A Short History of Stupid

by Helen Razer

  Then there were the consequences.

  Putting aside that the justification for the war—Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction—didn’t exist, the attack had other effects as well. In 2006, a US intelligence report concluded that ‘the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse’. That conclusion was echoed by a UK government report that year into the 2005 London bombings and confirmed by the head of British intelligence service MI5 in 2010 in evidence to the Chilcot Inquiry in the UK. The then head of the Australian Federal Police had also reached that conclusion in 2004, and was attacked by the conservative Howard government when he expressed that view publicly, just as the Blair government had initially rejected any link between Iraq and the increasing risk of terrorism. And the Islamic State that has emerged from the Iraqi and Syrian civil wars is regarded as so dangerous that a new round of military intervention is underway.

  This is a type of Stupid so vast that people seem unable to fully comprehend it: the governments of the United States, Britain, Australia and the other countries that participated in the attack on Iraq together spent trillions of dollars and caused the death of hundreds of thousands of people only to make their countries, by the admission of their own intelligence and law enforcement agencies, less safe from the threat of terrorism.

  But when it comes to the War on Terror, everything is big. Big costs. Big body counts. Big infringements of liberty. Big Stupid. The post-9/11 era has been characterised, indeed defined, by Stupid. We are surrounded by it, but we’ve become inured to it, our ability to use perspective and logic dulled, our capacity for astonishment pushed ever higher, so that we find nothing noteworthy in things we would have found ludicrous or outrageous twenty years ago. It was Voltaire who first claimed that those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities, but in his eagerness to coin the ultimate anti-clerical bon mot, he framed it too restrictively: those who claim to prevent atrocities also want you to believe absurdities.

  This is just a short list of some of the recent moments of vintage Stupid provided by the War on Terror:

  • In February 2013, the US Secretary of Defense announced a new medal for drone operators to honour their service in remote-controlled killing. In recent years, drones have killed, according to conservative estimates, several hundred civilians, including dozens of children, in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen. After an outcry from veterans who had actually faced real combat, the Pentagon plan was abandoned.

  • The Central Intelligence Agency’s torture program produced no useful intelligence, a report by the US Senate Intelligence committee, which oversees the CIA and other intelligence agencies, found. Instead, the CIA took intelligence gained by the FBI using traditional methods and claimed it had obtained it via torture, lied to Congress and the US government about the benefits of torture, and kept secret some of its more barbaric methods. In order to try to stop the report, the CIA spied on the committee itself and then launched a public attack on its chair.

  • One of the most vociferous Congressional critics of whistle-blower Edward Snowden and the journalists who have reported his revelations, Peter King—Republican chairman of the House Subcommittee on Counterterrorism—has for thirty years been a strong supporter of the IRA and refused to condemn its atrocities.

  • In the United States, if you’re within 100 kilometres of a border—which amounts to two-thirds of the US population—you can have your laptop or mobile device searched by law enforcement agencies without cause under a ‘border exemption’ from normal due process. You can also be prosecuted if you refuse to tell authorities your password.

  • The UK government made The Guardian go through an elaborate piece of theatre in destroying hard disks containing information on NSA and GCHQ spying provided by Edward Snowden, despite all parties knowing the same information was held on offshore servers and was just a click away.

  • In 2011, the US Transportation Security Administration said that it ‘stood by’ its airport security officers after they insisted on patting down a wheelchair-bound ninety-five-year-old woman with cancer and compelled her to remove her adult nappy while going through security at a Florida airport.

  • It took two years for the conviction of British man Paul Chambers for joking on Twitter about blowing up a Yorkshire airport to be overturned by British courts.

  • The White House counterterrorism adviser Lisa Monaco used a speech to the Harvard Kennedy School to warn parents that ‘confrontational children’ could in fact be terrorists.

  • After the fall of Muammar Gaddafi, documents recovered from his security agency showed that the CIA and MI6 had repeatedly abducted Libyan dissidents in other countries and delivered them to Gaddafi to interrogate and torture. ‘I congratulate you on the safe arrival of Abu Abd Allah Sadiq,’ a senior MI6 official wrote to Gaddafi henchman Moussa Koussa about one of their victims. ‘This was the least we could do for you and for Libya to demonstrate the remarkable relationship we have built over the years. I am so glad.’

  • The US government’s own files, and former Bush Administration officials, acknowledge that over 150 inmates of its Guantanamo Bay facility (for ‘the worst of the worst’ in lingua Dubya), including boys and old men, were entirely innocent; many were held for years anyway, including an Al Jazeera cameraman held for six years so he could be interrogated about that media company.

  • In September 2013, several Iraqi torture victims were ordered by a US court to pay the legal costs of the company whose employees tortured them in Abu Ghraib during the Iraq War, after a court ruled the company could not be sued in the US for its actions in Iraq.

  • Among the ‘trigger words’ that the NSA uses to filter internet communications for evidence of terrorism are ‘import’, ‘Elvis’, ‘illuminati’, ‘dictionary’ and, as if to prove that terrorists aren’t real men, ‘quiche’.

  • Under the Obama Administration’s ‘Insider Threat Program’, developed in response to Edward Snowden, the Pentagon advised its staff to consider reporting anyone seen reading satirical news site The Onion or progressive online news site Salon as potential security threats.*

  These absurdities aren’t merely disturbing, laughable or undignified, they come with a prodigious cost, even if we put aside as a one-off mistake the fact that the Iraq War has been a multi-trillion-dollar exercise in reducing Iraqi life expectancy.

  So, forget everything you’ve been told about the War on Terror, and let’s go back to basics, in order to de-Stupidise it.

  A cost-benefit analysis of the War on Terror

  Between 9/11 and 2011, the United States spent an additional US$700 billion on homeland security, separate from its military spending—spending on bigger budgets for security, law enforcement and intelligence agencies, spending on a new Department of Homeland Security, spending on irradiating airline customers with X-ray body scanners, spending on security furniture and scanners at every government building across the country, and people to staff them. It also incurred an estimated $400 billion in losses derived from additional security measures.

  Was this $1.1 trillion cost justified? There have been no mass-casualty attacks in the US since 9/11, and few terrorist incidents of any kind (more of which later). Did this additional spending—remember, the US, like every other government in the world, was already spending a lot of money on security, law enforcement and intelligence before 9/11—stop attacks? It’s impossible to tell, isn’t it? To determine what might have been without that additional $1+ trillion in spending and extra costs?

  Well, yes, it is indeed impossible to tell, but it turns out there is actually a way to determine if the spending was justified—a different question, but one with a much easier answer. Two academics, John Mueller and Mark G. Stewart, have tackled the question in their 2011 book, Terror, Security and Money: Balancing the risks, benefits, and costs of homeland security—the seminal text on understanding the mind-numbing stupidity of security spending. To grossly simplify their approach, they answer th
e question by working backwards—take how much additional money has been spent to prevent terrorist attacks, work out the cost of terrorist attacks, estimate the reduction in risk achieved by the extra spending and calculate how many terrorist attacks would need to have been thwarted to justify the extra spending. Yes, true, such an approach doesn’t account for the devastating emotional toll of a mass-casualty attack, the trauma for survivors, for families and friends of those killed and the wide-scale shock for a whole society, but it can put additional spending into an economic perspective.

  Based on Mueller and Stewart’s conservative estimates, including very generous assumptions about how much additional spending has reduced the risk of terrorist attacks, the additional expenditure on homeland security by the US would have only been remotely economically justified if the additional spending by itself—apart from pre-existing security spending—had prevented more than one 9/11-level attack each and every year, or prevented 1700 smaller but economically significant attacks every year. And bear in mind, while the US was spending a lazy trillion on homeland security under the pretence of making itself safer, it was spending as much again on its Iraq occupation, which by common agreement made it less safe.

  But even if you dispute Mueller and Stewart’s numbers or assumptions, their analysis points to one of the central absurdities of national security spending: terrorism is a negligible cause of mortality and economic cost in Western countries.

  This is where Stupid starts to mount up. For example, in the US, among the things that are more fatal to people than terrorism are not just obvious threats like gun violence or car accidents,* but threats as varied as malnutrition, falls, swimming accidents and work accidents, each of which kill more Americans annually than the death toll from 9/11, let alone the ongoing annual death toll from terrorism, which is negligible—in fact, so small it ranks below bathtub accidents and shootings by toddlers as a cause of death. In terms of demonstrated threat, terrorism is on par with exotic diseases, skydiving accidents and choking in restaurants.

  Indeed, Americans need more protection from their own police forces than from terrorists. On average, American police shoot, taser or beat to death around 400 of their fellow citizens a year, often for the most spurious of reasons, with the mentally ill and African Americans featuring prominently as innocent victims. In 2014, a North Carolina police officer called by the parents of a mentally ill teenager shot him dead even after two other officers had restrained him, declaring, ‘I don’t have time for this.’ Oklahoma police beat a man to death in front of his family after he had tried to intervene in a dispute between his wife and daughter. In 2013, Iowa police shot dead an unarmed teen whose father had called them because his son had taken his truck to buy cigarettes. Georgia police shot dead a diabetic man after his girlfriend rang 911 for medical assistance. Washington DC police shot dead an unarmed mentally ill female driver with a toddler in the back of her car. In 2012, Houston police shot dead a mentally ill double amputee in a wheelchair. These are only some of the more high-profile recent victims of America’s hyper-aggressive and heavily armed police.

  In Australia, there has only been one terrorism-related death since 2001, when a Christian fundamentalist killed an abortion clinic security guard, though authorities insist they have thwarted four mass-casualty attacks during that period. Approximately 100 Australians have also died because of terrorism overseas since 2001, mostly in Indonesia. Even accepting at face value the claims of security agencies about the planned mass-casualty attacks, the possible death tolls from such attacks would have been small compared to nearly 19,000 Australians who have died in road accidents in the same period. As it stands, about three times more Australians have died falling out of bed since 2001 than have died at the hands of terrorists. But in the decade after 9/11, Australia spent nearly $17 billion on additional security, increased funding for intelligence and law enforcement agencies, and our involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq, to which we committed as a dutiful ally of the US. That expenditure is in addition to other national security-related costs inflicted on Australian industry (the aviation industry in particular) that also run into the billions.

  National security has sucked up huge amounts of money that, based on the policy objective of saving lives, obviously should have been spent elsewhere. Directing vast amounts of additional resources into national security beyond those that were already being directed to it before 9/11 means fewer resources to direct at the long list of preventable and treatable health threats we face. Those resources could be used for improving roads and road safety, or ensuring people have enough to eat, or providing better mental health services, or lifting economic growth potential through spending on infrastructure and education, or paying off government debt, the future interest on which will reduce our capacity for such expenditures. Or it could just be used to cut taxes: a US university study suggests a billion dollars in defence spending produces around 20 per cent fewer jobs than a billion dollars in tax cuts.

  Hating our freedoms

  But it gets more Stupid. If the War on Terror costs money, health, lives and opportunities, it also comes with a heavy cost to basic freedoms. Our response to an enemy that purportedly ‘hates our freedoms’ has been to curb those very freedoms through anti-terrorism laws. For some reason, Australia has some of the most voluminous anti-terrorism legislation in the West, far bigger than legislation passed by US Congress or in other Anglophone countries. And under Australian laws, basic legal principles have gone by the board: people not charged with any crime can be detained by secret court order, without legal representation; people not charged with any crime can be subjected to strict controls on their freedom of speech, freedom of movement and freedom of association; the crime of ‘sedition’ even made a sinister comeback; simply writing a book urging violence has seen an Islamic extremist in Australia jailed for over a decade—despite no harm coming from it, despite the book being cut-and-pasted rubbish.

  Better yet, if you’re lucky enough to have been targeted for ‘rendition’ by the US, you’ll be sent to a third country and tortured, with an ASIO agent in attendance, while the Australian government denies knowing where you are.

  Moreover, the legal framework of anti-terrorism in the United States has been used by governments as the justification for expanding their powers well beyond even the generous remit provided by policymakers in areas such as torture, extra-judicial killing (including of Americans) and, above all, mass surveillance. Since 9/11, the United States, with the assistance of the intelligence agencies of the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, has established a global surveillance system aimed at tracking and collating information on every internet and telephone user on the planet.

  And as elsewhere, such laws, far from being temporary in nature as they were claimed to be when introduced, have remained in place and, worse, expanded into other areas of law, with Australian states applying anti-terror-style laws to motorcycle gangs and trade unions. And the very definition of terrorism expands to fill the space available to it. Protests by pacifists and people complaining about water quality have been labelled ‘terrorism’ in the United States, and groups targeted by the Department of Homeland Security’s intelligence ‘fusion centres’—whatever they are—include Ron Paul supporters, the Occupy movement, the ACLU, pro- and anti-abortion activists and gun ownership advocates. In the UK, in attempting to justify the detention of journalist Glenn Greenwald’s partner David Miranda, the UK government argued in court that simply publishing documents that might influence a government was ‘terrorism’, and that the motives of the publisher didn’t matter. ‘Terrorism is terrorism,’ the British government’s lawyers averred, meaning one could be a terrorist without even knowing it (the most dangerous kind of terrorist, presumably?). What they really meant was not that ‘terrorism is terrorism’, but that anything they wish to deem ‘terrorism’ is ‘terrorism’.

  Anti-terrorism laws are thus like untreated cancers: they grow relentlessly and metastasise,
infecting unconnected areas of law, undermining basic rights wherever they can find purchase. Aviation is a particular cluster point. Airports are now the legal null zones of the Western world: step into an airport, indeed even drive up to one, and your rights start vanishing. Security personnel can scan you, interrogate you, strip you of your possessions, detain you, use an (admittedly adorable) dog to sniff you and explore your belongings. If you choose to fly, your basic rights become dependent on the good temper and goodwill of bureaucrats and security guards.

  But despite the ferocious and ever-expanding nature of these laws, their benefit is negligible. How so? Because (just as Mueller and Stewart show with security spending) they are in addition to already comprehensive criminal and anti-terrorism laws that enabled law enforcement and intelligence agencies to infiltrate, prevent and investigate the activities of terrorists, and thus provide only a marginal risk reduction.

  This is another key aspect of War on Terror Stupid that people fail to grasp: there was no low-hanging regulatory fruit when it came to terrorism before 9/11, no gaping holes in criminal law and intelligence-gathering regulation that allowed terrorists free rein, or prevented agencies from doing their jobs properly. Rather, 9/11 was the result of agencies like the CIA, the NSA and the FBI failing to use the powers they already had, despite possessing detailed information about the attack and the attackers, and the failure of existing airport security measures which may have stopped the attacks.

  Nor has this lesson been learned since. The review panel Barack Obama was forced to establish in the wake of the Edward Snowden revelations reported that it couldn’t find any evidence that the extraordinarily expensive, and intensely invasive and damaging, mass surveillance conducted by the NSA in recent years had thwarted a single terrorist attack. Indeed, terrorist attacks like those of the Neo-Nazi Miller couple in Las Vegas in 2014, clearly signposted on Facebook days in advance, aren’t even regarded as terrorist acts.*