Annual Report  

Living With the War on Terror

by R.W. Bradford

How did we abandon our liberty and increase our tax burden without gaining any increase in security?

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A year has passed since four small groups of Muslim revolutionaries boarded four U.S. passenger planies, hijacked them, and tried to crash them into buildings in New York and Washington, D.C. Two jets hit their intended target, the World Trade Center in New York, causing nearly 3,000 deaths. Another crashed into the Pentagon, causing 184 deaths, though it is doubtful that the Pentagon was their intended target. The fourth plane crashed in Pennsylvania, killing all hijackers, passengers, and crew, apparently after passengers attempted to overcome the hijackers.

The American people responded to the attacks with shock, grief, patriotism, hostility toward Muslims in general and Arabs in particular, and increased support for their government.

In the year since Sept. 11, the U.S. government has responded to the attacks in the following ways:

It destroyed the government of Afghanistan, which had harbored an Islamic revolutionary group believed to have supported the terrorists. It established in its place a client state, whose existence depends on continued United States military presence.

It arrested or otherwise detained numerous people whom it suspects (or claims to suspect) of terrorism or, at least, of unpopular opinions or activities that we do not like. These individuals have been denied the right to a trial, denied the right to counsel, denied the right to due process of law. It has convicted one "terrorist," an American who never supported any act of terror against his country in any way.

It is preparing to invade another Islamic state, one not even tangentially involved in the attacks of Sept. 11, on the ground that it is a "terrorist state," i.e. one that has sought to produce devices of mass destruction with which it can threaten its neighbors. Other countries, notably the U.S. itself, which have produced devices of mass destruction with which they threaten their neighbors, are not targeted by the government's campaign.

It has instituted numerous restrictions on the personal liberty of its citizens, restrictions ostensibly designed to prevent another successful terrorist attack on them. The government has givin itself the right to search people who try to travel or attend public events, to conduct secret searches of people's property and secret copying of their private documents, to hold citizens as well as non-citizens in prison for indefinite periods, to make librarians provide government agents with the titles of books that any person has withdrawn from a library, and to do many other things destructive of its citizens' freedom and privacy.

These restrictions almost certainly would not have prevented the Sept. 11 attacks. Federal agencies have released several studies in which government operatives, posing as ordinary airline passengers, have boarded passenger aircraft while carrying concealed weapons that were far more dangerous than the razors and box-cutters used by the Sept. 11 terrorists. Terrorists using more sophisticated weapons — knives made from ceramics or disguised as parts of such common carry-on items as attachŽ cases — would have virtually no risk of detection under current regime.

While any of the new restrictions — not all of them instituted by the federal government; hysteria is a swamp that stretches far beyond the waters of the Potomac — might plausibly have made life more difficult for certain terrorists, many of them have no relevance to terrorism, and can be explained only as bureaucratic power lust. The University of Washington has prohibited possession of political leaflets at football games; meanwhile, Washington State Police randomly search people who travel on ferry boats, on the theory that it might apprehend a terrorist disguised as a tourist or commuter.

Ridiculous? Certainly. But it is difficult to see how any of the government's actions have made Americans more secure from terrorists who are willing to give up their own lives in committing their act of terror. No government in history, not even totalitarian dictators like Stalin, Samoza, Pol Pot, Hitler, or Mao, has ever managed to do this.

None of the recent anti-terror measures make Americans any less secure from foreign terrorist attack, either, with the possible exception of the government's more aggressive foreign policy, which might inspire further terrorists. But the simple fact is that Americans are, and have always been, extremely secure from foreign terror. In the more than two centuries since the founding of the republic, the attack of Sept. 11 is only the second significant act of terrorism by foreign revolutionaries directed against American civilians on U.S. soil. The organization allegedly responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks has, so far as anyone can determine, attempted at most one additional act of terror: an British man tried to light his shoe on fire on a trans-Atlantic flight, and was quickly subdued by passengers and crew.

Security at U.S. airports was not adequate to prevent terrorists from boarding planes on the morning of Sept. 11. Why did security fail? Most Americans believe it was because security operations were simply incompetent. What's curious is that the people who believe this almost invariably reacted by expressing support for the government and its security efforts — the very efforts that they believed had failed. The federal government had virtual total control of the security system that failed, so giving the government further resources seems questionable at best.

But there was another condition the terrorists needed to succeed in their deadly mission: they needed passengers and crew who would not resist. The terrorists could hurt a lot of people with their knives, and even kill some of them, but four or five men armed with knives could hardly keep them all at bay if the passengers and crew were willing to put their lives in jeopardy to regain control.

Of course, the passengers and crew members were doing what the government had told them to do when faced with hijackers: co-operate and let the experts on the ground deal with the hostages. The failure of this response was spectacularly evident when the first two planes crashed into the World Trade Center. But once people aboard the the other hijacked planes learned about the WTC attacks, they reacted by attacking the hijackers, in one case overpowering them and causing the plane to crash with relatively little loss of life and property, and in the other, it seems fairly likely, causing the plane to crash into what was, at most, a secondary target.

Ironically, the one measure that would substantially reduce the incidence of successful plane hijackings — the arming of pilots — has been resisted by the Bush administration and by most Americans, on the prepostrous theory that a pilot armed with a handgun might pose a greater threat to them than a pilot armed with a 250,000 pound jet aircraft. If there ever was a case of ideology trumping evidence this is it: hasn't everyone just seen how much damage a person armed with a jet plane can do?

Here is the situation today: we are no more secure from terrorist attacks than we were before Sept. 11, and we are less secure from government attack in our homes and persons. We can be arrested and held without the right to a speedy and public trial or even to consult with an attorney, our property can be searched without our even knowing it and can be confiscated on the flimsiest of pretexts. Our government is exercising its overwhelming military power to impose its will on people all over the world; it is establishing, in effect, the largest and most powerful empire in the history of the world — which motivates the people we subjugate to hate Americans more and more thus making Americans less secure in their travel abroad. Ironically, Islamic revolutionaries who hated America because it is a free and open society — and consequently a happy and prosperous place to live — got their wish: Americans reacted to their terrorist attack by making themselves less free, their society less open, and their country a less prosperous and less happy place to live.

How did we get into this situation? How did we abandon our liberty and increase our tax burden without gaining any increase in security?

The answer, I think, lies in a little recognized religious development. Over the past century or so, Americans have gradually abandoned their traditional religious belief in a Supreme Being, an other-worldly, ethereal God who who can perform miracles and intervene in their lives in ways both good and bad.

They have replaced this other-worldly god with a god that lives very much in this world. The new god is the state. Like the old god, it can perform miracles; it can, for example, spend more than it takes in year after year with no ill effects and can take money from everyone and distribute it among everyone with virtually everyone gaining in the process — and it cure disease, end poverty, and solve virtually any problem and relieve any discomfort that a person can face.

Just as people formerly reacted to tragic or disturbing events by renewing and increasing their faith in God, people now react by renewing their faith in the state, beseeching it to help and making additional offerings.

And just as the faithful in years past generally declined to examine whether their renewed faith, prayer, and offerings actually protected them from calamities, so Americans today aren't looking too closely at whether their renewed faith, prayer, and offerings to the state actually are protecting them.

From time to time there have been rogues among religious functionaries who exploited offerings of the faithful to increase their own power and influence, so today there are state functionaries who use the revival of faith in government to their own advantage. Of course, just as before, faith recedes as the calamity recedes into the past. The cynical among us might suspect that the Bush administration's insistence on war against Iraq is partly motivated, at least on a subliminal level, by the desire for another calamity to "bring us together."

For the present, at least, many Americans seem unaware that the money spent and the liberties abandoned have failed to make them more secure. They have no evidence for their belief in the efficacy of government; they simply think that by some mysterious process paying more taxes, supporting military action abroad, and giving up their rights and allowing their privacy to be invaded will somehow help. It is an act of faith.

But there is a sensible and well-disposed minority among us, and they are potentially just as influential as any "silent majority" or "moral majority" has ever been alleged to be. What should they do?

And they should insist, at all times, upon the obvious truth: that absolute security is impossible; people who are bereft of moral sense and willing to die for their envies and hatreds can successfully perpetrate an act of terrorism. Recognizing this, the sensible minority should demand reasonably efforts to make us reasonably secure: armed crews, alert security forces, a non-aggressive foreign policy, and so forth.

This demand should be matched by its correlative, that the government should restor the security it has already taken from the people; they should demand that our government undo the measures that subvert our liberty and privacy while not significantly increasing our security.

Sensible people will recognize that one of the reasons why so many Muslims are so hostile to America is that our government is attempting to impose its will almost everywhere in the world. They should call for a stop to this.

The power of the sensible minority is always great, because the power of the truth is great. And the truth is that government is merely a human institution, incapable of magic and, thanks to its broad power and its popular support, susceptible to the human frailties, follies, and vices that have undermined all people's attempts to live happy and fulfilling lives. These frailities will never be wholly removed, but their effects can be limited when their expression and idol — the state — is demystified by common sense. This is the task of the sensible minority. And its challenge.

© Copyright 2008, Liberty Foundation

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