<nettime> Homeland Security: The Untold Story

["Kermit Snelson" <ksnelson@subjectivity.com>]

Early this year, a commission chaired by former US senators Warren Rudman
and Gary Hart presented to the US Congress a report entitled "Road Map for
National Security: Imperative for Change."  This commission, the US
Commission on National Security/ 21st Century, was chartered by Congress to
produce "the most comprehensive examination of the structures and processes
of the U.S. national security apparatus since the core legislation governing
it was passed in 1947."  Here's a passage from that report, presented to
Congress several months before the WTC attacks:

    "The combination of unconventional weapons proliferation with the
persistence of international terrorism will end the relative invulnerability
of the U.S. homeland to catastrophic attack. To deter attack against the
homeland in the 21st century, the United States requires a new triad of
prevention, protection, and response. Failure to prevent mass-casualty
attacks against the American homeland will jeopardize not only American
lives but U.S. foreign policy writ large. It would undermine support for
U.S. international leadership and for many of our personal freedoms, as
well. Indeed, the abrupt undermining of U.S. power and prestige is the worst
thing that could happen to the structure of global peace in the next quarter
century, and nothing is more likely to produce it than devastating attacks
on American soil."

The report also includes a sophisticated analysis of how recent
technological developments require a radical revision of 20th-century
military doctrine:

    "In the Internet age, for example, information technologies may be used
to empower communities and advance freedoms, but they can also empower
political movements led by charismatic leaders with irrational premises.
Such men and women in the 21st century will be less bound than those of the
20th by the limits of the state, and less obliged to gain large industrial
capabilities in order to wreck [sic] havoc. For example, a few people with
as little as a $50,000 investment may manage to produce and spread a
genetically-altered pathogen with the potential to kill millions of people
in a matter of months. Clearly, the threshold for small groups or even
individuals to inflict massive damage on those they take to be their enemies
is falling dramatically."

The report then proposes solutions that go far beyond a simple
reorganization of the Coast Guard and Border Patrol.  The report outlines,
in effect, a new vision of national security based on protecting, not
weakening, parliaments and civil liberties:

    "Congress is crucial, as well, for guaranteeing that homeland security
is achieved within a framework of law that protects the civil liberties and
privacy of American citizens. We are confident that the U.S. government can
enhance national security without compromising established Constitutional
principles. But in order to guarantee this, we must plan ahead. In a major
attack involving contagious biological agents, for example, citizen
cooperation with government authorities will depend on public confidence
that those authorities can manage the emergency. If that confidence is
lacking, panic and disorder could lead to insistent demands for the
temporary suspension of some civil liberties. That is why preparing for the
worst is essential to protecting individual freedoms during a national
crisis."

It also calls for a defense of the nation-state against the vision of
"Globalism Triumphant:"

    "But the Globalism Triumphant scenario divides opinion, partly because
it is the hardest to envision, and partly because it functions as a template
for the projection of conflicting political views.  Some observers, for
example, believe that the end of the nation-state is upon us, and that this
is a good thing, for, in this view, nationalism is the root of racism and
militarism. The eclipse of the national territorial state is at any rate,
some argue, an inevitable development given the very nature of an
increasingly integrated world."

    "We demur. To the extent that a more integrated world economically is
the best way to raise people out of poverty and disease, we applaud it. We
also recognize the need for unprecedented international cooperation on a
range of transnational problems. But the state is the only venue discovered
so far in which democratic principles and processes can play out reliably,
and not all forms of nationalism have been or need be illiberal. We
therefore affirm the value of American sovereignty as well as the political
and cultural diversity ensured by the present state system. Within that
system the United States must live by and be ready to share its political
values-but it must remember that those values include tolerance for those
who hold different views."

The full text of the Hart-Rudman report is available at the US House of
Representatives Web site at:
http://www.house.gov/reform/ns/107th_testimony/road_map_for_national_securit
y.htm.)

The response of the US media to these authoritative, profound and shocking
statements by a distinguished commission given a charter of historic scope?
Nothing.  They went entirely unreported. On September 13, Arianna Huffington
wrote in Salon.com: "At the time the report came out, the media were too
busy ferreting out the latest info on the supposed defacing of the White
House by Gore loyalists and, later, on Gary Condit, over-age Little Leaguers
and shark attacks ... But after Sept. 11, it seems fair to say that the real
danger to Americans isn't shark attacks. And the sad fact is that the media
should have known what the real danger was -- and should have told us ... In
our modern, information-drenched times, the power of the media has increased
as dramatically as the number of people wielding that power has shrunk. We
are at their mercy. They set the agenda, they decide what we as a nation
should be concentrating on. The First Amendment wasn't intended as a license
to make billions. It was there to guarantee that the people stay informed.
And when the media fail at this job, we all suffer."
(http://www.salon.com/news/col/huff/2001/09/13/media/index.html)

Kermit Snelson

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