A decade after the fall of the World Trade Center towers, the volume of U.S. exports was 40% higher and imports 27% higher than in 2000. Since 2000, foreign-owned assets in the United States and U.S.-owned assets abroad have both more than doubled in relation to our nation’s GDP.
As a result, while trade and investment flows expanded, people flows stagnated. The U.S. has lost significant market share in global tourism since 2001, causing the loss of hundreds of billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of jobs in the U.S. tourism industry.
Fifteen years into the war on terror, the United States should acknowledge that it needs to do less, not more. In the long run, the solution for Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, etc., and thus the solution to Islamist-inspired terrorism, must come from the citizens of those countries.
Key provisions of the controversial post-9/11 anti-terrorism law (including section 215, which authorizes the National Security Agency’s collection of Americans’ telephone calling records) are set to expire on June 1. While the House has addressed the issue by passing the USA Freedom Act, the Senate is still dealing with competing proposals. In a ten-and-a-half-hour-long filibuster over the NSA surveillance programs, Sen. Rand Paul cited analysis by former CIA analyst and current Cato scholar Patrick G. Eddington.
“Through his filibuster, Paul has all but assured that 215 will sunset — at least until Congress returns from its Memorial Day recess in early June,” notes Eddington.
From 1988 to 1996, Patrick G. Eddington was a military imagery analyst at the CIA’s National Photographic Interpretation Center. He received numerous accolades for his analytical work, including letters of commendation from the Joint Special Operations Command, the Joint Warfare Analysis Center and the CIA’s Office of Military Affairs.
“Releasing this report is critical because it’s about America coming to terms with what we have done in the so-called ‘war on terror,’” he says.
Eddington doesn’t buy the argument that releasing the report will endanger U.S. national security, arguing that “drone strikes are doing as much or more to fuel anti-Americanism and help with terrorist recruitment than this report will ever do.”
Unfortunately, Eddington concludes, “the release of this summary may constitute the only form of public accountability that any of the individuals involved in this will ever suffer from.”
“Whether as federal employees or political appointees, CIA personnel took an oath to uphold the laws of the United States. Instead, they chose to engage in acts that clearly violated those laws, including international treaties banning the use of torture to which the United States is not only a signatory, but a putative leader as well,” lamented Eddington.
Terrorism is a hazard to human life, and it should be dealt with in a manner similar to that applied to other hazards—albeit with an appreciation for the fact that terrorism often evokes extraordinary fear and anxiety. The anniversary of the September 11th tragedies gives us the perfect opportunity to reflect on how our nation has approached terrorism from a policy perspective.
In a newly released study, Cato's John Mueller and the University of Newcastle's Mark G. Stewart join together to assess U.S. spending on domestic counterterrorism since September 11, 2001, concluding there has been very little proven benefit.
In Responsible Counterterrorism Policy, Mueller and Stewart apply conventional methods of risk assessment and cost-benefit analysis to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The study’s authors look at four issues central to risk analysis for terrorism — the cost per saved life, acceptable risk, cost–benefit analysis, and risk communication — and assess the degree to which risk analysis has been coherently applied to counterterrorism efforts by the U.S. government.
Mueller and Stewart found that DHS’ risk assessment process is deeply flawed and often absent from discussions of spending priorities. In order for the post-9/11 increase in domestic homeland security expenditures to be deemed cost-effective, these added measures would have to have deterred, disrupted, or protected against more than one otherwise successful car-bomb attack in a crowded area every single day.
Homeland Security bureaucrats generally do not thoroughly evaluate counterterrorism expenditures, and recent studies suggest DHS spent hundreds of billions of dollars without knowing what it was doing. Key to this systemic waste is a tendency to inflate the threat Americans face from terrorism, which leads to policies that are exceptionally risk averse. In addition, decision-makers appear to be overly fearful about negative reactions to any relaxations of security measures and also about the consequences of failing to overreact.
Public officials are supposed to responsibly spend funds. The burden is on DHS to explain why spending more than $1 trillion with very little proven benefit is not a reckless waste of resources. Americans concerned about their safety and though of their loved ones deserve answers that will only emerge once policymakers begin thoroughly assessing domestic security expenditures.
A D.C.-based public policy research organization (or "think tank") dedicated to the values of individual liberty, limited government, free markets, and peace.
