Let’s just note for the record that although we have a security spectrum that ranges from blue through green, yellow, orange, to red, the Department of Homeland Security has actually used only yellow and orange through the twenty-one months since the Bush administration implemented the system. Moreover, although the security wonks evidently have reason to suspect that al-Qaeda operatives may be planning once to use airplanes to attack targets in urban and rural locations (Margaret and I imagined the “attack a tiny, unguarded site to terrorize the whole nation” plan ages ago), Tom Ridge urges travelers not to change their holiday plans (except, presumably, to allow for longer lines at airports).
Question: What is the actual function of raising the Terror Threat Alert color under these circumstances, with these instructions to the public?
I resist cynicism, but the whole deal smells to me a great deal as though the Terror Threat Alert serves mostly to cover the posteriors of administrators in case a terrorist succeeds. That’s why the Alert color can’t go below yellow, and is unlikely to go above orange: letting the color slip below yellow constitutes too great a risk if a terrorist were to pull off an attack; letting the color rise above orange risks raising expectations that the administration disclose or foil an actual plot.
In the meantime, the U.S. government’s foreign policies have done nothing to quell terrorist activity, but have aggravated the grievances that embolden sane men and women to take suicidally extreme actions. How many billions have been spent, how many lives lost, in responding to an initial act of violence by raising the stakes of violence? Had those resources been devoted to the well-being of the world’s needy and disease-haunted billions, it would be a great deal harder to conjure a picture of the U.S. as a greedy, murderous international predator. That wouldn’t eliminate the threat of terrorism — nothing will, including a color-coded security system — but it would diminish the evidence in favor of terrorists’ hostile portrayals of the U.S. Instead, the Halliburton administration has in almost every way possible fulfilled the grimmest allegations made by desperate adversaries, waging two wars whose civilian casualties far outnumber deaths caused by terrorists, botching the conclusions of both wars (letting Osama escape in Afghanistan, and grossly miscalculating the way the Iraq conquest would play out), lying to the U.S. public about the basis for one of these wars, and directing the spoils of war to highly-connected corporate interests.
But at least we have color codes.
Posted by AKMA at December 24, 2003 09:27 AM | TrackBackUm, it *was* red, for five minutes at one point, but I can't remember ... I'm thinking that during the invasion of Iraq itself it was actually red. But otherwise, yeah.
Posted by: andelku at December 25, 2003 10:41 AMWell, andelku, I was going to quote the MSNBC story to which I linked above, but they seem to have changed wholesale the body copy on the page to which the link points. That story used to say that the threat had always only been orange and yellow — but that’s my only source, so I could very easily have been wrong (and since they’ve changed the copy, I can’t even check to see if I misread it).
So, I’m sorry to have missed that red interval — but as for the rest, it’s my guesswork and I’ll stand by it, till someone else corrects me again.
[Later:] Well it’s not the same story, but Fox — that bastion of unbesmirched journalistic integrity — alleges that “Four times before had the threat level risen to orange. Each change sets off a flurry of increased security measures by cities, states and businesses. The lowest two levels, green and blue, and the highest, red, have not been used since the system was put in place in early 2002.”
Posted by: AKMA at December 25, 2003 10:19 PM