The Growth of the Fear Industry and the Prison Industry

[No Exit]

Mini-gulags, hired guns and lobbyists

By Tom Engelhardt

Last month a site of shame, shared by Saddam Hussein and George W Bush, was emptied. Abu Ghraib prison is the place where Saddam's functionaries tortured (and sometimes killed) many enemies of his regime, and where Bush's functionaries, as a series of notorious digital photos revealed, committed what the US press still likes to refer to as "prisoner abuse". Now, there are no prisoners to abuse and the prison itself is to be turned over to the Iraqi government, perhaps to become a museum, perhaps to remain a jail for another regime whose handling of prisoners is grim indeed. The emptying was clearly meant as a redemptive moment or, as Nancy A Youssef of the McClatchy Newspapers put it, "a milestone" for the huge structure. After all the bad media and the hit US "prestige" took around the world, Abu Ghraib was finally over.

Camp Bucca is a story you can't read anywhere in the United States - and yet it may, in a sense, be the most important American story in Iraq right now. While arguments spin endlessly here at home about the nature of withdrawal "timetables", and who's cutting and running from what, and how many troops the US will or won't have in-country in 2007, 2008 or 2009, on the ground a process continues that makes mockery of the debate in Washington and in the country. While the "reconstruction" of Iraq has come to look ever more like the deconstruction of Iraq, the construction of an ever more permanent-looking American landscape in that country has proceeded apace and with reasonable efficiency.

First we had those huge military bases that officials were careful never to label "permanent". (For a while, they were given the charming name of "enduring camps" by the Pentagon.) Just about no one in the mainstream bothered to write about them for a couple of years as quite literally billions of dollars were poured into them and they morphed into the size of US towns with their own bus routes, sports facilities, Pizza Huts, Subways, Burger Kings, and mini-golf courses. Huge as they now are, elaborate as they now are, they are still continually being upgraded. Now, it seems that on one of them we have $60 million worth of the first "permanent US prison" in Iraq. Meanwhile, in the heart of Baghdad, the Bush administration is building what's probably the largest, best-fortified "embassy" in the solar system, with its own elaborate apartment complexes and entertainment facilities, meant for a staff of 3,500.

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Take for example the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), yet another sprawling, ill-organized, inefficient bureaucracy established after September 11 and not likely to do anything but grow in our lifetimes. Around it has sprung into existence an anti-terrorism homeland-security industry (thank you, Osama bin Laden!) of staggering proportions. "Seven years ago," writes Paul Harris of The Guardian, "there were nine companies with federal homeland-security contracts. By 2003 it was 3,512. Now there are 33,890." Think about that. They are there to divide a terrorism/security pie that has, since 2000, resulted in about $130 billion in contracts and now, according to USA Today, is a $59 billion a year business globally - one based on that surefire best-seller, fear, whose single major customer is, of course, the DHS.

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http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HI28Ak01.html