After the terrible events of 9/11, in which over 3000 Americans perished in the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil, the federal government began to exploit the fear (sometimes irrational fear) many Americans had of terrorism and expand the power, size and influence of the National Security State. A result of this irrational fear of terrorism, the U.S. intelligence apparatus grew exponentially. In a Washington Post report entitled "Top Secret America" Dana Priest and William M. Arkin document the massive intelligence state that has emerged since 9/11.
Here are some of the findings from the report:
The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.
[We] discovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight. After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.
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.
An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.
In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings—about 17 million square feet of space.
Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks.
Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year—a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.
This excerpt alone should alarm many Americans to the civil liberty crushing leviathan that has grown exponentially. As this excerpt shows, counter-terrorism, intelligence and "homeland security" may be just more wasteful rackets.
Historian and economist Robert Higgs further reports on this new racket:
According to retired admiral Dennis C. Blair, formerly the director of national intelligence, after 9/11 “the attitude was, if it’s worth doing, it’s probably worth overdoing.” I submit that this explanation does not cut to the heart of the matter. As it stands, it suggests a sort of mindless desire to pile mountains of money, technology, and personnel on top of an already enormous mountain of money, technology, and personnel for no reason other than the vague notion that more must be better. In my view, national politics does not work in that way.
As Priest and Arkin report, “The U.S. intelligence budget is vast, publicly announced last year as $75 billion, 2 ½ times the size it was on Sept. 10, 2001. But the figure doesn’t include many military activities or domestic counterterrorism programs.” Virtually everyone the reporters consulted told them in effect that “the Bush administration and Congress gave agencies more money than they were capable of responsibly spending.” To be sure, they received more than they could spend responsibly, but not more than they were eager to spend irresponsibly. After all, it’s not as if they were spending their own money.
Robert Higgs continues:
The announced goal is to identify terrorists and eliminate them or prevent them from carrying out their nefarious acts. This is simultaneously a small task and an impossible one. It is small because the number of persons seeking to carry out a terrorist act of substantial consequence against the United States and in a position to do so cannot be more than a handful. If the number were greater, we would have seen many more attacks or attempted attacks during the past decade—after all, the number of possible targets is virtually unlimited, and the attackers might cause some form of damage in countless ways. The most plausible reason why so few attacks or attempted attacks have occurred is that very few persons have been trying to carry them out. (I refer to genuine attempts, not to the phony-baloney schemes planted in the minds of simpletons by government undercover agents and then trumpeted to the heavens when the FBI “captures” the unfortunate victims of the government’s entrapment.)
So, the true dimension of the terrorism problem that forms the excuse for these hundreds of programs of official predation against the taxpayers is small—not even in the same class with, say, reducing automobile-accident or household-accident deaths by 20 percent. Yet, at the same time, the antiterrorism task is impossible because terrorism is a simple act available in some form to practically any determined adult with access to Americans and their property at home or abroad. It is simply not possible to stop all acts of terrorism if potential terrorists have been given a sufficient grievance to motivate their wreaking some form of havoc against Americans. However, it is silly to make the prevention of all terrorist acts the goal. What can’t be done won’t be done, regardless of how many people and how much money one devotes to doing it. We can, though, endure some losses from terrorism in the same way that we routinely endure some losses from accidents, diseases, and ordinary crime.
In another article, Robert Higgs explains why the federal government's efforts to "fight terrorism" are really efforts to monitor and spy on American citizens:
Moreover, the so-called intelligence gathering that the government bankrolls so lavishly is aimed in great part, not at Muslim madmen, but at you and me. The government's banks of super-computers and legions of apparatchiki are busily gleaning data on your telephone calls, Internet messages and Web searches, financial and other business transactions, and virtually everything else that touches your life in a way that can be snatched into data banks by soulless bureaucrats and techno-flunkies. Yet, while every nook and cranny of your privacy is being invaded, at your expense, you are being assured that these official crimes are all legitimate means of protecting you from grave, impending harm. Should we also believe in fairy tales and ghost stories?
The truth of the matter is that you have a greater chance of dying on a government highway than dying as a result of terrorism. If the U.S. intelligence apparatus spending of over $40 billion before 9/11 failed, then it would be sheer folly to increase the funding of intelligence activities that have been proven a failure. Throwing more money at an already broken bureaucratic system will not solve our problems.
Perhaps the responsibility of intelligence gathering should be returned to the military, instead of residing in a intelligence bureaucracy that often has served as the President's personal army. This would immediately save the American taxpayers over $80 and more.
Another solution to this problem would be to recognize that terrorism is best combated by the civilian justice system, instead of the militaristic intelligence apparatus.
As Jacob Hornberger explains, "terrorism is a federal criminal offense. No one can deny that. It has long been listed in the U.S. Code as a crime. That's why terrorists are indicted in U.S. District Court and accorded all the rights and guarantees in the Bill of Rights, just like drug defendants. It's why such famous terrorists as Ramzi Yousef, Zacharias Moussaoui, Jose Padilla, and Timothy McVeigh, to name only a few, were indicted, tried, and convicted in federal court."
Since terrorism is a crime, rather than a "act of war", terrorism should be treated as a crime. The criminal justice system would be better at combating terrorism than executing a foreign policy that antagonizes people into committing acts of terrorism against Americans and having a wasteful intelligence bureaucracy that spies and keeps tabs on the American people.
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