Dirty Bombs,
Blowback, and Imperial Projections
by Fran Shor
June 12, 2002
In
an effort to maintain its media blitz to scare US citizens into accepting a
developing police state and to bury all the emerging evidence of its own
criminal negligence in 9/11, the Bush Administration has unveiled an alleged
al-Qaeda agent who plotted to unleash a “dirty bomb” on US soil. Although
arrested on May 8 on his return to Chicago from Pakistan, an American citizen,
Jose Padilla, aka Abdullah al-Mujahir, is now languishing as an “enemy
combatant” in a military prison in South Carolina. While the allegations about
Padilla/al-Mujahir’s connections to al-Qaeda and the “dirty bomb” plot are yet
to be proved, the timing and story about the plot and the plotter raise
important questions about the present motivations of the Bush Administration
and US government’s policies in the past and future.
This is not
the first time that the Bush Administration has made allegations about
al-Qaeda’s dirty bombs. All during the campaign in Afghanistan, there were
periodic announcements about finding plans and materials stored away in
al-Qaeda caves that could be preparations for radiological weapons. Of course,
at the same time that the US military was making its subterranean searches, it
was launching its own radiological weapons against these underground bunkers.
In turn, the Bush Administration was pushing ahead with plans to develop
low-yield nuclear “bunker busters.”
To better
locate the actual deployment of such dirty radiological weapons, one should go
back to the first Bush Administration (the elected one). During the Gulf War,
the Pentagon unleashed massive amounts of depleted uranium (DU). According to
Professor Doug Rokke, ex-director of the Pentagon’s Depleted-Uranium Project,
“numerous US Department of Defense reports have stated that the consequences of
DU were unknown. That is a lie. They were told. They were warned.” Furthermore,
Rokke’s assessment of the consequences of DU, consequences that are part of the
astronomical increase in varieties of cancers among Iraqi children, provides
chilling evidence of the lethal impact of depleted uranium: “DU is the stuff of
nightmares. It is toxic, radioactive and pollutes for 4500 million years. It
causes lymphoma, neuro-psychotic disorders and short-term memory damage. In
semen, it causes birth defects and trashes the immune system.”
Now, against
this dire diagnosis of the effects of real radiological weapons used time and
again by the Pentagon, we have the fantasies of a possible plot of maybe one
“dirty bomb” in one US city. If this fantastic and paranoid projection of an
al-Qaeda bomb plot doesn’t sound like John Ashcroft’s attempt to capitalize on
the cinematic success of another paranoid projection - “The Sum of All Fears” -
then we’re not paying attention to how life imitates art. Or, in this case, how
imperial policies produce imperial projections and paranoia.
Just as there
has been a concerted effort to cover-up the use and effects of the Pentagon’s
radiological “dirty bombs,” so there is a denial of the “blowback” of US
imperial policies, from the early CIA support of bin Laden to the continuing
tragedies visited upon the Afghani people. It is such continuing tragedies
involving civilians deaths that were reported in a recent story in the Los
Angeles Times. One Afghani who had lost his wife, mother, and seven children in
a US bombing run of his village, lamented: “I put a curse on the Americans who
did this. I pray they will have the tragedy in their lives that I have had in
mine.” What more poignant and bitter reminder that blowback is, in the words of
Chalmers Johnson, author of Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American
Empire, “another way of saying that a nation reaps what it sows. Although
people usually know what they have sown, our national experience of blowback is
seldom imagined in such terms because so much of what the managers of the
American empire have sown has been kept secret (17).”
Of course,
keeping secrets is what is essential to the Bush Administration in its
prosecution of unending war and rampant repression. Undoubtedly, the management
of the American empire under the Bush Administration has taken on a more
sinister tone and global arrogance and unilateralism than preceding
Administrations. On the other hand, there has been an imperial thread
throughout the history of the nation. One can cite evidence for this imperial
operation from the 19th century Mexican-American war to US intervention in the
Philippines at the turn of the century through all of the CIA interventions in
the cold war period from Iran to Guatemala. It is no coincidence that in the
proposal for the creation of a Homeland Security Department Bush would recall
the passage of the National Security Act of 1947 and the establishment of the
CIA.
Just as the
CIA’s task was to preempt through dirty tricks and political machinations any
possible “threat” to the economic and political hegemony of the US empire, so
now the Bush Administration is seeking ways to launch a renewed lethal CIA and
military for preemptive strikes against the shadowy traces of al-Qaeda and any
projection fostered by blowback. The deliberate creation, thus, of fear and
insecurity is as central to this Administration as it was during the McCarthy
era. As incisively noted by Mansour Farhang in his book on US Imperialism: From
the Spanish-American War to the Iranian Revolution: “It seems to be in the
nature of imperialism to fear everything that is not subject to its influence.
This fear, which has always been present in the imperialist countries, has a
functional value for the state. Without continuing insecurity and fear in the
public, imperialism as a form of government cannot be maintained and
rationalized (69).”
So, we return
to the threats of an al-Qaeda “dirty bomb,” produced by a former Latino gang
member converted to Islamic fundamentalism in prison. Is this not a form of
domestic blowback: the neglect and continuing disrespect of the poor in
America’s inner cities, especially among people of color? Are they not a time
bomb waiting to explode after further deprivations and outrages, whether in the
form of police brutality or “benign neglect”?
And what of
all scare tactics surrounding the launching of a possible dirty bomb in a US
city? Again, in the face of the real devastation of the Pentagon’s use of
radiological weapons, we have the paranoid projections of the “dirty bomb.”
While not beyond the murderous intent of al-Qaeda operatives, the whole
operation is blown way out of proportion. Even the potential massive damage of
such an al-Qaeda dirty bomb is dismissed by Gary Milhollin, director of the
Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control: “I think the risk of a radiological
bomb (ala al-Qaeda) is vastly overestimated. It’s a problem of physics and you
have to work back from the condition you are trying to produce, which is to
contaminate a substantial area with high radioactive doses.”
What is
evident from the fallout of the dirty bomb plot is that the Bush
Administration’s own self-serving imperial projections are continuing to
contaminate the landscape at home and abroad. As the Bush managers of the US
empire plot to use more of their own dirty bombs in Iraq and any number of 60
countries that are now part of potential hit list, they need to raise the fear
and paranoia level to match their own grandiose schemes. We need to be alert to
such political and psychological manipulation from such a sick mindset. Perhaps
it is best to remember the diagnosis by psychologist Joel Kovel in his book,
Against the State of Nuclear Terror: “Paranoia creates enemies out of inner
need. Its suspiciousness provides an omnipresent climate of vulnerability.
Sensing hatred everywhere, it sees the world as a constant threat. At the same
time, grandiosity reaches into the world, sure of its invulnerability, and
materializes the threat in order to destroy it. This is not true defense
against a real aggressor. It is paranoid defense against an aggressor once must
create, because responsibility for history cannot be faced (82-3).”
Fran Shor teaches
at Wayne State University. He is an anti-war activist and member of the
Michigan Coalition for Human Rights. Email: f.shor@wayne.edu