Homeland Insecurity
by Mina Hamilton
Dissident Voice
February 15, 2003
The
US government is poised to embark on an extraordinarily dangerous war. Everyone from CIA pundits to left icon Noam Chomsky
says this war will substantially increase the likelihood of terrorist attacks
on US citizens. This same US
government, when it receives intelligence regarding a "dirty bomb"
and other imminent threats, tells its citizens to go out and buy water, flashlights,
plastic - and duct tape.
After
this superb piece of advice hits the channels everybody piles into their
Subaru's and S.U.V.'s and heads for Wal-mart.
A bit later, the biological and chemical warfare experts weigh in. They make a few points. One, probably you can't seal all your windows
and doors. Two, if you did, you'd
suffocate. Three, the seal will only be
effective for two hours. Then, those
deadly vapors will start seeping inside your home.
Confronted
with these criticisms, a Bush spokesman says, Oh, it's not so effective after
all, but we wanted folks to feel "less helpless."
This
loony counsel makes us feel less helpless?
No, it enrages us.
On
another occasion the US government employed duct tape. Cut to the sleepy village of West Valley, a
stone's throw from Buffalo, New York.
The setting: a failed nuclear
reprocessing plant, shut down in 1972, after only six years of operation. (Reprocessing is the technique whereby
radioactive fuel is chopped up and put into chemical baths, so that plutonium
can be siphoned off and fed into nuclear weapons.)
Those
six years of reprocessing in upstate New York generated a heck of a lot of
poisonous nuclear waste, which was duly buried on site.
Fast
forward to 1983. A suspicious amount of
plutonium showed up where it wasn't supposed to be. The toxic stuff was headed for a creek that fed into another
creek that dumped into Lake Erie, the water supply for Buffalo.
After
a couple of years, finally, somebody decided they'd better dig up the steel
containers in which the plutonium had been buried. What did they find? The
steel containers were empty. Their tops
had fallen off and the plutonium-contaminated contents had leaked out. Why did the tops fall off?
The
steel tops had been affixed to the steel drums with - you got it - duct
tape. Plutonium is named after the
Greek God of Hell, Pluto, for a reason.
This particular poison is going to be hazardous for hundreds of
thousands of years. And the tiniest
speck of it can cause lung cancer.
The
inanity of sealing a nuclear waste container with duct tape is
mind-boggling. The mind says, No. It couldn't be. The West Valley duct tape scam, unlike the current one, never got
into the news. However, plenty of local
citizen activists who were monitoring the cleanup at West Valley knew about
it. They, in fact, ferreted the
information out of reluctant Department of Energy officials at repeated public
meetings.
The
mindset of the two uses of duct tape is exactly the same. Take an unimaginably dangerous situation and
make it indescribably worse by applying a worthless band-aid that will fall off
in a matter of minutes.
Which
duct-tape scam is worse? One shudders
to think how many duct-taped tanks at nuclear burial grounds all over the
country have spread contamination far and wide.
The
Homeland Security duct-tape caper also contaminates. With the latest Orange Alert, fear is sown far and wide. Next, pictures of moms, toddlers in tow,
pushing shopping carts loaded to the gills with duct tape hits the news
media. Fear levels ratchet even
higher. Presto, more panic and more
support for the war - even if the war is against the wrong people, even if it
is a war that will cause terrorist attacks to proliferate exponentially.
There
could be a silver lining. When the
gullible public wakes up and realizes they've been snookered, they've just
bought a bunch of worthless plastic and duct tape, anger replaces their fear,
and they start asking questions. Like,
just who is protecting me and who is putting my life and the lives of my family
and children in jeopardy?
The
answer seems pretty clear.
Mina Hamilton is a writer
based in New York City. Email: minaham@aol.com