The Patriot Act, Terrorism and the Irrationality of Fear (Part 1)

“The essence of Government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse.”

James Madison

I believe most can agree that, no matter what your stance on national security, terrorism is and always will be a heinous and cowardly act of violence committed against innocent people, motivated by political, religious or social fanaticism. However, how we chose to let our government protect us and how we decide to fight this cowardly and invisible enemy is a choice we must make. 

The questions we have to ask ourselves are: How many hard-fought freedoms are we willing to let our government sacrifice in the name of protecting us? And how much privacy are we are willing to give up to feel safer? To say that we need to make an absolute choice between our freedoms and our security is a false argument because it’s impossible to be 100% safe from an enemy that is willing to give up their own lives to take ours. 

This is an extremely important debate given the revelations about the opaque nature with which our government and the NSA have been operating and abusing their powers. They have gone beyond our borders, bypassed our laws and their severely overextended their remit. The NSA no longer felt the need to keep the President of the United States of America informed about some of their spying programs. 

We urgently need a new framework for the NSA, one that has sufficient and effective oversight by the executive, legislative and the judicial branches of government. The NSA has shown they cannot be trusted, operating with complete impunity, little transparency and zero accountability. Beyond the argument to protect privacy, there are a number of other reasons why the current NSA spying program needs to be curtailed and have some reasonable limits applied to it, before it is too late.

Let’s start with the simple fact that, while fear is an irrational thing, it does have a tangible effect in our daily lives and societies. Take the stock market, for example, it goes up and down based on a number of rational factors, but is also directly driven by irrational sentiment – our level of confidence or lack thereof, in the economy, personal job prospects and optimism or pessimism about our future. So too with terrorism, there are irrational and rational elements that we need to consider when determining the level of security that is reasonable to protect against attacks.

First, security experts around the world agree that the majority of airport security procedures are completely ineffective in preventing an act of terror; yet the TSA’s budget in 2014 was over $7 Billion (source: Wikipedia). There have been numerous studies and reports published on how ineffective the TSA and their methods are (Source: “Airport Security Is Making Americans Less Safe” and “Report Says T.S.A. Screening Is Not Objective” and “TSA Chief Out After Agents Fail 95 Percent of Airport Breach Tests”.)  

If you examine these facts rationally, you could build a strong argument for getting rid of most of these airport security measures, or at the very least cut down on the number of inconveniences travelers face. Yet, the reason for all this security is simple and has little to do with making us more secure on an aircraft. It is psychological and driven by the fact that air travel is vital for global commerce and economic growth.

Imagine if people became too scared to fly - the world and business would come to a grinding halt. So even though the amount of money spent on airport security is disproportionate to the actual security it provides, the visibility and inconvenience makes people feel safer, which in turn helps them go about their daily lives. For this reason, there are sometimes important and valid reasons to make a show of security. There is a tangible economic benefit involved and this is why airports and not train stations, bus depots or sea ports are protected in the same manner. This is also the reason we always see a beefed up security presence on the streets in the aftermath of a terror attack anywhere in the world.

The second thing to weigh in this debate is that we have a disproportionate emotional response to terrorism as compared to every other event that ends with loss of life. Consider our response to the Boston Marathon bombings against our response to the Texas refinery explosion that happened the same week. Three people died in Boston and fifteen in Texas. In Boston, a number of people were maimed; in Texas an entire town was leveled with hospitals, schools and homes all destroyed. 

Yet, we and the media fixated entirely on the events in Boston and the subsequent manhunt for two young men. Within a few weeks America had donated $61 Million to the OneFund for the Boston victims; while Texas has received little more than $1M of our kindness in that time. I am not arguing that one was less or more devastating than the other, simply pointing out how disproportionate, both our fixation and our tangible responses is to terrorism versus any other calamitous event. 

Ultimately it is much easier to unite against a common enemy that has a name and face, and get some sense of closure when our government hunts down and kills them.

Read Part 2 here

September 11 - Ten Years Later (Part 2)

Read: September 11 - Ten Years Later (Part 1)

If Oscar Wilde were around he might say “To start one war, Mr. Bush, was a necessity but to start two seems like recklessness”. 

As we continue to examine the impact of the decisions made by our government in the months and years after 9/11, it is important to look back at some of missed warning signs and lost opportunity costs for America that were a result of the course the Bush administration chose to set America on.

On 2^nd December 2001 one of the world’s largest energy companies, named “America’s Most Innovative Company” for six consecutive years by Fortune magazine, with 22,000 employees and global revenues over $100 billion, filed for bankruptcy. Enron’s entire financial reporting had been based on institutionalized fraud. Their demise also led to the dissolution of an old and reputable accounting firm, Arthur Anderson, the firm responsible for auditing Enron’s books. Close on the heels of Enron a number of other companies fell to similar accounting scandals. These included ImClone and Global Crossing, followed in the summer of 2002 by WorldCom and Adelphia. This brought into question the accounting practices of virtually every corporation in America. It became clear that there were serious discrepancies between the financial pictures companies were presenting to Wall Street, publicly, and the actual state of their internal balance sheets – the vast majority of Corporations were obfuscating their financials using contemporary accounting rules. All this was unfolding against a backdrop of a darkening economic picture based on the stock market bubble which burst in the first quarter of 2001. The economic excesses that had accompanied the heady growth and profitability of the 1990’s were gone. Too many firms, especially those in the technology and telecommunications, had made poor decisions and investments in in the wrong type of assets. However, even as growth slowed there was one startling difference from all post war recessions. Most recessions have been driven by sharp decreases in consumption spending, particularly related to durables and housing. However, during the early 2000’s consumption spending had actually been increasing year on year. This recession was being driven by plunging business investment (source: Joint Economic Committee Reports 2003). There is no doubt that seeds of this economic slowdown were sowed in the Clinton years, and are not directly related to the Bush administration’s policies but it is abundantly clear is that the signs of America’s impending financial meltdown, including the underlying factors that caused it, had started to become apparent early on during Bush’s first term in office.

It was in 2001 that Bush administration became aware of the problems in the overheating US housing market. At the center of the problem were two Government sponsored enterprises (GSE) called Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, whose government mandated mission was to keep mortgage interest rates low, so more Americans could afford to buy homes. By now it was well-known in Washington political circles that both institutions were so highly leveraged that a minor decline in housing values, as little as 1.3% to 2%, could wipe out both companies. And that their failure would have major repercussions on financial markets and US economic activity across the board. Bush was shot down by Democrats in Congress when he tried to bring additional oversight over these GSE’s in 2002. By early 2003 the signs had grown alarming; by this time these two mortgage lenders had more than $1.5 trillion in outstanding debt issued on their balance sheets.  In July, of the same year, a report by independent investigators concluded that “Freddie Mac manipulated its accounting to mislead investors, and critics said Fannie Mae does not adequately hedge against rising interest rates” (source: New York Times). However, with stiff resistance from Democrats, and the administration distracted by two wars, Bush chose to relinquish this battle and focus on what he clearly believed was far more important for securing America’s future: getting rid of Saddam Hussein. By the time Freddie and Fannie finally collapsed at the end of 2008, housing values had dropped 12.8%, since 2006. By now things were pretty dire and it became necessary for government to intervene in every part of the economy as Bush put it, “to prevent the crisis on Wall Street from becoming a crisis in communities across our country." Finding themselves in the midst of yet another crisis this administration decided once more to use fear to push through a $700 billion bailout plan for banks. Giving sweeping powers to the government to dispense gigantic sums of taxpayer dollars in a program that was sheltered from court review. TARP was a three page bill that did not specify which institutions would qualify or what criteria would be used, if any, or what taxpayers would get in return for the unprecedented infusion. It was designed to save companies that had brought this Armageddon upon themselves, and by an administration that had neglected to pay attention to many years of warnings. By all accounts, what would likely have been a minor economic downturn had it been handled when the warning signs first emerged resulted instead in a US and global financial catastrophe.

Another aspect of economic growth is immigration, which early on Bush showed he realized the importance and benefits to the US economy. He saw a need to reform the stagnant US immigration policy. He called for a new and large-scale guest worker program, paths to legalization for existing illegals, and had five meetings with Vincente Fox, the Mexican President, all in his first nine months in office. However, when it became known that all of the 9/11 hijackers had entered the US with legal visas, and that some has stayed after expiration, it changed the complexion of the debate on immigration along with his administration’s healthy stance on it. The administration decided to view the issue of immigration through the lens of ‘homeland security’. One accompanied with rhetoric that heightened fear and focused on detection of terrorists along with greater powers for law enforcement. America went from taking pride in being a nation of immigrants to being afraid of them. In the two years after 9/11 legal immigration fell by 34%, naturalization decreased 19% and employment based immigration also declined, as percentage of overall legal immigration, while absolute numbers dropped by 53% (source: Migration Policy Institute, 2004). To give you one example of the effect of the Bush policies on immigration, pre-9/11 it would have taken an Indian student who came to attend college in America about 18 months to become a permanent resident, and five years to become eligible for citizenship. Today, the same Indian student would have to wait 70 years for a permanent resident visa (source: National Foundation for American Policy). There is no dispute among economists about the importance of immigration, and that it is fundamental to the success of the American economy. Immigrants have founded 52% of Silicon Valley’s companies, creating millions of American jobs (source: Foreign Born Entrepreneurs: An Underestimated American Resource). This is not just true of higher income, better educated immigrants but also uneducated, low skilled workers. Without immigrants “the pace of recent U.S. economic growth would have been impossible. Since 1990, immigrants have contributed to job growth in three main ways: they fill an increasing share of jobs overall, they take jobs in labor-scarce regions, and they fill the types of jobs native workers often shun.” (source: Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas). Instead of using the opportunity to rally Congress to fix loopholes, and sensibly and securely reform what was without a doubt an antiquated and outdated visa system, the Bush administration followed through on a knee-jerk path, deciding to clamp down with archaic rules that made it much more difficult to get any type of US visa and effectively encouraged, if not forced, the smartest minds from around the world to return home after receiving an American college degree.

Across the board this administration seemed to believe it could have its cake and eat it. In late 2002, Cheney summoned Bush’s economic team to his office to push for another round of tax cuts to stimulate the slowing economy. Paul O’Neill, then the Treasury Secretary, and the entire White House economic team had become convinced that the country was careening toward a fiscal crisis, and they pleaded with Cheney to start reining in government spending. Instead, Cheney used Reagan’s words that “deficits don’t matter,” to completely shut down Paul H. O’Neill and the economic team. This was just a few months before the Iraq invasion began. Apart from the two rounds of tax cuts, which added roughly $1 trillion to the deficit over ten years, Bush also created a Medicare drug entitle­ment that will cost an estimated $800 billion in its first decade, he increased federal education spending 58 percent faster than inflation. He became the first President in US history to spend 3 percent of GDP on federal antipoverty programs. He also spent billions bailing out the Detroit auto industry and ended his final term with the $700 billion toxic asset recovery program. It is worth noting that during his two terms the income disparity grew, the poverty rate increased, unemployment rose to reach 7.8% in January, 2009 (the highest level in more than 15 years). When President Bush took office, the national debt stood at $5.727 trillion and when he left office it was more than $9.849 trillion (source: CBS News). That is an increase of a staggering 71.9 percent on Bush's watch. There were a total of seven debt ceiling increases, almost one for every year Bush spent in office. Interestingly, most of Bush’s spending was financed by issuing US treasury bonds (about 40 – 45 percent bought by foreign powers). When Bush took office in February 2001, the mainland Chinese owned a paltry $63.7 billion in U.S. debt. When Bush left office at the end of January 2009 the mainland Chinese owned $739.6 billion in US debt (source: Treasury.gov).

There is no doubt that these were extenuating circumstances, and 9/11 changed America forever; no argument there. The issue has more to do with the priorities and focus of this administration for the many years after 9/11, and their fixation with a hurriedly planned and poorly executed War on Terror. As a result the vast majority of domestic and foreign policy decisions seem to be devoid of short-term priorities and long-term thinking. It was as if this administration decided that the 9/11 attacks gave them cart blanche and zero accountability for all their actions. That it also did not matter how America would pay for its out-of-control spending, as long as it was done in the name of ‘national security’. It seems this administration was perfectly content kicking the can down the road. This at a time when America was clearly in alarming decline with corporate innovation dying, the education system in shambles, entitlement programs going bust and the country heading towards insurmountable debt. Without the distractions of a spiraling situation in Iraq, a war that deeply divided the country and created an acrimonious stalemate in Washington, Congress would also have been much more focused domestically and compelled to act. And had Bush not been completely consumed by his war on terror it is certain he would have also paid greater attention to the many warning signs of US economic decline. All this coupled with a complete lack of diplomacy in his first-term resulted in alienating long-term US allies, weakening its moral authority and having the mighty US military power humbled by a bunch of rag-tag rebels, in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Consider that Bush’s global war on terror will continue to cost US taxpayers for at least another generation, and has almost single-handedly been responsible for tilting the balance of global economic power squarely into the hands of China. In the end, we must ourselves this one question - was all this worth it just to get rid of Saddam Hussein?

September 11 - Ten Years Later (Part 1)

“If we were about to be attacked or had been attacked or something happened that threatened a vital U.S. national interest, I would be the first in line to say, ‘Let’s go,’ I will always be an advocate in terms of wars of necessity. I am just much more cautious on wars of choice.”

Robert Gates

This is what George W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense said on being asked if he had any words of wisdom during his final interview before retirement. This lifelong Republican said that the human cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that he has witnessed first-hand are far too great to start wars that were not necessary. He said he had learned clearly over the past four and a half years that wars “have taken longer and been more costly in lives and treasure” than anticipated.” 

 

The man George Bush handpicked to fix the mess his predecessor Donald Rumsfeld made in Iraq, effectively told America that the Iraq war was not something he would have embarked on; a war that was clearly one of America’s choosing. (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/19/us/politics/19gates.html) 

Ten years after the September 11^th attacks, Americans are still avoiding having an open, honest and meaningful discussion about the far reaching implications and long-term costs of the decisions their government made in the name of national security. 

 

I truly believe that until America has this conversation and in doing so faces the real ghosts of 9/11, they will struggle to move forward as a unified nation again. Instead, the country will continue down the post 9/11 path of a nation deeply divided and one that has never stopped living in and reacting out of fear. 

 

Nobody denies the fact that the country’s security should be a major concern when attacked in this way. Nor would anyone have a problem with the United States going after those responsible with any and all means possible; we can also expect and discount a certain amount of knee-jerk reactionism in the short-term. 

 

However, after a short period of time the elected leaders should have been the first people to step up and ensure that cooler heads prevailed. They should have been the ones to ensure that both the short-term costs and the long-term implications of every major decision was weighed and counter-weighed; that every plan was carefully examined before there was a rush to judgement. 

 

Now, ten years later, the best way to have this important conversation is to do it by looking at the facts and figures, and by studying the realities and outcomes that resulted from those decisions made by the Bush government in those fear filled months and fear-mongering years after 9/11. 

Let’s start by examining the financial burden of both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. This figure now stands at a staggering $1.7 trillion and counting; and that is just for military operations, base security, reconstruction, foreign aid, embassy costs, and veterans’ health care. It is worth mentioning that 1% - 2% of this total amount has been misplaced. The government now acknowledges that they have no accounting for this loss of taxpayer money. 

 

The Iraq war accounts for $872 billion (or 63%) of the total. Of that amount, $803 billion has been spent on military operations, $28 billion on local security and $41 billion that includes funds for reconstruction and foreign aid (source: “The Cost of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Other Global War on Terror Operations Since 9/11” prepared by the Congressional Research Service). 

 

Keep in mind this does not include the future cost of both these wars; which along with the estimated veteran care are projected to cost US taxpayers another $867 billion. Of course critics say these projections are too high but think back to when Cheney was lobbying for the Iraq war, he also repeatedly re-assured us that the price tag for this war - to oust Saddam, restore order and install a new government would not exceed $50-$60 billion. 

 

As we compile the total costs of post 9/11 government actions we are still not accounting for the increased expenditure from huge new additions to the government bureaucracy with the inception of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), the Department of Homeland Security and increased domestic intelligence budgets that were all non-war related expenses. In fact, if you tally all of this government expenditure, then George W. Bush has the distinction of “presiding over the largest increase in the size of government since the Great Society,” and those are John McCain’s words.

Next, we need to examine the current state of the regions within which these conflicts reside to fully understand the very real outcomes from both a regional stability and geopolitical stand-point. In the Middle East, the US’s closest ally Israel finds itself increasingly isolated and alone in the region. Meanwhile, Iran’s influence and power has grown substantially, directly as a result of America removing enemies on her borders, Iraq and Afghanistan.  What’s more, today Iraq is one of Iran’s largest trading partners, and Iran is rapidly strengthening trade ties with Afghanistan, giving it unparalleled clout and influence in both countries.  Ironically, Bush’s War on Terror has resulted in unimaginable gains and geopolitical power for this “axis of evil” country. The US has inadvertently helped change Iran’s status from an isolated pariah state, in 2003, to a major regional power broker by 2009. One wonders if America had not taken its eye off the ball when it had the Taliban and Al’ Qaeda on the run, and finished the job, if the situation would be different today with Iran. By taking the entire focus away from the Afghan conflict and relying instead on writing blank cheques to Pakistan and a corrupt Afghan government, it seems America was hoping they could have their cake and eat it. The US expected to wrap up a quick and cheap Iraq war – we all know how that turned out. This decision is even more amazing given that the US was fully aware of the murky history between the ISI and Taliban and acutely aware of Pakistan’s paranoia about India’s growing influence in a new Afghanistan. By 2008 the Taliban had the opportunity to fully re-group, and had turned Pakistan’s tribal regions into a new safe harbor for themselves and a host of other affiliated terrorist networks, including Al Qaeda. Pakistan is still the launching point for all attacks on US troops in Afghanistan, and arguably closer to being a failed state, with nuclear weapons, than ever before in its history. I believe there is a strong argument that things would be very different in this region, today, had the US not diverted all its military resources, assets, support and political focus and diverted it to a war of choice in Iraq. 

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, between warrantless wiretapping, extraordinary rendition, enhanced interrogation, water boarding, the patriot act and illegal domestic surveillance programs, we are only now starting to scratch the surface of secret government decisions made in the name of our security. It is also apparent that many of these decisions did not uphold America’s high ideals, beliefs and strong democratic values. Rather than get into a discussion about civil rights violations, let us examine the net result of the actions of creating a huge new domestic security apparatus with the TSA, Homeland Security and a mega-billion dollar domestic intelligence gathering network. One that starts with a SAR (Suspicious Activity Report) that local police officers are encouraged to fill out on their beats, which gets stored in a massive database without any further scrutiny or investigation of the person named in the report. All this information is then analysed using sophisticated software that is meant to stitch disparate pieces of information together, distributing it to federal “authorities” in real-time. In the context of this enhanced security apparatus, let’s review the last three major terrorist plots against the US, starting with the Christmas Day bomber.  Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab managed to board a flight to Detroit with an explosive device hidden in his underwear. Luckily this device failed to detonate, after which he was wrestled to the ground by a fellow passenger. What boggles the mind is the fact that this new and improved multi-billion dollar security apparatus completely missed him - this after his father, a respected Nigerian banker, called US authorities and warned them that his son was becoming radicalized. Despite being on a no fly list Abdulmutallab was not stopped at two different airports, and even though he bought a one-way ticket (like all the 9/11 hijackers) it was not picked up as a red flag by all our new and highly sophisticated security algorithms and apparatus. We are told that his name was misspelled on the no-fly list; clearly our government’s multi-billion dollar taxpayer funded state-of-the-art software does not contain a basic spell check or even the level of sophistication that Google’s search box provides with its query suggestions. Next we had the Times Square bomber who was caught, not by our enhanced security, but only because some alert citizens noticed a man acting strangely after parking his SUV near Times Square. A couple of street vendors called police after seeing what looked like smoke and some strange apparatus inside the abandoned vehicle, Finally, we had another close call with two packages located on separate cargo planes bound for the US from Yemen. Both had home printers with plastique explosives and a sophisticated detonating mechanism timed to blow up in mid-air over US cities. The only reason we discovered and disarmed them was thanks to a call from a reformed Al Qaeda terrorist to the head of Saudi intelligence. It begs the question of what all this increased prying, searching, and snooping has resulted in. Clearly it has not served as a deterrent, because the number of terrorist attacks has actually increased dramatically worldwide* (see footnote for sources), and in the US, in the past decade and at a much greater rate than before the Iraq war. The point is that securing the country is important but finding the right balance between technology, paranoia and human intelligence is equally important. Think about the fact that every new action by terrorists has led to a knee-jerk and piece-meal reaction to our growing security paranoia. First, we were asked to remove our shoes, then our belts, then gels were prohibited, next liquids had to be less than 3.4 ounces, and put in clear plastic baggies. Now since they cannot ask us to take off our undergarments we are instead virtually strip searched. Arguably, all this money is not being well spent because it is being done in a completely reactionary fashion rather than as part of a well thought out plan. We know that the terrorists will stop at nothing to kill us, so the only question is where will we draw the line?

Read Part 2: September 11 - Ten Years Later (part 2)

*NOTE: Sources: The National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) from September, 2006.  The NIE is issued by the President’s Director of National Intelligence and their conclusions are based on analysis of raw intelligence collected by all the US spy agencies.  It is an assessment on national security.  The 2006 NIE said that the number of terrorist attacks (defined as “as an act of violence or the threat of violence, calculated to create an atmosphere of fear and alarm”) had risen dramatically worldwide since the Invasion of Iraq in 2003.  The same NIE also cited the Iraq war as a major factor in this startling rise in global jihadist terrorist attacks.   We also have the US State Department’s Country Reports on Terrorism, 2006 which stated that there had been a 29% increase in terrorism worldwide in 2006, over the previous year; terrorist attacks on non-military targets rose to 14,338 with an increase of deaths to 20,498.  If you need any more data then I can point to another independent global study on terrorism conducted by Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank, research fellows at the Center on Law and Security at the NYU School of Law.  They found that there was a 607 percent rise in the average yearly incidence of attacks since the Iraq invasion. It is true that Iraq and Afghanistan do cause a huge blip and together account of 80 percent of attacks and 67 percent of fatalities; however, if you exclude these two countries you still see a solid 35 percent per year increase in the number of terrorist attacks in the rest of the world.