The Heart of the Beast

Gabriel Matthew Schivone: In a recent interview, Abdel Bari Atwan, author and editor of the London-based Arabic daily newspaper Al-Quds Al Arabi, said that President Bush is not ending terrorism nor is he weakening it, as he claims in one of his strongest assertions with regard to his so-called “War on Terror.” Rather al-Qaeda now has powerfully developed into more of an ideology than an organization. As Atwan describes it, al-Qaeda is expanding like Kentucky Fried Chicken, opening franchises all over the world. “That’s the problem,” he says. “The Americans are no safer. Their country is a fortress now, the United States of Security.” Is this accurate?

Noam Chomsky: Except for the last sentence, it’s accurate. There’s good reason to think that the United States is very vulnerable to terrorist attacks. That’s not my opinion, that’s the opinion of U.S. intelligence, of specialists of nuclear terror like Harvard professor Graham Allison, and former defense secretary Robert McNamara and others, who have warned that the probability of even a nuclear attack in the United States is not trivial. So, it’s not a fortress.

One of the things that Bush hasn’t been doing is improving security. So, for example, if you look at the government commission after 9/11, one of its recommendations—which is a natural one—is to improve security of the U.S.–Canadian border. I mean, if you look at that border, it’s very porous. You or I could walk across it somewhere with a suitcase holding components of a nuclear bomb. The Bush administration did not follow that recommendation. What it did instead was fortify the Mexican border, which was not regarded as a serious source of potential terrorism. They in fact slowed the rate of growth of border guards on the Canadian border.

But quite apart from that, the major part of Atwan’s comment is quite correct. Bush administration programs have not been designed to reduce terror. In fact, they’ve been designed in a way—as was anticipated by intelligence analysts and others—to increase terror.

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# posted by Crooked : 6:01 PM