Fear as a Weapon

Commentary: How the Bush administration got away with its abuses of power

[The following essay is exerpted from How Would a Patriot Act? by Glenn Greenwald (Working Assets Publishing). The book, a bona fide publishing phenomenon, was developed, written, edited, published, and distributed in three months, and made the New York Times bestseller list earlier this summer.]

In one sense, it is difficult to understand how the Bush administration has been able to embrace such radical theories of executive power, and to engage in such recognizably un-American conduct—first in the shadows and now quite openly—without prompting a far more intense backlash from the country than we have seen. It is true that the president’s approval ratings have sunk to new lows in 2004 and 2005. The broad and bipartisan support he commanded for the two years after the 9/11 attacks has vanished almost completely. And yet, despite all of the public opinion trends and the president’s steadily declining popularity, there has been no resounding public rejection of the administration’s claim to virtually limitless executive power and its systematic violations of the nation’s laws.

That is because the Bush administration has in its arsenal one very potent weapon—and one weapon only—which it has repeatedly used: fear. Ever since September 11, 2001, Americans have been bombarded with warnings, with color-coded “alerts,” with talk of mushroom clouds and nefarious plots to blow up bridges and tall buildings, with villains assigned cartoon names such as “dirty bomber,” “Dr.Germ,” and so on. And there has been a constant barrage from the White House of impending threats that generate fear—fear of terrorism, fear of more 9/11–style attacks, fear of nuclear annihilation, fear of our ports being attacked, fear of our water systems being poisoned—and, of course, fear of excessive civil liberties or cumbersome laws jeopardizing our “homeland security.”

Our very survival is at risk, we are told. We face an enemy unlike any we have seen before, more powerful than anything we have previously encountered. President Bush is devoted to protecting us from the terrorists. We have to invade and occupy Iraq because the terrorists will kill us all if we do not. We must allow the president to incarcerate American citizens without due process, employ torture as a state-sanctioned weapon, eavesdrop on our private conversations, and even violate the law, because the terrorists are so evil and so dangerous that we cannot have any limits on the power of the president if we want him to protect us from the dangers in the world.

That terrorism is a real and serious threat cannot be denied. But America has never been a nation characterized by fear. Yet, for the last five years, we have had a government that has worked overtime to keep fear levels high because doing so served its interests. More than four years after the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration continues to keep up the relentless drumbeat of fear. Here is Dick Cheney in early January 2006, proudly defending the administration’s illegal eavesdropping program by invoking the specter of terrorism fears:

As we get farther away from September 11th, some in Washington are yielding to the temptation to downplay the ongoing threat to our country, and to back away from the business at hand.... The enemy that struck on 9/11 is weakened and fractured, yet it is still lethal and trying to hit us again. Either we are serious about fighting this war or we are not. And as long as George W. Bush is President of the United States, we are serious—and we will not let down our guard.

Cheney never once addresses the fact that the administration had full leeway to eavesdrop on terrorists without breaking the law. He ignores that fact because he is not making a rational argument. He is attempting to play on the fears of Americans to justify their violations of law.

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