The selectiveness of political memory takes some curious forms. Take, for example, 9/11. The first 9/11, not the second. The 9/11 that took place exactly 30 years before the fall of the World Trade Center, when the United States helped to violently overthrow the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende of Chile, and installed in its place an odious dictator who went on to murder far more people than died on that dreadful day in New York and Washington DC. How many Americans are aware of that? How many times has it been mentioned on Fox News? The first 9/11 was “nothing of very great consequence” as Kissinger assured his Nixon a few days later. though the survivors of Pinochet's torture camps may see the matter very differently. .
However, to return to the question of the American 9/11, has the United States become a safer place which has been on a war footing ever since 9/11.
1. $5.9 trillion: That's the sum of taxpayer dollars that's gone into the Pentagon's annual "base budget", from 2000 to today. Note that the base budget does not include the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nonetheless, even without those war costs, the Pentagon budget managed to grow from $302.9 billion in 2000, to $545.1 billion in 2011. That's a dollar increase of $242.2 billion or an 80 per cent jump ($163.6 billion and 44 per cent if you adjust for inflation).
2. $1.36 trillion: That's the total cost of the Iraq and Afghan wars by this September 30th, the end of the current fiscal year, including all moneys spent for those wars by the Pentagon, the State Department, the US Agency for International Development, and other federal agencies. Of this, $869 billion will have been for Iraq, $487.6 billion for Afghanistan.
3. $636 billion: The amount, adjusted for inflation, that the US government has spent so far on "homeland security". This isn't an easy figure to arrive at because homeland-security funding flows through literally dozens of federal agencies and not just the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). A mere $16 billion was requested for homeland security in 2001. For 2012, the figure is $71.6 billion, only $37 billion of which will go through DHS. A substantial part, $18.1 billion, will be funnelled through - don't be surprised - the Department of Defence, while other agencies like the Department of Health and Human Services ($4.6 billion) and the Department of Justice ($4.1 billion) pick up the slack. An entire industry has sprung up to sell an array of products, including high-tech motion sensors and fully outfitted emergency operations trailers. The market is expected to grow to $31 billion by 2014.
Add those three figures together and you're at the edge of $8 trillion in national security spending for the last decade-plus. In the decade before the 9/11 attacks, the Pentagon base budget added up to an impressive $4.2 trillion, only one-third less than for the past decade. But add in the cost of the Afghan and Iraq wars and total Pentagon spending post-9/11 is actually two-thirds greater than in the previous decade. By including funding for such things as veterans benefits, future costs for treating the war-wounded, and interest payments on war-related borrowing, Watson Institute of Brown University came up with $3.2 trillion to $4 trillion in war costs, which would put those overall national security figures since 2001 at around $11 trillion. A similar approach calculated the true costs of national security at $1.2 trillion annually.
The US invests its security dollars mainly in making war, slighting both real homeland security and anything that might pass for preventive diplomacy. In the Obama administration's proposed 2012 budget, for example, 85 per cent of security spending goes to the military (and if you included the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, that percentage would only rise); just 7 per cent goes to real homeland security and a modest 8 per cent to what might, even generously speaking, be termed non-military international engagement. Robert Gates while still Secretary of Defence said "Funding for non-military foreign affairs programs... remains disproportionately small relative to what we spend on the military...There is a need for a dramatic increase in spending on the civilian instruments of national security."
Government officials and counterterrorism experts frequently claim that the public is unaware of their many "victories" in the "war on terror". These, they insist, remain hidden for reasons that involve protecting intelligence sources and law enforcement techniques. They also maintain that the United States and its allies have disrupted any number of terror plots since 9/11 and that this justifies the present staggering levels of national security spending. Undoubtedly examples of foiled terrorist acts, unpublicised for reasons of security, do exist. There are, however, two obvious and immediate problems with taking it seriously. First, lacking any transparency, there's next to no way to assess its merits. How serious were these threats? Second, how exactly were these attempts foiled? Were they thwarted by programmes funded as part of the $7.2 trillion in military spending, or even the $636 billion in homeland security spending? An April 2010 Heritage Foundation report, "30 Terrorist Plots Foiled: How the System Worked", looked at known incidents where terrorist attacks were actually thwarted and so provides some guidance. The Heritage experts wrote, "Since September 11, 2001, at least 30 planned terrorist attacks have been foiled, all but two of them prevented by law enforcement. The two notable exceptions are the passengers and flight attendants who subdued the 'shoe bomber' in 2001 and the 'underwear bomber' on Christmas Day in 2009." In other words, in the vast majority of cases, the plots we know about were broken up by "law enforcement" or civilians, in no way aided by the $7.2 trillion that was invested in the military - or in many cases even the $636 billion that went into homeland security. And while most of those cases involved federal authorities, at least three were stopped by local law enforcement action.
It's possible that all that funding, especially the moneys that have gone into America's various wars and conflicts, the secret drone campaigns and "black sites", various forays into Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and other places may actually have made the USA less safe. Certainly, they have exacerbated existing tensions and created new ones. And resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands and the misery of many more, making Iraq and Afghanistan, among other places, potential recruiting and training grounds for future generations of insurgents and terrorists. Does anything remain of the international goodwill toward the United States that was the one positive legacy of the infamous attacks of September 11, 2001? Very unlikely!
By Chris Hellman Senior Research Analyst at the National Priorities Project at Al Jazeera website
In a separate article "The number of people worldwide who are killed by Muslim-type terrorists, Al Qaeda wannabes, is maybe a few hundred outside of war zones. It's basically the same number of people who die drowning in the bathtub each year," said John Mueller, an Ohio State University professor who has written extensively about the balance between threat and expenditures in fighting terrorism. "So if your chance of being killed by a terrorist in the United States is 1 in 3.5 million, the question is, how much do you want to spend to get that down to 1 in 4.5 million?" he said.
The March, 2011, Harper's Index expressed the point this way: "Number of American civilians who died worldwide in terrorist attacks last year: 8 -- Minimum number who died after being struck by lightning: 29."
Exaggerating, manipulating and exploiting the terrorist threat for profit and power has become one of the biggest scams of the decade. Nothing has altered the mindset of the American citizenry more than a decade's worth of fear-mongering and fear-based propaganda.
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