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| Arthur Giron |
as an intern at the Center
for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington
think tank, I grew accustomed to cringing whenever anyone
asked what I did at work. “I study homeland security”
could spark a variety of disapproving reactions.
Those who replied “Oh, I’m sorry”
assumed that studying terrorism made me too scared to
leave the house without a HazMat suit in my purse. Others
quipped, “So you’re contributing to the
further construction of Fortress America?” Even
though as an intern I was not important enough to construct
anything except nametags, these people assumed that
my job meant I now supported implanting ID chips in
neonatal Americans. And those who replied, “Well,
that must be an exercise in frustration” must
have heard about the unwieldy homeland security bureaucracy
and assumed that it couldn’t do much more than
lengthen the lines at airport metal detectors.
I don’t own a HazMat suit. I still believe in
privacy. I’m also not without hope that the United
States can protect itself. But I will admit that studying
terror attacks all day changes one’s concept of
fear.
My first indication that I had been initiated into the
homeland security world came early in my internship
last spring. Glancing out the window during a particularly
long meeting on biological weapons, I noticed something
white floating through the air and assumed it was anthrax.
This wasn’t some fleeting worry; my heart began
to race. I had just finished reading a pile of articles
that calculated the tiny amount of biological agent
required to swamp American hospitals. What were those
articles’ strategies—quarantine? vaccination?
decontamination?—and hadn’t we waited too
long to use them if I were seeing lethal powder in the
air above K Street?
When I looked again, the particles appeared more like
cherry blossoms than white powder, and my GER science
was enough to tell me that they were far too big to
be inhaled. Bio attack wasn’t imminent. (Though
I checked washingtonpost.com right after the meeting
to make sure the top headline wasn’t “Outbreak.”)
I’d heard about med students who began to feel
the symptoms of each disease they studied. Each time
I read about a new type of threat, it began to seem
inevitable. In addition to worrying about hijackers
on my flight out of National, I now thought about which
type of nozzle could turn a Kansas crop-duster plane
into a dispersal device for smallpox. About whether
a container of radiological material could slip past
the Coast Guard into Long Beach. About the damage one
truck bomb could do on I-95 on the eastern seaboard.
Preventing a successful terrorist attack required predicting
how one could be created—in essence, thinking
like a terrorist and then imagining how that terrorist
could be thwarted. As I listened to the members of our
team—people who had spent years in international
security or science policy jobs—do this kind of
hypothesizing, I often felt that the vulnerabilities
seemed endless.
Culture shock was a factor in my fear, too. I’d
come to Washington right after a quarter abroad at Stanford’s
campus in Berlin. Our nation’s capital had fortifications
everywhere I looked—biological weapons detectors
at Metro Center Station, wire fences and concrete barricades
surrounding the monuments, police
cars parked on every corner downtown. Nothing in Berlin
seemed so guarded—except the area around the U.S.
Embassy.
Humans can get used to a lot of changes, though, especially
if the changes occur gradually and become integrated
into daily life. By the end of my four-month internship,
it seemed impossible that I could have been so fearful
or felt so hopeless. The more days I spent with hypothetical
threats, the more desensitized I became.
Security and threat level both increased during the
time of my internship, but I (and I suspect most Americans)
had become more jaded. I got used to walking the long
detour around Pennsylvania Avenue, designed to keep
potential villains away from the White House but effectively
keeping people like me from ever getting anywhere on
time. I stopped noticing the sirens that, under Code
Orange police presence, have become a D.C. soundtrack.
(During cell-phone calls, my family stopped asking “Good
lord, what just happened?” and “Are you
under arrest?’’ and waited, unfazed, until
we could hear again.) On the August day when new warnings
about threats to New York and D.C. financial institutions
were atop washingtonpost.com, my co-workers and I didn’t
skip lunch at our favorite sandwich shop, situated in
the shadow of the World Bank.
Being desensitized does not mean that I am no longer
afraid of terrorism. Quite the opposite. Like everyone,
I still don’t know what the terrorists want to
do or where they want to do it. That reality has been,
and always will be, scary. But now I also fear that
we will lose touch with the useful aspects of fear—that
the proliferation of color-coded threat alerts, and
our skepticism about their politicization and cost,
will distract us from real threats that demand real
preparations. We may lose the ability to answer the
question that crossed my mind every day of my internship:
are we really doing what we need to do to make ourselves
more secure?
Our current government strategy revolves around “a
system of systems”—a “layering”
of inevitably imperfect defenses. Such a defense hopes
that if terrorists slip past one system, they will be
stopped by another, or another. Yet I was struck by
the fact that, at every meeting of experts I attended,
each reached the conclusion that a smart terrorist could
get by any system. The next step was always the question:
by investing billions in a “system of systems,”
are we strengthening our ability to prevent attacks,
or are we, as one Center for Strategic and International
Studies official suggested, “looking for the same
needle in an ever-bigger haystack?”
It’s hay, not cherry blossoms, that spooks me
now.
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