Mass Traumatization and the Body Politic
A long-held desire of the technocratic worldview
involves manipulation and control of a national and even international
body politic. “This planetary consciousness,” Zbigniew Brzezinski
observes, brings into closer view a single indivisible humanity united
by the soft tyranny of depersonalized and omnipresent coercion. “The
sense of proximity, the immediacy of suffering,” he wrote at the height
of the Cold War, “the globally destructive character of modern weapons
all help to stimulate an outlook that views mankind as a community.”[1]
In the perceived absence of such a powerful monolithic threat,
mass-mediated tragedy and terror increasingly fulfill a similarly
unifying purpose and means to conjure and augment broader political
projects.
More so than ever the population witnesses major
catastrophic events such as the recent mass shootings in Tucson Arizona,
Aurora Colorado, and Newtown Connecticut, and the Boston Marathon
bombing through the two-dimensional (audio-visual) lens of major news
outlets and social media platforms. A less-examined aspect of this
development is how United States law enforcement and intelligence
agencies operating under the Department of Homeland Security utilize
such media to create and promote news of designer tragedies capable of
generating a potent emotional response from the citizenry.
Moreover, the vicariously imagined trauma of such
events provides a window of public acquiescence wherein government
officials may shape popular sentiment and introduce restrictive
legislative programs (stricter gun control in the case of Tucson, Aurora
and Newtown) or forthright militarized oppression (the rescinding of
posse comitatus and Fourth Amendment protections in the case of the
Boston Marathon Bombing) that under normal circumstances would be
rejected by the citizenry.
In addition to providing the basis for introducing
unpopular policies and practices, mediated spectacles and a digitally
interconnected population allow for the precise measurement of public
sentiment and reaction to such crises, thereby producing information
that is essential for the police state’s continued roll out and
effective operation. As social scientist Armand Mattelart argues, such
interconnectivity brings to fruition the long held ambition among modern
social engineers to regiment the population–a pursuit that can be
traced at least to the crude practices of phrenology and
anthropometry.[2]
In this vein, the government’s manufacture of
tragedy or terror to manipulate the mass mind is hardly a new
phenomenon. For example, Operation Gladio sought to control Europe’s
political landscape throughout the 1960s and 1970s, and the military and
intelligence entities behind it targeted the civilian population with
mass shootings and bombings to further their vision. Such projects
arguably laid the groundwork for Western governments’ more recent
operations including 9/11 and the London 7/7/2005 bombings used to
propel the “war on terror.”[3]
With a broadly credulous public increasingly bound
to the system of digital networked communication and the 24-hour
corporate-driven news cycle, conveying the impression of catastrophe and
terror is easily achieved. Indeed, the development and fine tuning of a
uniquely-conceived apparatus in this regard has been underway for
decades in the US, having come into more formal public view over the
past several years.
Digital Emergency Alert System
In 2006 President George W. Bush signed Executive
Order 13047,[4] mandating the DHS to develop a new national emergency
alert system for the digital era that would further streamline an
already centralized communication network. This new framework
encompasses traditional broadcast communication with newer cellular
transmission and web-based platforms. The system’s design was delegated
to the Federal Emergency Management Agency which in 2011 announced the
Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAzRjEeqKhI
In times of crisis IPAWS “provides public safety
officials with an effective way to alert and warn the public about
serious emergencies using the Emergency Alert System, Wireless Emergency
Alerts, NOAA Weather Radio, and other public alerting systems from a
single interface,” the FEMA explains. The new infrastructure “embodies a
modernization and integration of the nation’s alert and warning
infrastructure and will save time when time matters most, protecting
life and property.”[5]
IPAWS was introduced alongside the deployment of a digital
transmission architecture that was largely the initiative of the US
public broadcasting industry. Indeed, behind the relentless move toward
digital broadcast was an intricate and far-reaching apparatus under
which the body politic may be united in temperament and purpose through
crisis and catastrophe, and where a hierarchized network of information
dissemination among officials and major media has made possible designer events that are perceived as real by the broader public at the lower reaches of this communicative pyramid.
In contrast to its analog forebear the digital
transmission framework possesses the “dual use opportunity” envisioned
by the Bush administration in 2006. John Lawson, President of the
Association of Public Television Stations oversaw the $1.1 billion
fundraising campaign undertaken by public broadcasting outlets for the
transition to digital. His
observations are especially revealing in terms of recognizing the system’s capacities and scope.
Our infrastructure is becoming the backbone of a
network of networks that can deliver instant warnings to people wherever
they are or whatever they’re doing. Initially this will be a government to government and government to media system. [author’s
emphasis] Eventually it will be a warning system for all hazards that
can reach practically all devices. You can receive some form of alert on
your cell phone or your Blackberry at your kid’s soccer match, or while
you’re listening to satellite or broadcast radio, or surfing the net,
or watching any of the 500 channels on TV. You’ll be able to receive
al—some [sic] form of emergency message almost simultaneously.
…We can send data packets—it’s called data casting.
This system, because it’s broadcast, is completely bottleneck-free.
It’s totally scalable. It avoids the congestion we saw here and in New
York on 9/11 with phone calls and cell phone calls. It can reach a
million receivers just as easily as it can reach one receiver, no matter
what you’re doing …
Here’s the other point about Digital EAS [Emergency
Alert System] and it speaks to the interoperability that the White
House has embraced. In the pilot project these packets, these data
files, these messages that originated from DHS, were sent out over the
air by WETA. They were received by other networks– cellphone companies,
pager companies, other broadcasters, cable companies—and retransmitted
simultaneously.
Once it’s all packets you can do that—you can move
this content around seamlessly. Testing that concept was one of the key
goals of the DEAS project. And we established here in the national
capital region proof of performance that the concept worked. We had
numerous partners in the test in the commercial and television and radio
industries, and we plainly established an interoperability was possible which in turn supported one of the key components of the President’s Executive Order. [author’s emphasis]
Lawson’s overview of the DEAS suggest how such a
system, used in conjunction with FEMA’s IPAWS, provides the basis for a
multifaceted real time orchestration of a mass casualty event that
includes careful synchronization with major news media. Indeed, as
discussed further below, National Public Radio is among the IPAWS
nework’s 22 “dissemination groups” that includes an array of electronic
broadcast outlets and consortia. [6]
As a principal element of its “interoperability”
IPAWS uses a Common Alerting Protocol—”a digital format for exchanging
emergency alerts that allows a consistent alert message to be
disseminated simultaneously over many different communications
systems.”[7] This may be used in conjunction with the Geo-Targeted Alert
System, another component of IPAWS that can issue alerts and warnings
targeted to specific geographic areas. Alongside “
Smart 911” and “
Reverse 911”
technologies capable respectively of profiling individuals and
distributing emergency and crisis information to networks of first
responders, media outlets, hospitals, and the broader public on a “need
to know” basis, the IPAWS system is an all-inclusive network for
orchestrating and broadly publicizing staged or authentic crisis events.
Mediating an Integrated Capstone Event
IPAWS and Digital EAS working in coordination with
broadcast and social media constitute an apparatus that can effectively
control important elements of the broader public’s perceptions and
sentiment. FEMA’s Integrated Capstone Event (ICE) is a comprehensive
exercise involving a “multi-disciplined response” of federal, state, and
local emergency responders and emergency response students reacting in
unison to a common mass casualty event. According to FEMA, “Each
scenario focuses on the foundations of CDP training—incident management,
mass casualty response, and emergency response to a catastrophic
natural disaster or terrorist act.”
“The ICE is a unique training approach in which
students from the various courses work together in a single
end-of-course exercise. ICE events may include students from up to ten
different disciplines —ranging from law enforcement to healthcare. The
students interact, communicate, and respond to a full-impact mass
casualty incident.[8]
From
FEMA.gov: “Left – Hospital Emergency Response Training members
decontaminate a simulated survivor before allowed admittance into the
hospital. The latest Integrated Capstone Event brought together four
courses. Center – Role players arriving from the accident scene surge
the hospital emergency department, as students from the Healthcare
Leadership course care for the patients. More than 50 role players
participated in this recent ICE. Right – A role player simulates the
affects and injuries from a simulated explosion during the latest ICE at
the CDP. Four courses merged as a scenario simulating a mass casualty
event unfolded.”[9]
IPAWS and the digital transmission system are
required for tiered, real time stage management of such a simulated mass
casualty event that integrates dozens of state and local agencies under
the coordination of FEMA to carry out the event for training purposes.
Given the acute hierarchical management of such an event—one that can
potentially involve close alliance with news media outlets themselves—in
addition to its lifelike qualities, only minor tweaking would be
required to present such an exercise to the broader public as one that
is actually occurring.
A 9:34AM Tweet from Connecticut-based Newstimes writer Libor Jany, “Media Staging at Treadwell Park” in Sandy Hook.
To what degree are major news media potentially
involved in such events? In the case of the December 14 school massacre
in Newtown Connecticut law enforcement and public officials may have in
some instances been informed of the event by representatives of regional
and national news media on the scene prior to the alleged shooting. At a
symposium held on April 22, 2013 at Columbia University’s Dart Center
for Journalism & Trauma, titled
Sandy Hook and Beyond,
remarks from journalists alongside law enforcement and civilian
officials suggest the unusual features of the event’s development. For
example, Connecticut State Police Lieutenant J. Paul Vance recalled,
“The first call I got about the shooting was from a member of the press
referencing an ‘incident’.” Newtown’s mayor E. Patricia Llorda similarly
recollected, “When I arrived at the [Sandy Hook] firehouse, the media
was already there.”[10]
Tweets by National Public Radio’s Andy Carvin
from Columbia University Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma’s Sandy
Hook and Beyond event.[11]
Bill Leukhardt, Hartford Courant reporter
and stepfather of slain Sandy Hook Elementary teacher Lauren Rousseau,
likewise explained how the first notification he received was a phone
call taken at his Danbury residence from the Courant newsroom.
“I got a call saying there’s been some incident at a school,” Leukhardt
remembers. “Here’s the address … I was assigned to go there. When I got
there it was shortly after ten. I think the murders occurred about
nine-thirty. By that time [there was] a large contingent of police and
reporters there. It was a tumultuous scene.”[12] The distance from
Danbury to Newtown is twelve miles–about 19 minutes by car. Assuming
Leukhardt proceeded to Sandy Hook without delay, the Courant’s call must have come no later than 9:45AM, at which time the police had not yet secured the crime scene.
Along these lines, before police even arrived at
Sandy Hook Elementary, one prominent Newtown resident oberved “the chief
of police in his official car, headed to the Sandy Hook school.”
Moments later the same individual receives “a news report text from the
Hartford Courant, that said police were responding to incident on
Dickenson Drive” where Sandy Hook Elementary is located.[13]
There are further indications that in terms of
knowledge and communication of such news media were on par with or ahead
of most every government or law enforcement entity. For example, at
9:53 AM, which according to the official scenario was no more than ten
minutes after police arrived and the shooting ceased, the Associated
Press published a story, “Official with Knowledge of Connecticut School
Shooting Says 27 Dead, Including 18 Children.”[14] The
AP and
Washington Post initially ran the story on their websites but retracted it shortly thereafter.
The
available data related to both Sandy Hook and the Boston Marathon
bombing culled from social media platforms such as Twitter exhibit
numerous inconsistencies that, taken as a whole, cannot be easily
explained away through the official version of each event. Social media
activity surrounding the April 15, 2013 Boston bombing similarly
suggests law enforcement coordination with media outlets prior to the
two bombs being detonated on Boylston Street.[15] A foremost piece of
evidence–widely circulated in alternative media–is a Tweet from the
Boston Globe
news staff suggesting when and where the Boston Police Department would
detonate explosives “as part of bomb squad activities.” Subsequent
Tweets describing the scale of carnage reverberated in major media
outlets, underlining the event’s severity and scale.
Further, the date stamp on many of the Tweets
posted by journalists reporting from Sandy Hook on December 14 precede
the purported 9:35AM time of the shooting–in some cases by several
hours, and there are inconsistencies with the date stamps on such posts.
The unusual publication of the detailed Associated Press story moments
after the event transpired is similarly confusing.[16]
One explanation is that DHS agencies worked in
coordination with news organizations to orchestrate a “Tweet timeline”
that perhaps even involved appropriating news organizations and
journalists’ individual Twitter accounts. A feature of the Twitter
platform called “Tweet Later allows you to keep the tweets flowing even
if you’re not in front of your computer or iPhone,” one observer
explains.
If you know you’re going to be stuck on an airplane
that doesn’t have Net access, you can timestamp a tweet that say “Stuck
on an airplane that doesn’t have Net access” and have it go live at the
time you’re on the plane. Alternatively, you can use Tweet Later to
send yourself auto reminders … Timestamped tweets can go out at a
specific time or set to go evenly throughout the day.[17]
Such a feature may also be strategically used in an
event planned around certain pivot times to coordinate social media
while conveying to the broader public a greater semblance of
authenticity. Conversely, in the event of potential foreknowledge Tweets
that are timestamped clumsily may be posted at unusual or inopportune
times. For example, the aforementioned Associated Press Tweet
referencing the Sandy Hook story that went live at 9:53AM may have been
timestamped for 11:53AM or sometime thereafter when more information had
been disclosed by law enforcement authorities. Likewise the Boston Globe
tweet timestamped for 12:53PM referencing the bomb’s detonation may
have been set at a time before Boston police rescheduled such a drill.
Conclusion
The US government and its private sector partners
have developed a complex, pyramid-like communication system, the
ostensible purpose of which is to “protect life and property.” To some
degree this may be true.. Yet it is also no doubt capable of essentially
generating traumatic events in association with broadcast and social
media outlets, and even health care providers to exert rapid influence
over the body politic.
A greater understanding of IPAWS and Digital EAS
and the rationales guiding such strategic frameworks can place Tucson,
Aurora, Sandy Hook, Boston, and probable future mass casualty events in
an entirely different light. Questions concerning, for example, why
common first responder-emergency management protocols were so seriously
breached at Newtown and Boston, or why government officials in
Connecticut have become so tight-fisted with basic crime-related
evidence pertaining to Sandy Hook, may be explained through a broader
critical perspective.
The US government has the demonstrable means and
motives to develop and carry out mass casualty events for larger
political ends, and historically it has exhibited little compunction in
proceeding with such measures. Indeed, in addition to Operation Gladio,
in the verifiable plans for Operation Northwoods and incidents such as
Tonkin Gulf or the sinking of the USS Liberty American military and
political leaders have demonstrated their capacity to undermine and
deceive the public in order to further what are frequently harmful and
disastrous policy agendas. Much like the case with 9/11, interrogation
and analysis focusing on government culpability in such maneuvers will
not be entertained in privately-owned mainstream media outlets. This is
now even more so the case as such media have become an essential element
of the emergency response and gradated communication-public relations
mechanism.
The recent instances of mass traumatization
realized through the communication networks now intertwined with
everyday existence via social media also involve social conditioning
toward a perpetual sense of mortal danger and crisis. This is already a
common life experience for the inhabitants of countries occupied by US
military or proxy forces, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and
Palestine. Such terror is similarly felt in Pakistan, Yemen and other
countries routinely terrorized by US drones.
In the homeland the trauma is administered in a
more subtle fashion. The US public would be well served to recognize
that it likely has more in common with those foreign peoples than it
does with its own government and the transnational corporations that
government so dutifully serves. Consenting to such manufactured
realities provides the illusion of security while further rationalizing
the militarized police state at home and abroad.
Notes
[1] Zbigniew Brzezinski,
Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era, New York: Viking, 1970, 59, 60.
[2] Armand Mattelart,
The Globalization of Surveillance: The Origin of the Securitarian Order, trans. by Susan Gruenheck Taponier and James A. Cohen, Cambridge: Polity, 2010.
[3] With regard to gun control specifically, the poorly investigated
and dubious circumstance surrounding the Dunblane Scotland school
massacre and Port Arthur Australia mass shooting—both occurring in the
spring of 1996—suggest events that were intended to prompt sufficient
public sentiment and calls to further restrict gun ownership.
[4] US President George W. Bush Executive Order 13407: Public Alert and Warning System (
PDF), June 26, 2006.
[5] “
Integrated Public Alert and Warning System,” Federal Emergency Management Agency, fema.gov, lasted updated June 13, 2013.
[6] “IPAWS Partner Organizations” (
PDF), FEMA.gov, n.d.
[7] “
Common Alerting Protocol,” FEMA.gov, last updated June 18, 2012.
[8]Shannon Arledge, “
Integrated Capstone Event Merges Four Mass Casualty Response Courses,” FEMA.gov, last updated May 28, 2013.
[9] Ibid.
[10] The interview portion including Vance and Llorda is no longer
available on the Dart Center’s Sandy Hook and Beyond webpage,
http://dartcenter.org/content/symposium-sandy-hook-and-beyond, last checked July 2, 2013.
[11] Andy Carvin is NPR’s senior strategist for social media and
“online communities.”Carvin was also an early advocate of citizen
journalism’s mobile phone podcasting—what he terms “mobcasting.” “
Andy Carvin,” Wikipedia, accessed June 16, 2013.
[12]
Bruce Shapiro interview with Bill Leukhardt, Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma, Columbia University, April 22, 2013.
[13] Thomas B. Scheffy, “
Joel Faxon Has Been Part of the Gun Debate in His Hometown,”
Connecticut Law Tribune, December 21, 2012.
[14]“
Official With Knowledge of Sandy Hook Shooting Says 27 Dead, Including 18 Children,” Associated Press, December 14, 2012. In March this author contacted
Newtown Bee
Associate Editor Shannon Hicks to inquire whether the numerous
photographs she claims to have taken in the parking lot of Sandy Hook
Elementary as police arrived would be shared with law enforcement or be
made publicly available. “The photos I took on 12/14 have not been
shared with anyone,” Hicks said in response. “We have no plans to do so,
either.” It seems especially unusual that such important evidence
related to the most serious mass shooting in the country’s history would
not have been turned over immediately to law enforcement. If such
photos were taken as Hicks claims and in fact exist, would they reveal
visual proof of extensive media preparation and thus potential
foreknowledge? Shannon Hicks to James Tracy, March 25, 2013, email in
possession of author.
[15] Jennifer Lake, “
Sandy Hook Early Birds,” jenniferlake.wordpress.com, May 1, 2013.
[16] Ibid. When this author addressed such inconsistencies in the
official Sandy Hook narrative in the weeks following the event the
reaction by major news outlets was strongly condemnatory. Yet very few
reports and commentaries seriously considered the evidence presented.
[17] John Chow, “
How to Timestamp Your Twitter Tweets,” johnchow.com, November 19, 2008.
-JFT
http://memoryholeblog.com/2013/07/02/mass-traumatization-and-the-body-politic/
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