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"This is an eternal war against terrorism. It's like a war against dandruff. There's no such thing as a war against terrorism. It's idiotic. These are slogans. These are lies. It's advertising, which is the only art form we ever invented and developed... "...you can only have a war with another country. You can't have a war with bad temper... Nothing makes any sense, and the people are getting very confused. The people are not stupid, but they are totally misinformed" (David Barsamian. "Gore Vidal." The Progressive, August 2006: 34-5).
"More important than the futility of armed force, and ultimately more important, is the fact that war in our time always results in the indiscriminate killing of large numbers of people. To put it more bluntly, war is terrorism. That is why a "war on terrorism" is a contradiction in terms... More than a million civilians in Vietnam were killed by US bombs, presumably by "accident." Add up all the terrorist attacks throughout the world in the twentieth century and they do not equal that awful toll. "If reacting to terrorism attacks by war is inevitably immoral, then we must look for ways other than war to end terrorism" (Howard Zinn. "Why War Fails." The Progressive, Nov. 2006: 14-15).
"What this President effectively accomplished was to restart the cold war, albeit under a new rubric... ""War on Terror" is a political slogan -- not a coherent strategy for national defense -- and it succeeds brilliantly only as politics. For everything else, it is quite illogical. "...Why have most people submitted so willingly to a new political order organized around fear? Other nations have confronted terrorism of a more sustained nature without coming thoroughly unhinged... "America's homeland security efforts are like a burlesque of the cold war struggle -- randomly throwing money at the problem, periodically issuing dire alerts and indulging expensive versions of old-fashioned silliness. The hapless new Department of Homeland Security is spending many billions, but it is pulled this way and that because it cannot say reliably what should come first or even what the "threat" is... "There is, in fact, a lot of stuff you could blow up in this country. And occasionally some does blow up, without any help from terrorist cells. We live with these industrial risks every day. Some of them could be reduced and maybe should be. It costs money. But when an oil refinery explodes and kills some workers or a freight train derails, dousing a community with carcinogenic chemicals, nobody in politics prooses that we "go to war"... "...the "war on terrorism" itself will produce random injury and death -- inadvertently, of course -- because the spending will deform and undermine the countrie's other priorities. The public health system, for example, has long been starved of adequate funding, but its role is being pushed aside by the exotic dangers of bioterrorism... Some children will doubtless pay with their lives for this shift in priorities" (William Greider. "Under the Banner of the 'War' On Terror." The Nation, June 21, 2004: 11-18).
"While the Bush Administration calls for the immediate disbanding of what it has labeled "private" and "illegal" militias in Lebanon and Iraq, it is pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into its own global private mercenary army tasked with protecting US officials and institutions overseas. The secretive program, which spans at least twenty-seven countries, has been an incredible jackpot for one heavily Republican-connected firm in particular: Blackwater USA. Government records recently obtained by The Nation reveal that the Bush Administration has paid Blackwater more than $320 million since June 2004 to provide "diplomatic security" services globally. The massive contract is the largest known to have been awarded to Blackwater to date and reveals how the Administration has elevated a once-fledgling security firm into a major profiteer in the "war on terror"... "Blackwater's higly lucrative "diplomatic security" contract was officially awarded under the State Department's little-known Worldwide Personnel Protective Service (WPPS) program, described in State Department documents as a government initiative to protect US officials as well as "certain foreign government high level officials whenever the need arises" "A heavily redacted 2005 government audit of Blackwater's WPPS contract proposal, obtained by The Nation, reveals that Blackwater included profit in its overhead and its total costs, which would result "not only in a duplication of profit but a pyramiding of profit since in effect Blackwater is applying profit to profit." The audit also found that the company tried to inflate its profits by representing different Blackwater divisions as wholly separate companies... ""This underscores the need for Congress to exercise real oversight on the runaway use of secret companies that have strong connections to the Bush Administration, for clandestine services all over the world," says Illinois Democrat Jan Schakowsky, a leading Congressional critic of private military companies. ""This whole business of security is just insidious," says former Assistant Defense Secretary Philip Coyle, who worked at the Pentagon from 1994 to 2001. "The costs keep going up, and there is no end in sight to what you can spend. What happens is you keep raising the threat levels to require more actions and more contracts to overcome these imaginary threats. It's an endless spiral"... "While the WPPS program and the broader use of private security contractors is not new, it has escalaated dramatically under the Bush Administration. According to the most recent Government Accountability Office report, some 48,000 private soldiers, working for 181 private military firms, are deployed in Iraq alone" ("Mercenary Jackpot." The Nation, Aug 28: 6).
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