It is no accident that the President managed to use the t-word at least twenty and as many as 36 times in each of his post-9/11 State of the Union addresses (as opposed to only once in January 2001).--John Mueller Terrorphobia
update: I need to give you more of the juicy quotes from this one...
Since when does it take political courage to defend a rational approach to public policy against an hysterical one?
Once again, the parallel with the post-World War II Red Scare is instructive. In that atmosphere politicians scurried to support spending billions upon billions of dollars to surveil, screen and protect, and to spy on an ever-expanding array of individuals who had aroused suspicion for one reason or another. Organizations were infiltrated, phones were tapped (each tap can require the full-time services of a dozen agents and support personnel), letters were intercepted, people were followed, loyalty oaths were required, endless leads (almost all to nowhere) were pursued, defense plants were hardened, concentration camps for prospective emergency use were established (an idea desperately proposed by Senate liberals in 1950), and garbage was meticulously sifted in the hope of unearthing scraps of incriminating information.
[credit: Associated Press] At the time, critics of this process focused almost entirely on the potential for civil liberties violations. This is a worthy concern, but hardly the only one. As far as I know, at no point during the Cold War did anyone say: “Yes, many domestic Communists adhere to a foreign ideology that ultimately has as its goal the destruction of capitalism and democracy by violence if necessary, but they’re so pathetic they couldn’t subvert their way out of a wet paper bag. So why are we expending so much time, effort and treasure over this issue?” It is astounding to me that this plausible, if admittedly debatable, point of view seems never to have been publicly expressed by any politician, pundit, professor or editorialist (although some may have believed it privately). On Stouffer’s survey, only a lonely and obviously politically insignificant share of the population (about 2 percent) professed to believe that domestic Communists presented no danger at all.....
Criticisms of the Patriot Act and of the Bush Administration’s efforts to apprehend prospective terrorists focus almost entirely on concerns about civil liberties, worrying that the rights of innocent Americans might be trampled in the rush to pursue terrorists. This is a perfectly valid concern, but from time to time someone might wonder a bit in public about how much the quest to ferret out terrorists and to protect ourselves is costing, as well as about how meager the results have been. In their valuable recent book, Less Safe, Less Free (2007), David Cole and Jules Lobel ably detail and critique the process. As their title implies, they suggest that we are less safe in part because the FBI and other agencies have failed in their well-funded quest to uncover the enemy within. There’s an alternative explanation, however: They have not failed, and we are not less safe; investigators haven’t found much of anything because there isn’t much of anything to find... All this may help to explain why there have been no al-Qaeda attacks in the United States for so many years, contrary to almost all anticipations. Perhaps the group’s goal is not to destroy the United States with explosions, but to have the Americans destroy themselves by wallowing in fear and by engaging in counterproductive policy overreaction. Thus, shortly after 9/11, Osama bin Laden happily crowed that “America is full of fear, from its north to its south, from its west to its east. Thank God for that.” And in 2004 he proclaimed his policy to be “bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy”, noting with consummate glee that, “It is easy for us to provoke and bait. . . . All that we have to do is . . . raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaeda in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses.” The 9/11 attacks, he calculated, cost only $500,000 to carry out, “while the attack and its aftermath inflicted a cost of more than $500 billion on the United States.”
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