical agents that could be used in an attack [is huge],” said the government advisor to the reporter. “I’m amazed how many agents are available over the Internet.”

[W]hile such news often departs from reality, it generates its own truth and consequences by filtering into reports delivered by expert government, corporate and academic agencies. The action of this process as well as the close uncritical embracing of it dissipates organization into thousands of efforts going in different directions, reducing security to a chaotic scramble for money by crowds of experts and officials, all trying to paint scary scenarios because the more forbidding the manner of doom the easier it is to command attention.

Such collections of news stories and claims frequently lead to hearings, policy, entrenched beliefs, and funding of no immediately visible benefit to average Americans. Indeed, it is not unreasonable to put forward the distinctly not radical idea that given the recent national and local failures in the face of catastrophe, the needy would still take it in the shorts if all that was claimed to be very insecure to terrorists was made secure.

I concluded that the packaging and delivery of doom and terror stories comprised rigidly casted scripts which destroyed careful deliberation. They inspire a belief that everything must be secured and that nothing is secure. They lead to the perception or even conviction that the work of battening down the nation will never be over.

They fostered belief that it is rational and healthy to be in fear because everyone is threatened, “the world is not a safe place,” and maniacs can and will attack fruit juice, school lunches in Iowa, chicken nuggets or tubs of cafeteria spaghetti.

“[Faddis’s] book reviews a litany of security flaws in the bio-weapons research world revealed by the 2001 anthrax attacks, which were allegedly the work of a disgruntled scientist, and criticizes the dramatic increase in the number of labs handling lethal substances,” writes Rotella.

No, actually, the DoJ/FBI Amerithrax investigation and report did that. And we’ve all seen this but despite the fact that the worst bioterrorist in history was an American insider, the bioterror defense industry — of which he was a key part — continues to expand.

Geezus.

Here you have another perfect example of misguided book publishing, one which asks the gullible to believe we need another where so many have already been.

I’m betting life’s going to punt on Charles S. Faddis’s Willful Neglect: The Dangerous Illusion of Homeland Security.

It will, suitably, subject it to an earned ‘willful neglect.’

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