Fear Not: Notes From a Naysayer

Bureaucrats

The hastily assembled and massively funded Department of Homeland Security officially stokes fear by intoning on the first page of its defining manifesto: “Today's terrorists can strike at any place, at any time, and with virtually any weapon.” If that bold statement were followed by another noting that one's chance of being killed by international terrorism outside of war zones is microscopic–maybe 1 in 80,000 over an 80-year life span–the warning would be given some context. 1 But that context is never supplied.

Threat exaggeration is encouraged, even impelled, because terrorism bureaucrats have an incentive to pass along vague and unconfirmed threats to protect themselves from later criticism should another attack occur. And the result, as statistician Bart Kosko points out, is a situation in which “government plays safe by overestimating the terrorist threat, while the terrorists oblige by overestimating their power.” 2

This is tidily illustrated by the FBI's “I think, therefore they are” spookiness when the purported terrorist menace is assessed. In testimony before the Senate Committee on Intelligence in February 2003, FBI head Robert Mueller proclaimed, “The greatest threat is from Al Qaeda cells in the U.S. that we have not yet identified.” He rather mysteriously judged the threat from those unidentified entities to be “increasing in part because of the heightened publicity” surrounding such episodes as the 2002 Beltway sniper shootings and the anthrax letter attacks of 2001, and he claimed somehow to know that “Al Qaeda maintains the ability and the intent to inflict significant casualties in the U.S. with little warning.” 3

However, if the bad guys had both the ability and the intent in 2003 and if the threat they had presented was somehow increasing, they had remained remarkably quiet by the time Director Mueller testified before the same committee two years later. Despite that posited ability, intent, and increasing threat; despite continued publicity about terrorism; and despite presumably severe provocation attending the subsequent U.S. invasion of Iraq, no casualties (significant or otherwise) were suffered in any attacks in the United States. Nonetheless, Director Mueller remained unflappable, calmly retreating to his comfortable neo-Cartesian mantra: “I remain very concerned about what we are not seeing,” a profundity this time dutifully rendered in bold type in his published script.

He failed to mention a secret FBI report that in the meantime had noted that after more than three years of intense, well-funded hunting, the agency had been unable to identify a single true Al Qaeda sleeper cell anywhere in the country–rather impressive given the 2002 intelligence estimate that there were as many as 5,000 people “connected” to Al Qaeda loose in the nation. For Mueller, absence of evidence apparently is evidence of existence.

Not to be left behind in the fearmongering sweepstakes, CIA analysts, convinced that Al Qaeda already had a nuclear weapon, responded to the observation that no abandoned nuclear material was found when the terrorist organization was routed in Afghanistan with the artful riposte, “We haven't found most of the Al Qaeda leadership either, and we know that they exist.” 4 We also know that Mount Rushmore exists; by their logic, that could be taken to suggest the tooth fairy does as well.

The media

Since 9/11, the American public has been treated to endless yammering in the media about terrorism. Politicians and bureaucrats may feel that, given the public concern on the issue, they will lose support if they appear to downplay terrorism's dangers. But the media like to tout that they are devoted to presenting fair and balanced coverage of important public issues.

As has often been noted, however, the media appear to have a congenital incapacity for dealing with issues of risk and comparative probabilities–except in the sports and financial sections. If a baseball player hits three home runs in a single game, press reports will include not only the notice of that achievement, but also information about the rarity of the event as well as statistics about how many home runs the player normally hits. By contrast, I have never heard anyone in the media stress that, in every year except 2001, only a few hundred people in the entire world have been killed by international terrorism outside of war zones.

Even in the media's amazingly rare efforts to put terrorism in context–something that would seem absolutely central to any sensible discussion of terrorism and terrorism policy–the process never goes very far. On November 25, 2001, the Washington Post published an article by economist Michael Rothschild that attempted to quantitatively point out how much safer it was to travel by air than by automobile even after 9/11. He tells me that the article generated a couple of media inquires, but nothing more. An October 7, 2002 cover story by Gregg Easterbrook in the New Republic forcefully argued that biological, and especially chemical, weapons are hardly capable of creating “mass destruction,” a perspective relevant not only to concerns about terrorism, but also to the drive to war against Iraq that was going on at the time. The New York Times asked Easterbrook to fashion it into an op-ed piece, but that was about all the interest the article generated.

OPEN IN VIEWER

A cynical aphorism in the newspaper business holds, “If it bleeds, it leads.” There is an obvious, if less pungent, corollary: If it doesn't bleed, it certainly shouldn't lead, and indeed, may not be fit to print at all.

No less than 23 terror alerts were officially promulgated between 2001 and the end of 2004, and all were played as lead stories on the evening news. In distinct contrast, only 13 percent of the subsequent decreases in alert status received top billing. The May 20, 2003 alert was reported by each of the three networks in stories typically hundreds of words long (some phrases included “the level of worry is as high as it's been since September 11” and “very imminent” and “something big is going to happen in the next two or three days”). By contrast, CBS devoted only 43 words to announcing the subsequent alert reversal, 25 were sufficient for NBC, and ABC did not bother mentioning it at all. Terrorism specialist David Rapoport was once contacted by a cable television channel about working with it on a program about terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. After several conversations, the producer asked, “By the way, what is your view of the problem?” Rapoport replied, “A frightening thought, but not a serious possibility now.” They never called him back. 5

Another problem concerns follow-up. It was widely reported that a band of supposed terrorists arrested in London in 2003 had been producing ricin, a poison. Contrary to initial reports, no ricin was ever actually found in their possession, but by the time that was cleared up, the press had gone on to other things. 6 In 2006, a best-selling and much-discussed book–The One Percent Doctrine, by Pulitzer Prize-winner Ron Suskind–revealed that Al Qaeda terrorists had developed and planned to use a handy device for delivering poison gas: a canister with two compounds in it that would lethally interact when the seal between them was broken. “In the world of terrorist weaponry,” Suskind proclaimed, “this was the equivalent of splitting the atom. Obtain a few widely available chemicals, and you could construct it with a trip to Home Depot.” 7 These lurid revelations were picked up by Time magazine, which prominently published excerpts from the book.

Neither Suskind nor Time apparently bothered to check the story with weapons experts, but United Press International wire reporter Shaun Waterman did. They told him the device as described would likely produce very little gas and destroy itself in the process of being set off. “If this is such an amazing device,” queried one pointedly, “why has no one ever used it?” 8 A LexisNexis search indicates that Waterman's story–one that sought to reduce hysteria rather than exacerbate it–was not picked up by a single newspaper or magazine.

In addition, there have been almost no efforts, systematic or otherwise, to go back to people who have prominently made dire predictions about terrorism that proved faulty (and, indeed, thus far almost all of them have been), to query the predictors about how they managed to be so wrong. When I asked one journalist working on a daily newspaper about this, the reply was that it was difficult to do stories that don't have a hard-news component.

Finally, there are quite a few elemental aspects of the terrorism issue that the media almost entirely ignores. For example, the suggestion that an American's chance of being killed by a terrorist is very, very small. Or that another hijacking such as the ones on 9/11 may be impossible because passengers and crew would forcefully interfere. Or that chemical weapons can't cause mass destruction. Notions like that may be controversial, but shouldn't the media at least discuss them?

Risk entrepreneurs

The financial response to 9/11 has created a vast and often well-funded coterie of risk entrepreneurs. Accordingly, they have every competitive incentive to conclude it to be their civic duty to keep the pot boiling.

For example, the book Staying Safe (previously published as The Complete Terrorism Survival Guide) by Juval Aviv includes absorbing advice such as “be wary of odd-looking neighbors,” “separate small pets from large ones,” “never take the first taxicab in line,” “ask yourself where you stand in the hierarchy of terrorist targets,” “don't eat, drink, or smoke around mail,” “never park in underground garages,” and “know the five primary means of assassination.” In July 2005, Aviv predicted on Fox News that a terrorist attack would occur in the United States within “90 days at the most.” Meanwhile, in his 2004 book Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe, respected academic Graham Allison uncritically relays a report in an Arabic-language magazine that Al Qaeda purchased no fewer than 20 nuclear warheads by 1998 “from Chechen mobsters in exchange for $30 million in cash and two tons of opium.” One might think Al Qaeda members (or their Chechen suppliers) would have tried to set one of those things off by now.

There have also been creative efforts to fold political agendas into the all-consuming war on terror. The gun-control lobby has proclaimed, “We have a responsibility to deny weapons to terrorists and to actively prevent private citizens from providing them.” Meanwhile, the National Rifle Association claims to have espied an “increased momentum since September 11 for laws permitting concealed guns,” and its executive director patiently explains that people would rather face the terrorist threat “with a firearm than without one.” Organizations fighting AIDS in Africa have had difficulty deciding whether to stress that AIDS is a far greater killer than terrorism or that AIDS-devastated countries create breeding grounds for terrorists. 9

Moreover, it turns out that many of your agile risk entrepreneurs just happen to have stuff to sell–data-mining software, antiradiation drugs, detention-center bed space, cargo inspection systems, etc. When the government is hastily hurling vast amounts of money at a problem, there will rather predictably be those–quite a few in fact–who will jockey to place themselves in the receiving position. USA Today recently reported that the U.S. market will generate $29.1 billion in 2006 from “the threat of terror,” and that U.S. companies will receive nearly all of it. An impressive number of top-ranking Homeland Security officials have already abandoned public service to serve the public by working and lobbying for such entrepreneurial firms, moves that often are associated with a considerable increase in salary–from $155,000 per year to $934,000 in one case. 10

Cosmic alarmism

Security analyst Bernard Brodie's cautionary comment in the 1970s about the creative alarmists in the defense community holds as well for those in today's terrorism industry. Both are inhabited by “people of a wide range of skills and sometimes of considerable imagination,” and “all sorts of notions and propositions are churned out, and often presented for consideration with the prefatory words: ‘It is conceivable that ….’ Such words establish their own truth, for the fact that someone has conceived of whatever proposition follows is enough to establish that it is conceivable. Whether it is worth a second thought, however, is another matter.” 11

OPEN IN VIEWER

What we get from the terrorism industry is a great deal of fearmongering, much of it bordering on hysteria. An insightful discussion seeking to put the terrorist threat into context was published by astronomers Clark Chapman and Alan Harris in the magazine Skeptical Inquirer in 2002. They suggested that terrorism deserves exceptional attention only “if we truly think that future attacks might destroy our society.” But, they overconfidently continued, “Who believes that?” 12 The article triggered enormous response, much of it, to their amazement, from inquiring readers who overcame any natural skepticism to believe exactly that. 13 Those readers have a lot of company in the terrorism industry.

Some prominent commentators, such as David Gergen, have argued that the United States has become “vulnerable,” even “fragile,” and the Heritage Foundation's James Carafano and Paul Rosenzweig assert that “because of the terrorists' skillful use of low-tech capabilities, their capacity for harm is essentially limitless”–apparently suggesting that the bad guys would be less dangerous if they could only obtain high-tech weapons. 14 Others, like Indiana Republican Sen. Richard Lugar, are given to proclaiming that terrorists armed with weapons of mass destruction present an “existential” threat to the United States, or even, in columnist Charles Krauthammer's view, to “civilization itself.” 15

Graham Allison, too, thinks that nuclear terrorism could “destroy civilization as we know it.” 16 Not to be outdone, Harvard's Michael Ignatieff warns, “A group of only a few individuals equipped with lethal technologies” threaten “the ascendancy of the modern state.” 17

David Benjamin and Steven Simon, two counterterrorism officials from the Clinton administration, contend that a small nuclear detonation “would necessitate the suspension of civil liberties,” halt or even reverse globalization, and “could be the defeat that precipitates America's decline.” 18 In Cigar Aficionado, Gen. Tommy Franks opined that a “massive casualty-producing event somewhere in the Western world” could cause the U.S. population “to question our own Constitution and to begin to militarize our country,” in the process losing “what it cherishes most, and that is freedom and liberty.” A best-selling book by a once-anonymous CIA official repeatedly assures us that our “survival” is at stake and that we are engaged in a “war to the death.” 19 It has become fashionable in some alarmist circles to characterize the contest against Osama bin Laden and his sympathizers as World War III or World War IV (depending on how the Cold War is classified). Gen. Richard Myers, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has concluded that if terrorists were able to kill 10,000 Americans in an attack, they would “do away with our way of life.” 20

As the subtext (or sometimes the text) of these hysterical warnings suggests, the “existential” threat comes not from what the terrorists would do to us, but what we would do to ourselves in response. After predicting with great assurance that there would be terrorist events in connection with the 2004 elections, Ignatieff writes with equal certainty that “inexorably, terrorism, like war itself, is moving beyond the conventional to the apocalyptic,” and he patiently explains how this will come about. Although Americans did graciously allow their leaders one fatal mistake in September 2001, they simply “will not forgive another,” he explains. If there are several large-scale attacks, he confidently predicts, the trust that binds the people to their leadership and to each other will crumble, and the “cowed populace” will demand that tyranny be imposed upon it, and quite possibly break itself into a collection of rampaging lynch mobs devoted to killing “former neighbors” and “one-time friends.” The solution, he thinks, is to crimp civil liberties now in a desperate effort to prevent the attacks he is so confident will necessarily impel us to commit social, cultural, economic, and political self-immolation. 21

It seems, then, that it is not only the most-feared terrorists who are suicidal. But we need a reality check here. All societies are “vulnerable” to tiny bands of suicidal fanatics because it is impossible to prevent every terrorist act. But the United States is hardly vulnerable to being toppled by dramatic acts of terrorist destruction–even extreme ones. To hold otherwise is to express contempt for Americans' capacity to deal with adversity.

General Myers's prediction that the sudden deaths from terrorism of 10,000 Americans would “do away with our way of life” might be assessed in this regard. As it happens, officials estimated for a while that there would be 10,000 deaths from Hurricane Katrina. Although this was not a terrorist act, there were no indications whatsoever that, though catastrophic for the hurricane victims themselves, the way of life for the rest of the nation would be notably done away with by such a disaster. It is also easy to imagine scenarios in which 10,000 people would have been killed on 9/11. Indeed, early estimates at the time were much higher than 3,000. 22 Any death is tragic, but it is not at all obvious that a substantially higher loss on 9/11 would have triggered societal suicide.

In fact, as military analyst William Arkin forcefully points out, although terrorists cannot destroy the United States, “every time we pretend we are fighting for our survival we not only confer greater power and importance to the terrorists than they deserve, but we also at the same time act as their main recruiting agent by suggesting that they have the slightest potential for success.”

In 1999, two years before 9/11, the Gilmore Commission, a government-funded, Rand-assembled advisory group that assessed domestic response to WMD terrorism, pressed a point it considered “self-evident,” but one that nonetheless required “reiteration” because of the “rhetoric and hyperbole” surrounding the issue: Although a terrorist attack with a weapon of mass destruction could be “serious and potentially catastrophic,” it is “highly unlikely that it could ever completely undermine the national security, much less threaten the survival, of the United States.” To hold otherwise “risks surrendering to the fear and intimidation that is precisely the terrorist's stock in trade.” 23

The fact that terrorists subsequently managed to ram airplanes into three buildings on a sunny September morning does not render this point less sound. We need to hear it again, and often.

The enemy in the mirror

Although the alarmists may exaggerate, the subtext of their message should perhaps be taken seriously: Ultimately, the enemy, in fact, is us.

Thus far, at least, international terrorism is a rather rare and, when considered in appropriate context, not generally a terribly destructive phenomenon. But there is a danger that the terrorism industry's congenital (if self-serving and profitable) hysteria could become at least somewhat self-fulfilling should extensive further terrorism be visited upon the Home of the Brave.

A key element in a policy toward terrorism, therefore, should be to control, to deal with, or at least to productively worry about the fear and policy overreaction that terrorism so routinely inspires and that generally constitutes its most damaging effect.

Current policy puts primary focus on preventing terrorism from happening and on protecting potential terrorist targets, a hopelessly ambitious approach that has led to wasteful expenditures, an often bizarre quest to identify potential targets, endless hand-wringing and political posturing, and opportunistic looting of the treasury by elements of the terrorism industry.

A contrasting terrorism policy might stress three issues. First, the United States can, however grimly, absorb just about anything the terrorists can dish out. Policy should mostly focus on policing (particularly international policing) and on some limited preventive and protective measures, especially those that restrict the development and potential threat of nuclear weapons. Second, to minimize the damage terrorism can do, there should be efforts to apply strict rigor when addressing the erratic and foolish fears terrorism inspires. And third, policy makers should seek to control their political instincts to overreact when provoked by acts of terrorism, something that, contrary to conventional thought, may be, however unnatural, entirely possible politically.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Policy makers then should seek to put risks in context rather than, as at present, to exacerbate the fear. However, the communication of risk is no easy task. As risk analysts Paul Slovic and Cass Sunstein point out: People tend greatly to overestimate the chances of dramatic or sensational causes of death; realistically informing people about risks sometimes only makes them more frightened; strong beliefs are very difficult to modify; a new sort of calamity tends to be taken as a harbinger of future mishaps; when presented with two risk estimates from reasonably authoritative sources, people choose to embrace the alarmist opinion regardless of its source; and if emotion is intensely engaged, attention is focused on the bad outcome itself, not on the fact that it is unlikely to occur.

There is also more reputational danger in underplaying risks than in exaggerating them. Disproved doom-sayers can always claim that caution induced by their warnings prevented the predicted calamity from occurring. (Call it the Y2K effect.) Disproved Pollyannas have no such convenient refuge.

For all the gloomy difficulties, however, risk assessment and communication should at least be part of the policy discussion on terrorism, something that may well prove to be a far smaller danger than is popularly portrayed. By contrast, the constant and unnuanced stoking of fear by politicians, bureaucrats, experts, and the media–however well received by the public–is on balance costly, enervating, potentially counterproductive, and unjustified by the facts.