CHAPTER 23 In a speech on the tenth anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani said, “As with Pearl Harbor and the John F. Kennedy assassination, these defining events have a big impact on a nation because they’re not just a shared experience; they’re a shared memory.” There is no doubt that the attacks profoundly affected our country’s policies, politics, economy, society, and even collective psychology. Moreover, in addition to sharing the immediate experience of September 11, Americans have dealt with its consequences in the years since.
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the United States heightened security at home while applying military force overseas. In Afghanistan, the United States toppled the ruling Taliban (a regime that provided sanctuary for al-Qaeda) and in 2003 began the politically contentious Iraq war. President George W. Bush set forth the nation’s new challenges in a speech to Congress, saying, “Our war on terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.”
Most Americans have experienced the long-term effects of 9/11 through the actions of new agencies, such as the Transportation Security Administration and the Department of Homeland Security, as well as the provisions of the Patriot Act. For example, Americans have grown accustomed to removing their shoes and submitting to invasive searches at airport security checkpoints. In addition to these relatively obvious responses to the threat of terrorism, a large, complex, expensive, and largely hidden security apparatus has come into being. According to a 2010 Washington Post report, “Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security, and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.” All this comes at considerable cost—over $1 trillion since the 9/11 attacks. Given that at least thirty planned terrorist attacks have been thwarted since that time, many argue that the government’s actions are justified. Others worry
The four essays in this casebook evaluate the nation’s long-term responses to the September 11, 2001 attacks. In “Ten Years after 9/11, We’re Still in the Dark,” Omar Ashmawy, a U.S. Air Force veteran, examines America’s approach to interrogating and detaining suspected terrorists, claiming, “After so many years and so much sacrifice, nothing has changed” (para. 1). In “Remembering 9/11: How Safe Are We Today?” Paul Brandus lists the major terrorist attacks that have occurred since 2001 but still asserts that Americans’ level of fear is not really justified. Jonathan Rauch agrees, questioning the extent of our fear and even asserting, in “Be Not Afraid,” “Never have so many feared so little, so much” (para. 13). Finally, in “The TSA Has Never Kept You Safe: Here’s Why,” Christopher Elliott reports on a test of TSA screening that revealed its ineffectiveness but argues that the agency’s purpose was never to keep the United States safe.
OMAR ASHMAWY TEN YEARS AFTER 9/11, WE’RE STILL IN THE DARK I joined the U.S. military after law school to help my country defend itself against the threat of Islamic extremism. My final assignment in my eight years in the Air Force was as a war crimes prosecutor in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. With access to our nation’s most intimate secrets, I shuttled between Guantanamo and the Pentagon from the summer of 2007 to the winter of 2009. I learned many lessons, but on the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, the most important lesson I can share is the most alarming: After so many years and so much sacrifice, nothing has changed.1
Our greatest weakness remains today what it was 10 years ago, and what it was eight years before that, when the World Trade Center was bombed in 1993. We don’t understand Islam or Arab culture, and that ignorance prevents us from accurately predicting our relationship with Arab and Muslim countries and identifying our enemies.2
From our government to the front lines, individuals are making decisions based on inaccurate, biased information. The White House’s August announcement on combating radical Islam acknowledged this reality. Our soldiers, 3
Whether it’s the FBI recommending its agents read books by a known anti-Muslim author, misplaced anxiety over “sharia law,” the near absence of linguistic and cultural training in the military, or our government’s collective surprise at the Arab Spring, the effect of what we don’t know reverberates through U.S. policy. But the result is the same: We are caught off guard by events we should have anticipated, or, worse, we confuse our enemy’s propaganda with knowledge.4
As an American Muslim born and raised in New Jersey, I am frustrated that America still struggles with the basics: We don’t understand the difference between Islam and Islamic extremism or that Arab culture is not the same as the religion. We divide Muslims into secularists and extremists and can’t tell the devout from the radical, the sympathizer from the opportunist.5
Two of the most enduring examples are the military commissions and Guantanamo Bay—intractable problems that will never be resolved to anyone’s satisfaction. They’re once and future disasters built by people who should have known better—people America trusted to know more. Both were operated and sustained by individuals so uninformed of our enemy’s religion, language, and culture that they could not accurately process the information available to them. Attorneys couldn’t tell good cases from bad ones, and the agents assigned to the commissions didn’t know what questions to ask detainees.6
I saw it firsthand. From lawyers to interrogators, the vacuum was enormous. It filled Guantanamo Bay with men who did not need to be there and barred their release. It was fuel on a fire set by a legal process that initially conflated the mutually exclusive missions of intelligence-gathering and the rendering of justice. The absence of knowledge and leadership permitted the worst of what happened—reports of the abuse of prisoners, the desecration of holy books, the legal pantomimes—and continues to prevent a resolution to the human drama playing out on that island.7
We cannot close Guantanamo because the trials of the detainees who remain would be tainted by evidence from botched interrogations and because the men there are now radicalized—the result of decisions based in an ignorance tantamount to racism.8
This ignorance is a degenerative disease that debilitates our efforts to protect our nation. It was tempting to think that with Osama bin Laden’s death we could end this conflict, if only we could end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. While those wars must be concluded, neither their end nor the death of any individual terrorist will secure us against another attack by Islamic extremists. We’re not fighting a single enemy but a decentralized patchwork of groups that adhere to the same twisted, bankrupt ideology. Whether it is Jemaah Islamiah in Southeast Asia or al-Shabab in Somalia, our enemies are motivated and wait—patiently—until we forget.9
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READING ARGUMENTS
In what sense is this essay an evaluation argument? In what respects is it a proposal argument? Identify the specific elements of each argumentative strategy.
According to Ashmawy, what is the United States’ “greatest weakness” (para. 2) in dealing with the threat of terrorism?
Ashmawy uses first-person plural pronouns (such as we and our ) in this essay, particularly in paragraphs 2–5. Why do you think he does this? Does this choice strengthen his argument? Why or why not?
Where in this essay does Ashmawy appeal to ethos ? Why is his personal background important to his argument?
PAUL BRANDUS REMEMBERING 9/11: HOW SAFE ARE WE TODAY? As we mark the 12th anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, and honor the memory of the nearly 3,000 people who died that day, I think of the debate we’ve had this year on our security, and just how much privacy we have given up over the years to be (or at least feel) safer.1
More than a decade after the towers fell, the Pentagon burned, and a Pennsylvania field was scarred, we still don’t feel all that much safer. A Gallup survey taken in April said 40 percent of Americans are either “very worried” or “somewhat worried” about terrorism. Just 10 days after the 2001 attacks? 49 percent.2
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Fall 2001: Five people die in a series of anthrax attacks.
July 4, 2002: Two Israelis are killed at Los Angeles airport.
July 28, 2006: One woman is killed in an attack on a Jewish organization in Seattle.
July 27, 2008: Two people are killed in an attack on a church in Knoxville, Tennessee.
May 30, 2009: Three people, all members of the same family, are killed by a militia group.
May 31, 2009: An abortion doctor is gunned down in church.
June 1, 2009: One soldier is killed at a recruiting center in Arkansas.
June 10, 2009: One man is killed in a shooting at the National Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.
November 5, 2009: 13 soldiers are killed during a shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Texas.
February 18, 2010: One person is killed after a man flies a small plane into an IRS facility in Austin, Texas.
September 23, 2011: A man is killed in his home during an attack by three members of the Aryan Brotherhood.
April 15, 2013: Three people die in the Boston Marathon bombing; a fourth person—a policeman—is shot and killed three days later.
Again, in 12 years, only 35 deaths from terrorist acts. That’s less than three a year.
Now, I’m not including such horrors as the 2002 sniper shootings in the Washington area (10 killed) or last December’s elementary school massacre in Connecticut (27, not counting the killer). These incidents certainly terrorized their respective communities and instilled fear—but we’re using the NCTC’s narrower definition of “politically motivated violence” here.4
Now let’s add the number of Americans killed in terrorist attacks abroad. The NCTC has been collecting this data since 2005, and says between then and 2011, 158 U.S. lives were lost—with the vast majority occurring in Iraq and Afghanistan. Unless you plan on traveling to Helmand province in the near future, you probably have nothing to worry about.5
Here’s the bottom line: Your odds of getting killed in a terrorist attack are absurdly low: about one in 20 million. You’re far more likely to meet your demise from a bee sting, gun, car accident—or from behavior that you can control: smoking, sitting on the couch stuffing your face with junk food, not exercising.6
So why do tens of millions of Americans worry about terrorism? Because humans, flawed creatures that we are, don’t consider probabilities with 7
But there is less reason to be fearful today, in my view, because we’re doing a much better job of countering the threat. Let’s remember that the 19 hijackers who changed our world a dozen years ago were in many cases living right under our noses. Had we been less complacent about our security and more competent about connecting the dots, it’s entirely possible, if not probable, that the attack never would have happened. As for the tradeoff we have made between civil liberty and national security ever since, I suspect that’s one reason why the death toll from terrorism is so low.8
Since 2001, some plots—the Times Square bomber, the underwear bomber, and others—came close to succeeding; others were disrupted before they became operational. In 2001, I wondered what more could we have done; now we’re doing it. There are more cameras watching us in public. The government we like to bash is doing a better job of data mining, sharing information, and being more proactive about disrupting possible threats. It has made mistakes and, yes, in some cases it has gone too far and there have been abuses. We live in an imperfect world. We can do better, and I’m confident we will.9
And this, in the end, is the real tradeoff: What is going too far in the name of security—and what is not far enough?10
READING ARGUMENTS
Brandus believes that Americans should not fear an imminent terrorist attack. Why then does he include a long list of attacks in his essay? Does this list strengthen or weaken his argument? Explain.
In what respects is this essay an evaluation argument? In what respects is it a cause-and-effect argument?
In assessing the number of terrorist attacks since September 11, 2001, why does Brandus exclude “horrors” such as the 2002 sniper shootings around Washington, D.C., and the 2012 school shootings in Connecticut? Do you agree with his decision?
In paragraph 9, Brandus discusses the U.S. government’s antiterrorism measures, such as public surveillance and data mining. What point is he making here? Explain why you agree or disagree with him.
Do you think the December 2015 terrorist attack in San Bernardino, California (which occurred after Brandus wrote this essay), challenges this essay’s thesis? Explain your reasoning.
JONATHAN RAUCH BE NOT AFRAID It often befalls presidents to be most criticized in office for what later turn out to have been their particular strengths. Disparaged at the time as simplemindedness, timidity, and slickness, Ronald Reagan’s firmness, George H. W. Bush’s caution, and Bill Clinton’s adaptability look in hindsight like features, not bugs. (Unfortunately, George W. Bush’s bugs still look like bugs.) President Obama catches flak for his supposed underreaction to crises in the Middle East, Ukraine, and elsewhere. Instead of leading, the professorial president lectures the American public not to be so darned worried. “If you watch the nightly news, it feels like the world is falling apart,” he said last August. “I promise you things are much less dangerous now than they were 20 years ago, 25 years ago, or 30 years ago. This is not something that is comparable to the challenges we faced during the Cold War.” Blame social media, he tells us, for shoving so much upsetting stuff in our faces.1
Naturally, Obama’s pontifications draw protests. “I strongly disagree with the president’s assertion last night that America is safer,” said Senator John McCain. “By no objective measurement is America safer.” Danger abounds! In 2012, General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, pronounced the world “more dangerous than it has ever been.” That was before the Islamic State, or ISIS, took over swaths of Iraq. Senator Lindsey Graham has warned that failure to defeat isis “will open the gates of hell to spill out on the world.” Obama appears to have his doubts: a few months after Chuck Hagel, then the defense secretary, pronounced ISIS an “imminent” threat, not just to the United States but “to every stabilized country on Earth,” Obama sacked him.2
The American people deserve to hear complex, multifaceted debates about any number of complex, multifaceted matters. This is not one of them. Obama is simply right. The alarmists are simply wrong. America is safer than it has ever been and very likely safer than any country has ever been, a fact that politicians and the public are curiously reluctant to believe.3
Danger is a broad category. In principle, it includes everything from workplace accidents and natural disasters to infectious diseases and pollution. In pretty much all of those categories, we’re doing well, although we have much work to do. For present purposes, however, let’s limit ourselves to threats in the usual political sense: malevolent violence against Americans. The major menaces here would be warfare, crime, and terrorism.4
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined , today is probably the most peaceful time in human history. By the numbers, he writes, “the world was a far more dangerous place” in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s. According to the Uppsala Conflict Data Program, armed conflicts have declined by almost 40 percent since right after the end of the Cold War. “Today,” write Micah Zenko and Michael A. Cohen in Foreign Affairs , “wars tend to be low-intensity conflicts that, on average, kill about 90 percent fewer people than did violent struggles in the 1950s.” War between major nation-states has dwindled to the verge of extinction. In the context of human evolution, this is an astounding development.5
Of course, the world remains turbulent, but most of today’s military conflict, as in Syria right now, takes the form of civil war rather than war between nations, and implicates American interests but not American lives (unless America enters the fighting). The United States faces no plausible military invader or attacker. All we are really talking about, when we discuss threats from Iran or North Korea or ISIS, is whether our margin of safety should be very large or even larger. “No great power in world history comes close to enjoying the traditional state security that the United States does today,” writes Stephanie Rugolo in A Dangerous World? Threat Perception and U.S. National Security, a new collection of essays from the Cato Institute.6
Here at home, criminal violence is, as ever, a serious problem. But its reduction over the past couple of decades is one of the great success stories of our time. The violent-crime rate (which excludes homicides) has declined by more than 70 percent since the early 1990s. The homicide rate has declined by half, and in 2011 it reached the lowest level since 1963. According to the National Crime Victimization Survey, between 1995 and 2010 the rate of rape and sexual assault fell from five per 1,000 females to two.7
And how do Americans celebrate this extraordinary success? By denying it. Every year Gallup asks whether crime has gone up or down since the previous year. Every year, rain or shine, the public insists, usually by overwhelming margins (63 percent to 21 percent in 2014), that crime has risen. “Most Americans Unaware of Big Crime Drop Since 1990s,” announced the Pew Research Center in 2013; only 10 percent of those surveyed knew that gun crimes had gone down since the 1990s. Criminologists say that many people get angry when told that crime is decreasing.8
Perception is even more skewed where terrorism is concerned. “Terrorism Worries Largely Unchanged,” ran another Pew headline, also in 2013. That year, 58 percent of the public was worried about another terrorist attack in the United States, a rate not all that much lower in October 2001, immediately after the 9/11 attacks, when 71 percent of the public was worried. A few months ago, perhaps influenced by ISIS’s atrocities, a large plurality of respondents told NBC News/Wall Street Journal pollsters that the country is less safe than it was before 9/11.9
A Dangerous World? , “is today only a shadow of what it was in the 1970s and 1980s.” As for the risk posed by terrorism inside the United States, to characterize it as trivial would be very generous. Americans are about four times as likely to drown in their bathtub as they are to die in a terrorist attack. John Mueller of Ohio State University and Mark G. Stewart of Australia’s University of Newcastle estimate the odds of such deaths at one in 950,000 and one in 3.5 million, respectively.10
Surely we can at least agree to worry about a nuclear Iran, or nuclear terrorism, or ISIS? All are indeed worrisome, but Mueller persuasively argues that none merits the alarm it begets. Since Nagasaki in 1945, the few countries that have obtained nuclear weapons—including dangerous rogue states like Mao’s China, the Iran of its day—have consistently found them militarily and diplomatically useless, except as ego boosters and perhaps as defensive weapons to forestall attack. The odds of terrorists’ obtaining and deploying nuclear weapons are much lower than most people appreciate, for a host of technical and political reasons. ISIS, meanwhile, is an unusually vicious and destabilizing actor in a region that is full of them, but its menace has been almost entirely local. (In this issue’s cover story, Graeme Wood examines this threat, and the appropriate response, in detail.)11
Pinker, a psychologist at Harvard, mused in a recent speech about Americans’ odd refusal to appreciate their security. The bad news for Obama, if Pinker is correct, is that presidential palaver will have no effect, because people are hardwired to overreact to threats, real or perceived. In today’s world, where intricate social systems keep us safer than our forebears could ever have imagined, overreaction is maladaptive: it is often more disruptive and damaging than whatever provoked it. In the world we evolved for, however, humans needed to be hyperalert. Something rustling in the bush was more likely to be a predator or an enemy than a friend with glad tidings. Moreover, Pinker says, people are biased to overestimate the likelihood of the sorts of events that stand out in our memory, as violence and mayhem do, and as peace and quiet do not. Add alarmism’s usefulness to politicians and pressure groups, and you have a standing order for overreaction—always, not just now.12
Still, now is special. Given how safe we are, and how frightened people nonetheless feel, it seems unlikely that Americans’ threat perception has ever before been quite as distorted as it is today. Never have so many feared so little, so much. In an era of overreaction, a president who lectures the public about its insecurities, instead of pandering to its fears, necessarily seems impolitic, out of touch, tone-deaf, pedantic, negligent, complacent—choose your adjective. For precisely that reason, we can be grateful his instinct is to underreact. Historians will thank him, even if we don’t, for his steadfastness in the face of unprecedented safety.13
READING ARGUMENTS
What is Rauch’s position on the issue of Americans’ safety? Where does he state his thesis? Is this location the best choice? Why or why not?
In paragraph 6, Rauch concedes, “Of course, the world remains turbulent….” How does he refute this statement, which seems to challenge his position?
Where does Rauch use definition? Why is definition essential to his overall argument?
What, according to Rauch, has been the “biggest violent killer of humans” (para. 5)? How is this “violent killer” different now from what it was in the past?
According to Rauch, what should Americans be worried about? What should we not be worried about? Why?
CHRISTOPHER ELLIOTT THE TSA HAS NEVER KEPT YOU SAFE: HERE’S WHY The Transportation Security Administration’s timing couldn’t have been any worse. Just a few days after the busy summer travel season started—a time when inexperienced and nervous air travelers clog the nation’s airports—word leaked that the TSA screeners missed 95 percent of mock explosives and banned weapons smuggled through checkpoints by screeners testing the system.1
And the reaction was swift. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson “reassigned” the TSA administrator, Melvin Carraway, and the president nominated Coast Guard Vice Admiral Pete Neffenger to the post. Meanwhile, critics called for the agency to be reformed or disbanded, which is a familiar refrain to anyone who watches the agency assigned to protect America’s transportation systems.2
The larger question is: What’s wrong with airport security?3
And the surprise answer is, absolutely nothing. TSA defenders will tell you that there hasn’t been a single successful terrorist attack on America’s airports 4
Put differently, members of the red team knew where to hide the dummy explosives, because they’re aware of the places screeners are less likely to look for them. Terrorists aren’t.5
But agency critics say the lack of a new terrorist attack doesn’t mean the TSA is doing its job. It simply means there hasn’t been another successful terrorist attack. They point out that the agency is corrupt, inefficient, and constantly in the news for violating the civil rights of passengers. Even the most level-headed and patient detractors now believe the time for reform is long past and that the agency needs to be re-imagined from the bottom up. In other words, those calls for eliminating the TSA aren’t as fringe as they might have been a decade ago.6
In a sense, the TSA was never meant to protect anyone from terrorism. Experts know that no aviation security procedure, no matter how airtight it seems, can repel a truly determined terrorist. As Bruce Schneier, a security technologist, explained to Vanity Fair , “The only useful airport security measures since 9/11 were locking and reinforcing the cockpit doors, so terrorists can’t break in, positive baggage matching and teaching the passengers to fight back. The rest is security theater.”7
All the talk about the layers of aviation security is really just that: talk. It’s not meant to stop terrorists from attacking a plane or airport, and they aren’t even meant to make the bad guys think they can’t pull off another 9/11. No, the TSA and its so-called “security circus”—which seems so much more like a carnival in the bright glare of the red team revelations—is meant to make us feel safer. That’s the real job of the TSA. Next time you go to the airport and see the long lines and the full-body scanners, the screeners giving pregnant mothers and senior citizens “pat downs,” and passengers being “swabbed” and having the samples submitted into a fancy explosive detection machine, remember that.8
It’s a $7billion-a-year show put on for you .9
And remember that when a terrorist finally succeeds in blowing up another plane, too. There will be a similar reaction. Heads will roll at the agency. Maybe the president will ask for the Secretary of Homeland Security’s resignation this time, maybe not. Critics will say, “We told you so.” But in the end, we’ll decide that having an incompetent TSA is better than having no TSA at all.10
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There’s nothing wrong with airport security, and there’s nothing wrong with the TSA. It’s doing exactly what we wanted it to.12
READING ARGUMENTS
In June 2015, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) tested its own security measures. What, specifically, did the TSA find?
Were you surprised by the results of this investigation? Why or why not?
In paragraph 3, Elliott asks, “What’s wrong with airport security?” What does he conclude? Do you agree with him?
In paragraph 6, Elliott summarizes the views of TSA critics. Does he refute these criticisms effectively, or does he need to do more? Explain.
What, according to Elliott, is the real purpose of the TSA’s security measures? What other purpose (or purposes) could they have?
Some critics of the TSA believe that the agency should be eliminated entirely. Does Elliott? What might be gained and lost if this agency were eliminated?
Does Elliott believe that we are safer today than we were before 9/11? Explain.
AT ISSUE: IS AMERICA SAFER NOW THAN BEFORE 9/11?
Ashmawy is critical of the U.S. government’s approach to capturing, detaining, and interrogating suspects after 9/11: “It was fuel on a fire set by a legal process that initially conflated the mutually exclusive missions of intelligence-gathering and the rendering of justice” (para. 7). What specific distinction is Ashmawy making? Why is this distinction important to his argument? Do you agree that these two “missions” are (or should be) “mutually exclusive”? Why or why not?
After documenting the general decline in “malevolent violence against Americans” (para. 4), Rauch asks: “And how do Americans celebrate this extraordinary success? By denying it” (8). What factors do you think contribute to this “denial”? Do you think this denial is harmful, or might it have some benefits?
WRITING ARGUMENTS: IS AMERICA SAFER NOW THAN BEFORE 9/11?
Brandus writes, “As for the tradeoff we have made between civil liberty and national security … I suspect that’s one reason why the death toll from terrorism is so low” (para. 8). Do you agree with his judgment that the tradeoff of privacy and civil liberties has been worth it because of the safety it may have brought Americans? Why or why not? Write an essay that takes a position on this question.
After reading these four selections, do you think America is safer now than before 9/11? Write an argumentative essay that presents your position on this issue.
AT ISSUE: IS AMERICA SAFER NOW THAN BEFORE 9/11?