A Short History of Stupid Read online

  Terror and Nothingness: The existentialism of the War on Terror

  Why does such palpable and expensive Stupid flourish in absurd national security policies costing trillions and damaging the fabric of Western countries while going virtually unnoticed?

  Western societies managed to get through the Cold War without much of the rampant Stupid of the War on Terror, despite our foe in that conflict being a sophisticated, modern dictatorship with the capacity to completely destroy us. Western governments spent more on defence then than now—the US was spending well over 5 per cent of GDP on defence in the 1980s compared to around 4.5 per cent until recently—but spent far less on ‘homeland security’ and intelligence (Cold War intelligence agencies were, in any event, notoriously riddled with double agents and profoundly incompetent). They had no need for mass surveillance of the kind East Germany established, now replicated in electronic form by the NSA, GCHQ and other Anglophone agencies. Nor did they need laws that dramatically curtailed basic rights: indeed, it was the very economic, political and social freedoms of Western liberal democracies, in contrast to the oppressive conditions of the Soviet Union, that played a key role in undermining the latter.

  One reason for the difference is a toxic mixture of risk aversion on the part of politicians and risk incomprehension on the part of voters and journalists. As any number of economists, psychologists, neuroscientists and statisticians have demonstrated, humans are wired to make rapid, rather than accurate, risk assessments, given early humans needed the former more than the latter. We thus tend to overstate the risk to ourselves of things that are unusual, that we can see affecting us personally, that are beyond our control, that aren’t associated with anything positive and which are unfamiliar. Contrarily, we underestimate the risks from things we are familiar with, over which we have a degree of control or which are a by-product of positive things. The prospect of dying in a car accident—which in Australia is around ten thousand times more likely than dying as a result of terrorism—is apparently far less worrying to people than perishing at the hands of violent religious fanatics; ditto the chance of being murdered, which is about forty times greater than dying at the hands of a terrorist. Our different reactions to the Cold War and the War on Terror are thus partly a difference between a world in which the chief threat, the Soviet Union, was a familiar part of our mental furniture, while Islamic terrorists are a sinister and unfathomable Other.*

  That your average citizen doesn’t understand risk, or how additional security laws or spending only provide marginal reductions in already negligible levels of risk, isn’t surprising. But, political leaders, if dim-witted, still have access to high-quality advice on those subjects and many others, and thus have no such excuse. But their probability calculus is a political one: the remote chance of a major terrorist attack (in contrast to the much higher chance of ordinary low-casualty events like road accidents) must be treated seriously because of the political ramifications if one occurred.

  During the early stages of the War on Terror, politicians and security officials around the world repeatedly referred to terrorism as an ‘existential’ threat. Its repetition suggested the word was in danger of coming free from its actual definition and drifting off, like ‘decimate’ and ‘genocide’, into a far vaguer meaning—in this case, ‘really bad’. Terrorism is by definition not an existential threat, but limited in impact even compared to conventional war. The Cold War was an existential threat, given all of humanity could have been obliterated through one small error, as nearly happened in 1963 and 1983. But terrorism is an existential threat for politicians, since any major attack would inflict, beyond the death toll or economic impact, serious political damage on those in power at the time.

  Skilful politicians, however, also see opportunity in threat (the Chinese word for ‘crisis’ also means ‘opportunity’).* The War on Terror has thus been ruthlessly exploited by politicians both to extend government powers and for electoral gain, most famously when the Bush Administration pressured Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge to elevate the terror threat level just before the 2004 presidential election in order to boost Dubya’s chances in a tight race.

  The Stupid produced by the War on Terror is thus a repulsive combination of voter ignorance of the basic rules of probability and politicians’ awareness of self-interest. That’s why anti-terror policies so strongly emphasise security theatre—elaborate and often very expensive measures, like airport body scanners, that create an impression of greater security without adding significantly to it. The primary effect of the airport X-ray body scanners used until recently in the US (they’ve now been replaced with millimetre wave machines) seems to have been irradiating people, given the evidence of cancer clusters among TSA staff, and the invasion of privacy—a former Transportation Security Administration official admitted that TSA staff racially profiled passengers and routinely gathered to mock passengers’ body images on scanners. However, politicians are evidently convinced the public rates scanners highly: during the swine flu hysteria of 2009, the Australian government installed thermal scanners at airports, insisting they would detect people with elevated body temperature.* Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent in the United States and Australia installing body scanners at airports, without a cost–benefit analysis ever having been done, money that would have been better spent separating traffic at well-known highway blackspots, or providing better health services in regional communities, if the intention was to save lives rather than create the illusion of greater security.

  A system designed for Stupid

  Stupid isn’t a rare exception when it comes to the War on Terror: the primary institutional tools of national security are automatically predisposed towards absurdity. Intelligence and law enforcement agencies in Western countries are subjected to far less oversight than other government agencies, meaning corruption, incompetence and unauthorised or illegal activity are far less likely to be exposed than elsewhere in bureaucracies. (Contrary to the traditional conservative view that government bodies must be subjected to the most forensic scrutiny in the way they spend public money and regulate industry, it is usually the left that pushes for security and intelligence agencies, and the companies they keep in business, to be subjected to public and political scrutiny.) Instead, they operate with minimal scrutiny except via rubber-stamp secret courts or parliamentary oversight committees that work behind closed doors, meaning the evidence and arguments about the activities of intelligence and security agencies can never be publicly scrutinised.

  As a consequence, intelligence and security agencies are particularly prone to misjudgements that result from a lack of concern about how internal decisions and policies may be viewed externally. It might be small things, like Australia’s foreign intelligence service using an aid program as cover for bugging the Cabinet of East Timor for the commercial advantage of Australian companies.* It might be serious blunders, like the FBI’s cross-border gunrunning operations, only exposed after a law enforcement official was killed as a result. Or it might be something profoundly wrong, like the CIA spending millions of dollars trying to develop mind-control drugs via monstrously unethical experiments—frequently on unwitting subjects—that resulted in a number of deaths over nearly two decades. Lack of scrutiny creates fertile ground for Stupid.

  It also leads to abuse and mission creep. In the wake of Edward Snowden’s revelations, the NSA admitted that a number of its staff had confessed to using its vast surveillance apparatus to stalk women—though it only knew of those who had admitted doing it. Snowden also revealed that intimate photos picked up by NSA internet surveillance were often shared among staff. This comes on top of previous revelations that NSA staff had listened in to the intimate conversations of US defence personnel and journalists for titillation a decade ago, and that NSA staff broke US laws thousands of times in the operation of the Obama Administration’s mass-surveillance programs. Edward Snowden’s revelations have also demonstrated how the NSA and
other Anglophone intelligence agencies, despite the ‘War on Terror’ hyping of their role, in fact devote vast resources to economic espionage against even close allies.

  Abuse of the intelligence-gathering powers that have been dramatically expanded in the War on Terror are thus not the problem of ‘a few rotten apples’ but an inevitable outcome of a culture of secrecy, which fosters abuse and incompetence. When there is no fear of oversight and accountability of the kind that lurks in the minds of most bureaucrats, incompetence, corruption and abuse follow more readily. It also leads to misjudgements and a tendency to use power merely because it is available to be used, not because its use is the most sensible means to achieve an organisation’s goals: NSA spying on the leaders of most of the US’s allies, and the efforts of Australia’s intelligence agencies to listen in to the phone calls of the Indonesian president, have inflicted significant damage on the national interest of both countries, for no clear gain. In a direct parallel with the Iraq War outcome, the NSA’s deliberate strategy of degrading internet encryption standards has actually made us less secure, by helping the cybercriminals who are supposed to be one of its targets, while the revelations of its surveillance have inflicted major economic damage on US IT companies, which have demanded that its activities be curtailed so that they can restore trust in the eyes of their customers.

  Lack of, and resistance to, accountability is also a reason why humour is regarded with such malice in national security operations. Humour is, at least in part, realising the incongruity between what should be and what is—that is, it is a basic form of human scrutiny that identifies what doesn’t feel right in others’ behaviour, or that exploits the difference between what others say and what they do or what actually exists. As the identification of The Onion as possible evidence of treasonous intent, and the prosecution and conviction of people for joking about bombs at airports (sometimes not even when they’re at an airport) suggest, national security isn’t merely not humorous, it is anti-humour, a kind of humour black hole sucking everything around it into a singularity of zealotry. To joke at the expense of national security is to immediately signal your unwillingness to accept at face value the claims of those who purport to be providing it, and thereby to immediately place yourself under suspicion. National security officials reflexively resent scepticism and treat it as a direct threat.

  Like politicians, security and intelligence agencies have seized the opportunity of the War on Terror to increase both their budgets and their powers. The budget of Australia’s domestic intelligence agency increased 600 per cent during the War on Terror, and it also received a glittering new headquarters on the shores of Lake Burley Griffin in Canberra that cost $700 million and was, aptly, 25 per cent over budget; the Australian Federal Police budget increased 160 per cent and that of Australia’s foreign intelligence agency by over 200 per cent. The powers of such bodies, and especially ASIO, have undergone a similar rapid inflation, with almost annual extensions of its legal powers, which often receive minimal parliamentary scrutiny.

  But another group has similarly benefited from the War on Terror without even the risks faced by security and law enforcement agencies, which are at least exposed if a terrorist attack occurs: corporate America. Stupid is big—very big—business. Defence contractors obviously benefit from US military action (the share prices of several major US defence contractors surged in mid-2013 in anticipation of US military action in Syria and surged again when the Obama Administration announced air strikes aimed at Islamic State militants), but more than a third of Australia’s $70 billion-odd defence acquisitions budget over the last decade has flowed to foreign defence contractors, nearly all of it to US defence companies like Lockheed Martin and Boeing Defence. Even more has gone to those companies indirectly via local subsidiaries.

  However, defence contractors aren’t the only, or perhaps even the biggest, corporate beneficiaries of the War on Terror. Ten US firms earned $72 billion between them from the Iraq War, with more than half of that obtained not by a defence contractor, but Dick Cheney’s former firm KBR, which secured nearly $40 billion worth of US government service contracts in Iraq. The really big bucks in the War on Terror aren’t so much in weapons as in cleaning, and catering, and construction, and administration and transport to service the military and intelligence machines. Oil companies earned billions from supplying the armed forces of the US, the UK and vassal states like Australia in Iraq and Afghanistan; healthcare companies that manage veterans’ services for the US military have tripled their profits as a result of over a decade of war. Homeland security spending, which in the US is still over $40 billion a year, also provides a strong revenue stream for both defence contractors and IT companies like IBM.

  The corporate beneficiaries of the War on Terror, which stretch across IT to defence to services to health care, form a potent public and private lobby for continued expenditure on national security. Military personnel, politicians and national security bureaucrats often take board or executive positions at firms that work in national security industries after leaving their former profession, and sometimes go back to their old careers after a stint in the corporate sector. Northrop Grumman, Boeing and Lockheed Martin are fixtures in the list of top-twenty lobbyists in the United States; former and current defence contractor executives played a significant role in institutionalised lobbying efforts like the US Committee on NATO, which lobbied for the expansion of NATO in the 1990s, and the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, which aggressively pushed for an attack on Saddam Hussein in the lead-up to the Iraq War.*

  In such an environment, governments and highly influential industries have at best little incentive in ending the War on Terror and some agencies and companies may even seek to perpetuate it. Defence industries, in particular, must be concerned about repeating the disaster of the West accidentally winning the Cold War, which precipitated a big drop in military spending—over 20 per cent in the US alone between 1990 and 1997. Military spending in the West has already reduced because of fiscal pressure in the wake of the global financial crisis; victory in the War on Terror would be a bitter blow indeed for arms manufacturers and companies providing services for military and intelligence operations, and a fate to be avoided at all costs. Thank goodness the Islamic State came along when it did.

  Manufacturing terrorism

  Besides the Iraq War encouraging terrorism against Western targets, the conduct of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have created other positive feedback loops for terrorism. The destabilising effect of the Iraq War and massive expenditure on oil by Western armies in their campaigns helped drive oil prices to record highs: one oil analyst suggested the Iraq War was responsible for oil prices trebling. This has been a boon for Saudi Arabia and other repressive Middle Eastern autocracies, which promote fundamentalist forms of Islam that provide fertile soil for Islamist alienation and resort to violence.

  The more significant feedback loop is the direct radicalising effect of the United States’ extra-judicial killing program involving drones, which have killed at the very least hundreds of civilians, and many children, in Pakistan, Yemen and Afghanistan, as well as an Australian, a New Zealander and several US citizens, including Anwar al-Awlaki and his son, Abdulrahman.* Drone strikes that kill civilians enrage target communities and directly create the conditions for radicalisation and anti-Western anger. This isn’t just the view that Malala Yousafzai, the brave Pakistani schoolgirl who was shot by the Taliban, put to Barack Obama in her White House meeting with him, but also that of the former US commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, who explained that drone strikes ‘are hated on a visceral level, even by people who’ve never seen one or seen the effects of one’ and that they threaten the achievement of broader goals. As it turns out, the direct manner in which the attack on Iraq increased the terrorist threat to Western citizens is being continually replicated via drone warfare.

  However, it’s the FBI that seems most committed to perpetuating the War on Ter
ror, and if there are no terrorists, the FBI will invent them. The great majority of people prosecuted for terrorist plots in the United States since 9/11 have been caught in FBI stings, usually involving plots initiated or advanced by the FBI or its informers themselves, not those prosecuted. In one case, an FBI informant convinced a homeless man to sell two old stereo speakers (sic) to an undercover FBI agent for grenades to use in a plan, suggested by the informant, to attack a shopping mall. The homeless man is now serving seventeen years for terrorism. In another case, that of the ‘Newburgh Four’, four drug users living in poverty, including a mentally ill man, were recruited by an FBI informant and promised holidays, cars, businesses and huge amounts of cash—up to a quarter of a million dollars—to carry out a plot; one of them was told he would be killed if he backed out. All four are serving twenty-five years for terrorism.

  The FBI isn’t alone in this type of behaviour. British police, in league with the UK’s febrile tabloids, entirely invented an Islamic extremist plot to blow up Manchester United’s Old Trafford ground in 2004—there was no plot, no explosives and no extremists. Another Islamic extremist plot, said to involve the biotoxin ricin, turned out to have no ricin, and four of the five people charged were acquitted.

  Three of the key features of the War on Terror thus demonstrate how it can be a vast, self-perpetuating cycle of Stupid: the Iraq War actually made us less secure by radicalising civilians in target countries and increasing the incomes of fundamentalist Middle Eastern regimes; drone strikes continue to enrage and radicalise target communities; and undermining encryption as part of mass surveillance degrades internet security. And if terrorist plots don’t exist, they are invented by police agencies.