 The following episode discusses issues surrounding terrorism in the United States and abroad. It was recorded before the San Bernardino shootings. Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm Trevor Burrus. And I'm Aaron Powell. Joining us today are co-authors of a new book, Chasing Ghosts, the Policing of Terrorism. John Mueller is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, and he is a member of the Political Science Department and Senior Research Scientist with the Merchan Center for International Security Studies at Ohio State University. Mark G. Stewart is Professor of Civil Engineering at the University of Newcastle, Australia. Welcome to Free Thoughts, gentlemen. Thank you. Nice to be here. Thanks, everyone. Your book kind of begins, I mean, as most terrorism discussions begin with 9-11. What was the mindset, immediately post-9-11, what was the mindset of the defense security establishment about terrorism? Well, it was just hysterical. Basically, they were fighting ghosts, we call them, but terrorists under every rock. In 2002, they were telling journalists there between 2,000 and 4,000 al-Qaida operatives at Lewis in the United States, and the number we now know is very close to zero. So they were constant, everybody seems to have been in intelligence ready and worrying about an immediate second wave, which never happened, of course. Were you ever able to figure out how they got this 2,000 or 4,000 number? No. Well, that's sort of the hysterical aspect of it. They were apparently finding them all over the place or the thinking they were finding them. They talk about when we hear them talking to each other, and there's a few cases where they might have done that, but what's bizarre is people haven't gone back and said to these people, you know, you should ask the intelligence community, where did you come out 2,000 to 4,000? I mean, it's just not like off by a factor of 4 or something, it's off by a huge amount. Is it that they were intentionally inflating that number or just so paranoid in the months and years immediately following that they just weren't, I guess, thinking rationally if the number's off by that amount? I think the latter, institutionalized paranoia, and you get reports of people saying that everybody believed that, everybody in the intelligence, which is bizarre, you think there's a few people saying, well, you know, maybe there won't be a second wave, maybe they aren't at all there. I mean, George Bush opens his book saying that right after 9-11, the director of the FBI comes in and says, we know they're 331, Al Qaeda operative is working in the United States, and Bush is writing his book 10 years later, and he doesn't say, whatever happened to those 331, so the thing is that no one goes back to these people and saying, where did you get, how come you're so wrong? Is the security establishment as such that you could have this kind of swirling misinformation where no one knows where anything actually comes from? Everyone seems to believe that it's 2,000 to 4,000 Al Qaeda operatives because their friend in the next cubicle told them that, and their friend in the next cubicle told them that, and that's just basically the source of the belief is sort of a self-sustaining delusion that they all work off of and they can't gain say? Yeah, that's a major problem in intelligence, basically. You're tied into a small number of people who can look at the classified intelligence. The classified intelligence is overwhelming, so that's all you read, that's all they read, and you get into this mindset. Nonetheless, it's absurd that no one was saying, maybe there won't be a second wave, maybe we've overestimated them. That should just be a hypothesis, who knows? You can't be sure, but you'd think somebody would say that. A year after 9-11, I did an article, it was a national interest and got picked up as an op-ed by the Washington Post, suggesting that maybe 9-11 was an outlier, that it was not a harbinger, but basically an aberration. I didn't say, well, I just said we ought to consider the possibility that it might be an aberration. They published it in the national interest and it was labeled a 9-11 provocation, that someone is a very provocative, that you could even bring up the possibility that this was an aberration. That was very much the mentality and it continued on. Why would it be an aberration? If it is an aberration, it seems odd that it would be given how common terrorist attacks are all over the world. There hasn't been that much in the whole world outside of war zones. It seems to me there's only 200 to 400 people killed each year by Muslim extremist terrorists outside of war zones each year. That includes London and Bali and Mumbai and so forth. It's not that there's a whole lot of it going on. The countries like Canada or Australia, obviously, they've found virtually none. This observation is never really made publicly. The politicians don't really like to think about that. They just want to think about what might happen next, rather than actually what is happening and what does the data actually show us and what's the evidence? We often get the sense, we hear stories in the newspaper that it seems like the U.S. government is always stopping another attack. We're constantly hearing stories about the FBI arrested this particular guy who was planning something or were told there was a threat and then the assumption is and therefore government stopped it. If you take the front page of the major newspapers at face value, it does feel like there's a fair number of threats on a fairly regular basis and we've either just been lucky or really good. There's extensive sections of the book dealing with the homegrown terrorists who've plotted supposedly been arrested or have actually consummated violence in the United States. And the more you look into these cases, the more pathetic and trivial they become. Over half of them have had an FBI informant who has been egging the would-be terrorist on. That doesn't mean, of course, a terrorist wouldn't have figured out on his own completely, but that seems to be a very common phenomenon. And there's a British movie called Four Lions, which I strongly recommend, which basically seems to get much closer to what the average terrorist is like. Basically four bumbling or five bumbling actually terrorists in Britain directed by Chris Morris. And so anyway, when these things do get put forward, they do tend to be exaggerated. The police want to indicate what they might have done and what they had intentions of doing. And they often had grandiose schemes like toppling the Sears Tower, or something like that. Less commonly talked about is the fact that they didn't have a remote capacity to do it and that most of them didn't even know where Chicago was. What is the... You open up your book discussing the threat matrix in the sort of briefing system of the establishment. How did that system work? It came out... I talked to one of the former CIA guy, Glenn Carl, about it and he said it emerged initially because after 9-11 George W. Bush said, give me your 10 most wanted list for terrorists and they didn't have anything like that. And so literally overnight they invented the threat matrix. And what it is is any squib of information, any tip, in other words, that might lead to terrorism has to be examined and it gets it put in this massive matrix. And the number of tips in the FBI and other government agencies have followed up since 9-11 is well over 10 million. And the number... We know certainly the number of those who have proved fruitful and they're incredibly small. And then when they do prove fruitful, frequently the people you actually end up with are rather pathetic losers who are unlikely to do much of anything, though they did have the terrorist mentality in them. And what seems to happen, there's a very good book on this by Garrett Graf called the FBI... Called the Threat Matrix about the FBI. And he goes into chapter and verse about these tips coming in and you basically are surrounded by them all the time and you just... Your whole life is on these tips and many of them are horrible, nuclear weapons in the Bronx and things like that. The fact that hardly any of them pan out to be anything is less considered. And there's also a book by Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard law professor who came in somewhat later after 9-11 into the Republican administration and said that you read this stuff and it literally scared you to death every single day. And he quotes... That's a fairly direct quote from George Tenant who is head of the CIA. And Goldsmith says that's the view of everybody who ever read the Threat Matrix. So you're living with this stuff and you're scaring yourself to death and no one says, this is an awful lot of crap. And maybe there's anything out there. My favorite one is the one entry in this, a quoting from the book, one entry in the Threat Matrix is crisply cited as quote, a threat from the Philippines to attack the United States unless blackmail money was paid. It turns out that this entry was based on an email that said, dear America, I will attack you if you don't pay me $99, $99, $99, $99, $99 dollars. Is that a fair... Is that representative of the kind of threats or is that a little bit... Yes. No, I think it's... That's pretty representative because every... People have written about this and they say every squib of information goes in. Previously, what would happen, something like that, say this is some nutcase and some kid in the Philippines who's got his finger on the nine key, which it basically was. The FBI had it, but they from the get-go, every single tip has to be followed up. And I talked to one top FBI official just a few months ago and I mentioned to him, do you still do that? Follow up every tip and he said, unfortunately, yes. And he said that twice, unfortunately. And so even people within the FBI seem to think that maybe we could use our resources better by only examining something by basically triaging the tips, which is what they did in the past. But everything gets followed up. And many of them are bizarre, very common as people sending in tips because they're trying to get even with somebody. My ex is a terrorist. He's also a communist. And he's also a prevert. But you have to follow it up. Do you have a favorite of the threat matrix? I mean, that was definitely my favorite. But in terms of that dichotomy between the stories that were told, Aaron mentioned these stories that come out and say, we recently captured a pterousel wanting to topple the Sears Tower, which I'm just picturing that my mind is bizarre by itself. But we know the transatlantic flight or the bomb in Times Square, do you have a favorite one in terms of the biggest difference between the story that was told and then the actuality of the story? You too, Mark, if you have a different favorite one. Yeah, mine would probably be that Sears Tower one. The guy, I mean, it's a really interesting case when you get into it. What's really fascinating, I did a casebook which is available on the web called Terrorism Since 9-11, the American Cases. So there's about 60 cases in there. And they're all worked out in a fairly elaborate case studies. And it's been really interesting to write the book because each of these cases is different. Many of them are just bizarre beyond belief. In the case of the Sears Tower case, what happened was this guy goes into a Yemeni grocer and says, I'd really like to be connected to al-Qaeda. Can you help me out? He just happened to see one on the street. Well, Yemenis, they must have all about al-Qaeda. So the Yemeni grocer helps him out. And he also tips off the FBI because he's actually an FBI agent or an informant. He just happened to find a Yemeni grocer who was an FBI informant. Yes, right, an informant. Or he was tied in. Or he was served on the pipeline for the FBI. So the FBI, you know, sigs a informant on him. And this guy has this little group of about seven or eight people. He's mostly a failed businessman in Miami, but he used to be from Chicago. And he's trying to create his own religion and so forth. And he also thinks that he might be able to get some money out of al-Qaeda. So the operative comes in and says, hey, you want somebody from al-Qaeda? Yemeni grocer told me, here I am. I'm from al-Qaeda. And even some of these informants are really clever. In this guy, for example, right at that time Osama bin Laden sent out a message saying very soon there's going to be a big attack in the United States because we've got people working on it. And so the informant tells this guy, he's talking about you. You're already world famous. And the guy basically, his argument is, to make it turn it around further, that he was actually trying to con, he needed money desperately. And the guy was constantly dangling tens of thousands of dollar potential from al-Qaeda, of course, got deep pockets and so forth. Not as deep as the FBI, but nonetheless. And his idea was basically we'll just string this guy along. That's what he says today. We're going to string this guy along and get the money. We won't do anything, of course. And as he gets pushed further and further, he gets more and more valuable. And he comes up with this idea of what we want to do is go to Chicago, which at least he knew where that was. He was from Chicago. They have a girlfriend of mine. And then we'll blow up the tear series tower. And then it'll topple over and fall into Lake Michigan, creating that tsunami, which you'll then wash back on. I'm sorry. I feel like I'm laughing too hard at this, but continue. All this is totally true. And then it'll wash back on Chicago, downtown, and there's a big, there's a jail there and it'll destroy the jail. And from that, we'll free prisoners and with it we can create a new Moorish nation. And someone asked me, Trout, where'd you come up with that? And he said, oh, I'm putting some movie or something like that. So the informant says, wow, that's really interesting. But maybe we should start with something a little bit easier. And so then they have this idea, we're going to bomb the FBI headquarters in Miami. And the plot ends up basically in an incredibly bizarre way. Somebody should make a movie of this. In order to humor this guy who's trying to create a new religion, the FBI informant says, well, they would bring in an expert on creating religions from Chicago at the request of the guy he's doing it. So he comes in. That's a strange expertise. Yes, right. We have an expert. It's from the south side of Chicago, where lots of religions have been created over there. You know, it's a hot spot. So he comes in and he brings his wife, who he calls Queen Zebediah. And so he walks in and he's basically a live wire because he immediately spots the, unlike these guys, spots the informant as an informant. So that guy's from the FBI. And they start to get really antsy and say, yeah, that's right. The plot starts to break up. So this long period of time in which they're trying to get this plot worked out by the police is about to go down the tubes. And then the informant, then the informant gets, I mean, not the informant, but the Queen Zebediah husband guy gets into a gunfight with one of the guys and shoots him. So he gets arrested. No one gets killed. He gets arrested. And then he tells the police, these guys are about to do terrorism, which is totally nonsense. And so then the police swing into action, they arrest the group. And it went to trial three times. It failed twice. And then finally the guys got in prison. Do you have a favorite one, Mark? On The Sears Tale is also my favorite because when you read about the media, it sounded like it could really happen. So the first thing I thought was, well, this must be really a tall building. So, you know, so then I went to Google Maps just to see where it was. And it would actually have to topple over and then slide downhill for more than a model. People would actually hit the lake. It must be very steep hill. It's kind of astounding. But, you know, we're laughing here. But, you know, we are also recording this a few days after the horrible tax in Paris. So we, I mean, how do you, when people say we're being too flippant about this? Well, sometimes they get lucky. 9-11 was getting lucky big time. But no one else has. I mean, it's been very few successful attacks. And the worst one in the United States has been shooting at Fort Hood. It killed about 13 people. So the damage is obviously unacceptable, but it was quite low. And the other cases where there's been, you know, one guy tried to ram a, tried to kill people by driving through the University of North Carolina campus and running over people and he missed everybody somehow. And then he telephoned saying, I did that and the rest of them. Anyway, most of you look at the, what's strange about the cases is they're serious in the sense that these guys are not phonies. They really believe this stuff. What's comical is their incapacity to do much about it. But it, and if you look at them all and say, you know, if all these guys had succeeded what they're doing, I mean, what they're practically capable of doing, which would not include taking down the Sears Tower. But if they were capable of doing something, how much damage would be done? And it's likely pretty small because they're just not very competent. And so, but sometimes you get lucky. 9-11 was, they got lucky. And it's, and of course, in the Paris thing, the Paris thing is also, if the information is not very fully out yet, but it looks like a guy who had set up several other terrorist attacks in Europe, all of which became, were abysmal failures. So finally, he got it right, unfortunately, and put together this plot. The current news reporting is correct on that. We can, this incompetence seems odd given, you know, so maybe toppling the Sears Tower is really hard. But getting a gun and shooting up a lot of people seems to be, I mean, just based on the last few years, something that Americans are pretty good at. And, and so why, I mean, is even that beyond the capacity of these people? And if so, why, why are they so bad at it? Well, it's obviously some of these school shootings are worth the kill far more people, and they're just by kids than, than all the, the terrorist plots. But many of them have visions about getting guns and shooting people. Some of them have actually had experience with guns. Many of them have not. Most of them have angled their way more toward, toward explosives because they think that's more, I don't know why, because it's much more, more difficult to do. And they also get tied in with the FBI informants so that there's one guy in Baltimore, for example, who email or posted on Facebook that he was looking, he wanted to do Jihad. And he wanted to have the, he wanted, he needed help. He needed help. So he gets three messages. The first is from somebody telling him to stuff it. The second is from somebody trying to convince him not to do it. And the third is from an FBI informant and says, I just happened to have this car bomb in my garage and maybe we can work together and we can make beautiful terrorist music together. So they get connected. And of course, the guy eventually does try to use the car bomb, but does not. But obviously it's a dud and, and he gets arrested. So in their case, he got this guy, you know, it's kind of, it's, it's funny in a way, but it's also dangerous in the sense this guy really did push the button, which he thought would blow up a, in this case, a military recruiting station. So they're serious in that sense most of them. But their capacity is very limited. He never in a million, and he said he never in a million years would have been able to put together a bomb on his own. Have the number of threats or plots or stated intention to blow things up gone up as social media use has climbed. So you mentioned this guy just put it out on Facebook, asking for help. And one of the things that Facebook and Twitter and other social media sites do is make it much easier to broadcast threats, make it much easier to have conversations with other people all over the place. And so young men, especially angry young men, often have these rich fantasy lives about their own capacity and these elaborate plans that they're going to put together and whatever else. And so has social media, has it grown with that? And what portion of the threats that say the FBI is monitoring are people spouting off on Twitter? Twitter didn't even exist for not very long ago. And it, there's been three or four different studies of this academic studies. And they basically conclude that the social media stuff is to the benefit of the police overall. The communications, they like this guy in Baltimore. They're able to pick up people, find people and use the evidence. It must be about a third of the cases involve some sort of social media. It doesn't have to be Facebook, we just having a website, which frequently they were able to put together and they spout their views, which is perfectly legal, obviously, just about your view. But then the implication is maybe they actually do something and then the FBI follows up. Yeah. And it's also been, it has, it's been a big help to the police services in Australia. Quite regularly, the Smanford police will pick up, um, Australian national, so at the airport, about to catch a flight to five Isis, because I told all the other friends that they're going. You know, because I think it's a good thing. And so they're happy to tell their friends and obviously that the police can actually tap into that information as well. Yeah, they didn't have to talk to the friends. They just catch any electrons that's going through the air. And this is open. This is open. This is not spying. I mean, anybody can look into Facebook. It's not a restricted thing particularly. Again, the bumbling. So I've talked to people who have said, so I've talked to some people who've worked in the government of the more conservative bent and they have said to me, when I've criticized our terrorist terrorism policy, they've said, you don't know what it's like to see the threats that are facing this country. And until you do, you can't really have. So that's one version. And then on the same page, some people say, well, why do presidents post-election, they often change their rhetoric from, from being maybe somewhat, you know, less attacking on terrorists or saying this is maybe more civil libertarian. But then when they get in the office, they, they stop that. And someone says, well, it's because they see, they, they, then they get the secret folder. So they see what's really going on. And so that's another explanation for this. And then another one is... You wouldn't be thinking about Obama, would you? Well, exactly. And then another one is, is, is sort of the Dick Cheney explanation that we haven't had a terrorist attack because the intelligence establishment has thwarted tons and tons of these. Now, we've addressed a bunch of this. Now, it seems one of those three seems to be a more common opinion amongst, I don't know if it's scholars, if it's more common scholars, but amongst the defense establishment for the explanation for terrorist attacks. Yours is just that the simplest one. It's not that common. It's hard to do. And they're kind of idiots. Yeah, that's probably pretty good. Well, I think that it's actually easy to do. And that was touched on before. I mean, if people really wanted to do harm, they could do so, you know, with guns, with cars, like happens in Israel, you just drive down a bus stop or tram stop or something. So the fact that it's happening sort of suggests to us that maybe there aren't many people out there who really wish us harm. Because if they wanted to, they could do it pretty easily. Now, how do people react to that thesis though? I mean, in the defense establishment and in the scholarship, how do the scholars wind up on this issue? Your first issue about them seeing all these threats, and that's exactly what the threat matrix is. You see all the threats. And the question is, no one is saying, you know, this is a lot of garbage, or even 10, it says, even if half of them are wrong, it's scary. Well, come on, they haven't been anywhere near half that have led to anything. And the quantitative issue basically doesn't even come up overall. They just get this institutionalized paranoia. So when they're talking about all this stuff, it's like that. What we tried to do is actually sort that out. What you have is, first of all, the disclosed plots. These are the ones we know about because they've been arrested in their court cases or and or like the guy at Fort Hood. He actually did shoot somebody. Then you get basically the idea that there are these plots that are not out there that are out there, but they have been stopped. And if there are any, but they didn't get arrested. And the question is, if there's real plots, why weren't they arrested? And I've talked to two people. One is Glenn Carl and also also working with lots with the CIA is Mark Sageman. And they basically say, there aren't any of those out there. I get if I can use the phrase of Glenn Carl says that who used to be in charge of net threat assessment at the CIA when he was employed there says, it's bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. So it's either three words or two, depending on you look at it. And I asked, can I use that? And he said, yes, yes, yes. So then what happens is they do find a lot of little teeny plots that are just beginning. And they also close them out frequently by arresting on something else. Again, they don't, there's enough to arrest them on terrorism charges, essentially. But there's, you know, they did check bouncing and I end over immigration violations. And so they do send these people out of the country if they're immigration violations are given short prison cells. Prison sentences because for, you know, forging driver's license or something like that. So there's a group like that. But those plots are even more embryonic than the ones that have come to trial. Because if they weren't embryonic, they would have come to trial because they would arrest them on terrorism charges. So the question is they're dealing with very extremely embryonic plots. And then there's the plot, then there's the positive issue about deterrence. There's people who don't, who don't do anything that they'd like to because they got those great security apparatus. Well, as Mark just said, it's very easy to do if you want to shoot somebody and stab somebody through a brick through a window. It's very easy to do. There's some things which is very hard to do, which is like commandeering an airplane. So in that sense, terrorists have not tried very hard to commandeer airplanes like 9-11 for good reason. It's very hard to do so. There's a lot of security barriers, both ones that are created because of the act and also because the ones that put them by TSA. So this means basically, okay, one thing they can't do is commandeer an airliner. Now the argument about deterrence is that if people agree that they can't do an airliner thing, then why don't they do something else? There's, as the Paris thing showed, an infinite number of targets. I mean, some of the people who were just walking on the streets as drive-by, they shot at a couple of restaurants and then on people on the street. I mean, you can't predict everything remotely. So the question is, they may be deterred from doing certain things like hijacking airliners, but they certainly could do other kind of terrorism. So the implication of this whole line of reasoning about deterrence is that a terrorist says, you know, I want to be a terrorist. I want to, what do I want to do? I think I want to blow up an airliner. And then they think about that. That's really hard to do. Okay, I won't be a terrorist. If that's what your idea of a dedicated terrorist is, namely he can't get his super prize and therefore he's not going to become a terrorist, what kind of a terrorist is that? I mean, it doesn't show you exactly a whole lot of dedication. So the deterrence argument makes sense in the sense that certain things are awful and it's also, many of them would like to shoot up military bases because their main motivation is anti, is basically from hostility to American foreign policy. And that's really hard to do because military bases are not exactly easy targets. That'd be the last place I want to shoot up. Right, yeah. Yeah, though they still look at it. They still obviously do that. Yeah. So essentially the deterrence thing that, you know, there may be deterred from attacking certain targets, but if they are deterred from all terrorism, which is, you know, it's very easy to do because they can't get certain targets, it's hard to see how they're really, you know, dedicated terrorists. But that seems really bizarre because someone who really does want to blow up a plane and then thinks they can, they're a little confused by your deterrence thing. They would be, wouldn't they then go into the shooting? Yeah, that's right. That's what they would do. Yeah, okay. So they would, they would deterred from a certain target, but they wouldn't, they shouldn't, that shouldn't deter them from doing terrorism. So we should see a lot more shootings almost and we don't. So that's interesting. Yeah. Now what about, of course, everyone here is thinking here, listening. Small probability high cost. I mean, you know, standard nuclear weapons. This has been a problem. This has been talked about consistently. People thought this would be one Harvard professor, you quote, said that he pretty much thought it was a certainty that this would happen. So there are bumbling idiots all this. Okay. But this is the one guy is all it takes for a nuke to be part in Central Park and then it's just game over at that point. Well, I'm sure it'd be game over, but I did another book called Atomic Obsession, which is somewhat summarized in the Chasing Ghosts book. It did difficult, I mean, these guys have had difficulty putting together bombs. And so, I mean, this, for example, the Marathon bombs at, at, at, in Boston, they, you know, three bombs went, two bombs went off and killed three people in a crowded area. They, so they finally actually got a bomb to go off, but it wasn't exactly terribly lethal. So the more I looked into the more the difficulties of creating nuclear weapons or stealing them or something or so horrendous that they may have had and many terrorists don't even have much interest in that. And basically, if you're going to be successful, it's like in Boston, like in Paris, which would do things which are really pretty simple. But don't we have, isn't there a bunch of sort of rogue Russian nukes out there that are unaccounted for? It's a common idea. No, no, it is like the suitcase bombs. Now, even if they are out there, they demand constant maintenance. And so, if they are not being used, they're just deteriorating, essentially, but there doesn't seem to be very little evidence there are in the out there. Now, what about suitcase bombs? Suitcase bombs. Yeah, we talked about beforehand, but what about those? Do those exist? That's the same thing. They don't seem to even exist, as far as I can see. I think at that one time, the Russians made one in the 60s that weighed like 180 pounds and was a pretty small yield itself. But there may be some around, but they're not loose, essentially. And it basically is not, you know, the whole hysteria that came out after 9-11 about the many nuclear weapons. They're really good with box cutters. Therefore, they must be able to make nuclear weapons. It doesn't exactly follow. How many – we've talked about the FBI being involved in counterterrorism, the CIA and NSA, but it seems like basically everyone who works for the federal government now is in some way involved in counterterrorism or at least claiming they should get more money for counterterrorism. So, outside of those three, what other agencies are involved and how is this all working? If you're spending something like $115 billion per year, there's a lot of agencies involved, a lot of snouts in the trough, essentially. Yeah, that's the other way of asking questions. Where is all the money going? Excellent question. First of all, the diffusion of Homeland Security is so broad these days. So, everyone wants to say that they're in that nexus. So, it covers things like, you know, immigration and customs and border protection. The Coast Guard has a substantial Homeland Security sort of role as well. So, it's pretty hard to find a government department that actually doesn't have some aspect in terms of Homeland Security in their role. And that's part of the issue is that there's a lot of money being spent in agencies that really don't have much expertise or much really capability in that area as well. I mean, if you take the FBI has a budget of something like $3 billion for counterterrorism, that's about 3% of the total federal spend, essentially. They're a fairly competent agency. They tend to be, they're the lead agency for counterterrorism in the United States. They're responsible for most of the convictions and everything else. So, even we wonder, where does the other 97% go and what are they really achieving? You're telling about the local police too. Yeah. I mean, local police budgets on Homeland Security is no more than about one or two percent of the total police spend. So, even an agency like the New York Police Department, which is always the media about how they're the main role against counterterrorism and everything else, they only spend about 2% of taxpayers' money, their taxpayers' money on counter-ism. And probably another 2% comes from the federal government in terms of protecting the UN and grants. Does that indicate how much of a problem they think it is? Exactly. So, actually when, because most police departments are funded by local taxpayers and it sort of shows that local taxpayers are more concerned about crime and traffic, you know, traffic and much more mundane issues than actually terrorism. But also, but if the federal government says, we'll give you this money to chase terrorists, they're perfectly willing to accept it. Well, do we have that? This is my tactic. Exactly. Here's some other money. In Eisenhower's speech, he warned about the military industrial complex and he was at the height of the Cold War and the actual sort of traditional nation-state model. Do we have like a terrorism industrial complex? I mean, mixed it with the military since 9-11? Yeah, I've called it the terrorism industry and they're trying to get the money. But the Eisenhower thing is really interesting in my respects because Eisenhower really believed correctly that, as it turned out, that the Soviet Union was not likely to strike the United States. It basically didn't want another war with or without nuclear weapons. And he was appalled at how much money is being spent on defense. And what he didn't say was the threat isn't really that big. We don't have to spend that much money, which would be totally true as far as I'm concerned. And I think as far as he is concerned, instead what he did... This is a general, it's a reminder. Yeah, he's on a peacetime. But there's a whole bunch of evidence about talking to friends and so forth. You know, they're not going to strike us. I've seen these guys at Geneva, come on, they're not going to start nuclear war. They might do subversion and stuff like that, class warfare. They're not going to start World War III, come on. And he really believed that, and he thought, therefore, we didn't need this huge defense establishment. But instead of saying that publicly, what he did say was that it's all basically done through the influence, wanted or unwanted, of the military-industrial complex. So what he did was he attacked the messenger, the people profiting from it, but not their premise. And they say, yeah, but the Russians are going to attack any minute now. And if the Russians are going to attack any minute now, then you say, we've got to spend a lot of money on that. And so if you accept the premise, you're dead. Basically, the money's going to go. And the same thing is happening with terrorism now. Because what we try to do is say the threat is really very limited, not zero, but limited. And so when Cheney says these measures have saved thousands, hundreds of thousands of lives, and the ACLU says, well, yeah, but they've invaded our privacy. People say, well, wait a minute, invaded our privacy versus hundreds of thousands of lives. You don't have much of an argument. And the people attacking the NSA, for example, and other intelligence things, they basically keep saying legalistic arguments, the Fourth Amendment and so forth. Is it reasonable seizure? Is it a search and seizure? Well, if the search and seizure saves thousands of lives, most people won't say that proves that it was reasonable. It's not an abstract thing. And you have to attack that argument. You can't just let Cheney say a hundred thousand people have been killed. Lives have been saved. And they basically rarely do it. And so then it becomes a new role of an argument basically about something. You have to go after it, like Eisenhower, attacking the military industrial complex, but not its premise. So the military industrial complex in the Cold War and afterwards, we can see the incentives. We can see how these companies were making money. You inflate this threat, and then, oh, well, that means we need to build a lot of planes and a lot of tanks and a lot of missiles and all sorts of other equipment. But for terrorism, who is profiting off of this? And what are they selling? And what are they trying to convince us to buy more of? Well, anything that the market will bear, if the TSA or the Department of Homeland Security says we need a whole lot of X-ray machines, everybody's got X-ray machines to sell, is in Washington in an Algenblik. And when they get there, they say, you know, you don't really need these X-ray machines because the terrorism threat isn't so bad. They don't have much of an incentive to say that. So it's the vendors who are creating it. And if I were selling X-ray machines, I'd be there. I mean, that's my job. And who's am I? They want the X-ray machines. I have X-ray machines. They're really terrific X-ray machines. And who am I to tell them that we don't... That's their problem. They say, I think there's a need, so we'll supply the need. It's capitalism working perfectly. Well, I mean, with the government, it's forced money. Particularly if it's government money and it's free. So when local police departments, when they're offered free money from the federal government, they say, ah, we wouldn't mind an armored vehicle. That could be quite handy. You never know. And then they say, well, actually, we might need a boat and something else. And so it's like a shopping list. And that's the area that I went on. I mean, that's one of my areas that I wrote on our policy handbook about the militarization of local police, which came to light in Ferguson, but it was always directly tied. I mean, first it was the drug war and then it was terrorism. Yeah. Well, their job is to suck as much money out of the federal government as they can. Same with mayors, of course. And Mayor Bloomberg frequently, when he comes up with the case, twice, in fact, he came up with cases, which the culprits were so trivial that even the FBI wasn't interested in them. Was one of those the Times Square Palmer? No, no. That wouldn't actually happen. The one is a guy named Pimentel, another guy, which I call a pair of lone wolves, because that's what they call them. Say, I don't know if you can have a pair of lone wolves. That's what they call them, who are going to bomb some synagogues and stuff. And in both cases, these guys, one guy in the synagogue case, one guy was certifiably crazy. And the other guy was basically a loser big time. And the FBI said these guys aren't worth going after him. Pimentel, the other guy who was going to do pipe bombs, was similar. But anyway, they rest these guys, and they do have enough evidence eventually to convict them, at least on our New York state laws. And then they sort of hype the thread. They say they're going to give a big press conference, and they show how a bomb that Pimentel might actually work, and so forth. And then at the same time, they say, we really need a lot of money down here in New York. And they're experts at weedling money out of the United States, government. And they have obviously, because of 9-11, of course, they have a good deal to work with. Now, for other, I wanted to ask about two more things, because for listeners who aren't convinced yet of the threat inflation, we talked about nuclear weapons now, dirty bombs. What about the problem of dirty bombs? Well, we keep waiting for that to happen. I mean, there's a big difference between nuclear bombs and dirty bombs. Nuclear bombs will kill people. Dirty bombs won't. That is a big difference. Yeah, you notice that. It's right there on the surface. What they can do is cause an inconvenience, and they can increase nuclear radiation in a certain area. In some cases, the calculations are that if you stay in that same area where the dirty bomb has gone off for 40 years nonstop, your chance of getting cancer might go up by one percentage point. If that's your idea of a good time, okay, you know. So, they're basically not very... In fact, people who look at it frequently say they're not male evidence of mass destruction, because they aren't destroying anybody in terms of property or people. Their weapons of mass disruption, that if you have an area which has elevated radiation risk, then, and we have extremely conservative standards about that, you might have to evacuate it, and that would be really costly. And the cleanup would take forever, because the cleanup has to go down to super, super clean standards. I had heard that if you put a dirty bomb in Central Park, most people... I mean, it may not have been how it was made, but it's easy to die from making them, too, if you're trying to get that much concentrated material. But because I'm from Denver, I have a higher level of radiation because I'm from Denver. So, it would be... Most people would get about the level of radiation that I got from living in Denver. And that's another really fascinating thing in your book. You discuss Jose Padilla, arrested in 2002. This is quoting, who apparently mused at one point about creating a dirty bomb, a device that would disperse radiation or even possibly an atomic one. His idea about isotope separation was to put uranium into a pail and then to make himself into a human centrifuge by swinging the pail around in great arcs. This seems unbelievable. It's fairly typical mentality of these guys. It's unbelievable. Now, what about biological weapons? This seems to be... We have anthrax and small, but these would devastate the world. Yeah, but these have been known for centuries, essentially. And there's been very little use of it. The problem is they're very hard to control and they're very often very unstable. Anthrax spores do last a long time, but most of them don't. They can... The effect can be massively reduced by having just some wind in the area. And the military hates them because they're so hard to control. And they also contaminate the area they're in. And terrorists have seemed to... I mean, the case with Amshunariko, for example, is a really good case. This is a millennial cult in Japan that decided to want to blow up the world or something, Armageddon, whatever. And so they first tried to get nuclear weapons. They even bought at least a uranium mine in Australia, for example. And they couldn't get off first base on that. So then they went to biological weapons and they actually worked on some and even set some off a couple of times. The weapons were let off. Not only did they not do any damage, but no one even noticed, which has got to be really deflating. And in fact, the head of Amshunariko said, all this stuff about biological weapons is disinformation coming out of the SCA. They wanted us to work on biological weapons because they're so difficult. And then they moved eventually to chemical weapons and had great difficulties with that. And then finally set off a few very crudely in the subway and in the closed area in Japan, killed a few people and then were arrested and then finally closed down. So the difficulties are very high. If you want to be a terrorist, some people, some terrorists have said, keep it simple. Use things you know how you're doing. And that's why if there's a scary thing about the, particularly about Mumbai or about the Kenya attack and particularly now with Paris, it's that relatively simple, easy to manage. You don't have a lot of training or leadership or anything else. It can be pretty spontaneous and it can be improvised as you go along and doesn't take advance technology. You just have to have a gun or it can be a knife or something else and know how to use it and it doesn't take a lot of training. You're not trying to shoot careful targets or anything. You're just trying to kill people or have people walk around the street. It's not rocket science. So given that, given that terrorism is, we've been talking about the threat is overblown, but there still is a threat. There are clearly people out there who would like to kill Westerners if they could. What would an alternative, much more effective and efficient way to fight this threat look like? That's a real question. Well, I suppose the first thing to think about is actually what are the risks of terrorism and then how that, and has that compared to other hazards that we're exposed to? Then that gives us a basis for actually, do we need to invest in this area or maybe we should invest in tornado shelters or flood levees or some other way that can save lives? So that the risk of being killed by terrorists in the United States over the last 30, 40 years, including 9-11, is about 1 in 4 million. In Australia, it's about 1 in 7 million. Per year. Per year. If you look at in the United States post 9-11, the risk of being killed is 1 in 110 million. They're very low numbers. If you're looking at aviation security, the risk of being an airline passenger that gets killed and a flight that's either hijacked or blown up is about 1 in 90 million. 1 in 90 million. Or in other words, you have to fly every day for 68,000 years before you're being involved in any sort of terrorist incident in a plane or airport. And yet we never hear these facts discussed openly at all. John, I go to a lot of security conferences and quite often the byline is risk, you know, risk management, security risk management. Risk-based. And we are the only speakers who start the talk by saying these are the numbers. This is the basis for a discussion. Now, maybe you're happy with these numbers, maybe you think they're too high. If you think they're too high, why do you think they're too high? And then what can be done about it? Or maybe you think that there might be something that we can tolerate. I mean, you don't accept a risk. No one likes to accept any risk. But there's a large amount of research and consensus in terms of low probability, high consequence events with nuclear power, medical technologies, environmental pollution, where difficult choices have to be made about where do we invest the resources and funds to maximize the life-saving potential of any regulation? And we just don't see that debate happening at all. That's really absurd. It should be because basically if you want to put seat belts in the back seat of a car, you have to explain how many lives it's going to save. And what's the cost? And that's not being done for terrorism. So we have that debate in other areas, like with cars. Absolutely. And medicine. So you can say, well, if we wanted to cut down auto accidents, we could force everyone to drive five miles an hour. And people are like, well, it's not worth that in order to prevent these things. But it does seem like there's something different about a terrorist threat versus a car accident or the threat of hurricanes if you live in certain parts of the country or other kinds of risky activities you can engage in. And that's that there's an agency behind it. Like terrorism is scarier because it's another person who wants to do us harm. And it's not the kind of individual personalized harm of like, oh, my ex-spouse may get mad and attack me. But there are people out there who want to hurt a lot of us indiscriminately. And that's legitimately potentially terrifying in a way that the threat of earthquakes or car accidents is not. Is there something to that? And does that difference in the nature of the threat, should that factor into the way we approach preventing it? Well, I wanted to actually add to that, too, because we have people who shoot people obviously too much in America in bad situations. But they don't have in their mind hating America or hating us for our freedoms or these sort of like things that people say that the Harris want or wanting to destroy America. There are people who kill people, but that's not their goal. They're just psychotic. So we don't worry about that. But then if you do the same thing, but you have something in your mind that's different, it's somehow worse. So connect dovetails off of Aaron's question. Yeah, that's a really good point. Yes, terrorism exposes so many emotions and risk aversion, particularly. But then so does like nuclear energy. And so there's been a large amount of debate over the last 40 years in the US. There's a debate in the state at the moment and elsewhere about where do you put a nuclear power station? What are the risks of something going wrong? How do you safeguard it? Who pays? Who benefits? You know, local jobs versus versus the risks. And there's and there's public meetings and it's very controversial and people people get angry and they take and they take different sides. But it's all done in an open, transparent manner. No one's no one's trying to hide anything. And so you really have a mature debate about it. You might you might not agree with it with the outcome. So terrorism should be treated in a similar aspect. Sure, there are there are things that make it unique. But there are aspects that are very similar to rather highly motive public policy decisions out there. And I suppose I mean, the work in our book is really trying to save with this is a framework that's been used for other emotive issues. And if you apply the same framework for terrorism, this is sort of where where it tries to lead us. And particularly when it comes to risk aversion, you know, you know, I can be risk averse, I can decide I don't want to clone mountain because I just don't think it's not all go skiing. Well, I can't ski, but anyway, back in Australia. So but governments, they need to be they don't need to be quite as pessimistic when they're spending public money. So, you know, if there's a way that you guarantee to save excellent of lives by investing in tornado shelters, rather than maybe only saving a couple of lives, maybe for some new counters and policy, then they should pick the tornado shelters. Now, there may be concerned about how that looks in terms of their politics and their electoral chances. But that's that's not what they were meant meant to do. Yeah, let me just add to that. There's a study by the by the then is commissioned by the Department of Homeland Security about how much a life for terrorism is worth, which other agencies do all the time. How much is life worth? It's not it's not infinite. You know, save one life is not an infinite good. I mean, you have because you can save lots of lives with the same amount of money, what you might do to one. But anyway, they conclude roughly, which is fairly standard about human life is worth about five or six or seven million dollars. And they suggest that to add to that because the terrorism proposes exactly what you've been talking about special anxieties and so forth, that it be doubled. So it's like 14 million dollars per life or 15. So you can do that. And we do that. We also the it's a little bit tricky because some terrorist attacks, like 9 11 or like the French case really create a huge amount of anxiety. But the shootings at Fort Hood at the worst attack in the United States since 9 11. It's hard to see that people got very anxious. There's definite costs. Obviously some people were killed and property damage, but it didn't cause people to not to go to Texas because they're afraid of being shot or anything. And they didn't create a lot of anxiety. So what we usually prefer to do is look at certain kinds of attacks that seem to have some of them have basically look at them individually. This seems to have a fair amount of this emotional impact and others don't and to deal with in those terms. So you can you can include it, but you can't do is simply say life is infinitely valuable. And you have to and but known and I mean physicians, you know, prescribing things, you know, there's a small chance they give you this vaccination will kill you. And they tell you that, you know, and so and so that kind of calculation is there, should be there and is very important. And the fact that no one talks about acceptable risk is bizarre. The only time we found really a public discussion of acceptable risk is by John Pistol of the Lenny's Head of Transportation Security Administration. And they were calculating that there's that they were trying to put in these scanners that had x-rays in and the x-rays could give you cancer. So they had it checked out and said, can I give you cancer? And he said, no, it's perfectly safe. It's not perfectly not perfectly safe. He said, acceptable be safe, because we've looked at it very carefully and you had experts at MIT and so forth look at it and they say the risk is perfectly okay. So a mark basically looked there's it's pretty straightforward to figure out what the risk is because you know what the dose is and there's standards things that are also extremely conservative, but they're out there and they're accepted by the Nuclear Regulatory Agency and the government agencies. And so what's the chance of getting cancer from a single scan? And it comes out to be one in 60 million. Well, then as Mark said and pointed out, what's the chance of being killed by a terrorist? It's one in 90 million. And if one in 60 million is acceptable risk, why isn't one in 90 million acceptable risk? But that's with, I mean, the idea is that it's one in 90 million when you have scanners in airports. It's lower if you didn't have scanners in airports. Well, the having scanners in airports raises the chance that it makes it less likely you'll be killed by terrorists. Yeah, except that the data come from before, mostly before scanners even existed. So it's not clear that they've added that much to the risk, to reduce the risk that much. So we have again a sensitive situation now with Paris and we also have a situation with which has captured the world's imagination probably more than almost any terrorist attack since 9-11. We, or at least the Western world, we also have a sensitive situation with what France is going to do. And we also have a Syrian refugee issue that's all getting wrapped up in this. What do you fear about what will happen in post-Paris and then also how we're going to deal with the refugee problem in light of this horrible event? Yeah, what the concern is basically overreaction. I mean, the overreaction in 9-11 included not only the huge amount of increase of security spending without the examination that Mark noted, but also the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which have ended up with the deaths of far more Americans that died in 9-11, not to mention obviously the far higher death tolls for Afghans, Afghanis and for Iraqis. And so the French are making all kinds of screaming, hollering things and including increasing surveillance and being able to arrest people just because they don't look right and so forth. And so there's a danger of that, basically that overreaction which costs a lot of money and also has a lot of civil liberties implications. And if it involves getting throwing things at the wars in the Middle East, it can be extremely costly. I mean, the war in Iraq has cost several trillion dollars and it's still going on. And so that's that, I'm worried that that might happen, that the experience suggests probably that it won't be as bad as that. But the most important, the actually what you find is the most effective counterterrorism measure is to not overreact. That doesn't mean don't react at all. Terrorism is a problem. You want to deal with it. It's a, the terrorists do exist. They do kill people. And so it's a public hazard that should be dealt with by people in charge of public safety, but should be done in a responsible manner the way other hazards have been examined and simply hasn't been done. Thank you for listening. Free Thoughts is produced by Evan Banks and Mark McDaniel. To learn more, find us on the web at www.libertarianism.org.