Democrats faced a dilemma. Say that the threat isn’t so grave and Republicans could savage them for not taking it seriously and thus being unfit to lead in a time of grave danger. Accept that terrorism is this serious and elections will be decided on the opposition’s preferred battleground. In terms of political tactics, that leaves only one option: Be just as shrill about the danger and accuse Republicans of not doing enough to protect Americans.
The terrorist threat did not win the 2006 elections for Republicans as it had the previous two rounds. In part, the responsibility for that lies with other circumstances—notably the bungled response to the Hurricane Katrina disaster. The deepening chaos in Iraq—the “central front in the war on terror”—also cast doubt on Republicans’ presumed superior handling of security matters. But another key is the simple difficulty of running a campaign based on fear after controlling both the White House and Congress for so long. If Americans are in such terrible danger, doesn’t that mean the Republicans have failed to deliver security? That awkward question explains the Republicans’ equally awkward theme of the 2006 elections: “Safer but still not safe.” It was a tricky line to walk, and they stumbled.
Other Republicans, unburdened by incumbency, were able to go back to the original script. The Democrats “do not understand the full nature and scope of the terrorist war against us,” Rudy Giuliani declared in April 2007. As the lauded mayor of New York City at the time of the 9/11 attacks, Giuliani had the aura of a strong leader who can weather a storm and so, as he sought the Republican candidacy for the presidential election of 2008, he naturally tried to convince Americans that they actually were in the midst of a storm. The war on terrorism is “the defining conflict of our time,” Giuliani proclaimed, while warning darkly that if a Democrat entered the White House in 2008, the United States would suffer “more losses.” Democrats were furious. “This administration has done little to protect our ports, make our mass transit safer and protect our cities,” said Senator Hillary Clinton. “They have isolated us in the world and let al-Qaeda regroup.” Giuliani fired back in a radio interview: “They do not seem to get the fact that there are people, terrorists in this world, really dangerous people, that want to come here and kill us. That in fact they did come here and kill us twice and they got away with it because we were on defense because we weren’t alert enough to the dangers and the risks.”
And so, more than half a decade after four jets were hijacked, the same basic messages—even some of the same lines—echoed over and over in American politics. Terrorists want to kill us, one side says. The threat is high. The other side responds that yes, the threat is high, but don’t vote for them because they haven’t done enough to protect you. For all the accusations and acrimony in political circles, the political establishment is essentially unanimous in saying that terrorists are a serious threat to each and every American.
Politicians are not the only guilty parties, of course. Government agencies have always understood that the most effective way to protect themselves is to err on the side of threat inflation. Few people will blame the agency that says a risk is high when it does not come to pass, but downplay a risk that later hits the evening news and you can expect a trial by inquisition. The more politically sensitive the risk, the truer this is—and in the United States, nothing is as politically sensitive as terrorism. This explains statements like that of Porter Goss, the CIA chief: “It may be only a matter of time before al-Qaeda or some other group attempts to use chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear weapons.” This is frightening but meaningless. All sorts of bad things may happen. This isn’t substantive information, it’s insurance. In the unlikely event that an attack happens, it can be pointed to as proof that the CIA was on the ball, and if it never happens, it can be forgotten. The possibility that ordinary Americans may take Goss’s statement to mean the CIA has substantial reasons to believe it is likely that this awful event will happen is incidental.
FBI director Robert Mueller took caution to even more absurd lengths. When he testified to a congressional committee in February 2005, Mueller did not emphasize the absence of terrorist strikes, the failure to find al-Qaeda cells within the United States, or the report his agency had prepared suggesting that, perhaps, al-Qaeda simply doesn’t have the horsepower to pull off serious attacks in the United States. Instead, he worried. “I remain very concerned about what we are not seeing,” he said. As political scientist John Mueller acerbically noted in his book Overblown, “For the bureau’s director, absence of evidence apparently is evidence of existence.”
Other government agencies had different reasons to hype terrorism. Some did it to protect budgets. Finding that its mission had suddenly plummeted down the list of the administration’s priorities, the Drug Enforcement Administration created a traveling exhibit explaining how profits from the illicit drug trade funded terrorism, while the Office of National Drug Control Policy spent millions on an ad campaign that fingered teen pot users as terrorism’s financiers.
Others saw opportunity in the new environment. “After 9/11, lobbyists and politicians quickly recognized that the best way to secure legislative approval for a spending proposal is to package the idea as a ‘homeland security’ measure even if the expenditure had nothing to do with national defense,” wrote Timothy Lynch of the Cato Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank. Lynch cited a few examples of this new species of security spending: $250,000 for air-conditioned garbage trucks in Newark, New Jersey; $557,400 for communications equipment in the town of North Pole, Alaska; $900,000 for the ferries operating out of Martha’s Vineyard—where the harbormaster admitted, “I don’t know what we’re going to do, but you don’t turn down grant money.” In towns and backwaters across America, officials saw federal money and became convinced that a terrorist strike was a serious possibility and that it would be irresponsible of them not to take the cash.
High-end security has always been big business, but after 9/11, it was the industry of the future. According to the Center for Public Integrity, a Washington watchdog group, the number of companies lobbying homeland security officials went from 15 in 2001 to 861 in 2004. Just as makers of police equipment have no interest in seeing the perception of crime do anything but rise, so these companies had no reason to suggest the threat of terrorism was anything less than dire. And with a spokesman of the caliber of John Ashcroft—George W. Bush’s first attorney general, who, after leaving office, founded a lobbying firm that specializes in homeland security— those corporations don’t have any difficult in making their views known.
Ambitious prosecutors also discovered that talking up terrorism was an excellent way to get attention. It was “one of the most chilling plots imaginable, ” U.S. Attorney Roslynn Mauskopf said at a June 2007 press conference announcing the arrest of four men for plotting to bomb New York’s JFK airport. “The devastation that would have been caused had this plot succeeded is unthinkable.” This was particularly strong language in the city that had experienced 9/11, and yet there was nothing about the case that supported it. The four men had allegedly talked about blowing up jet fuel tanks at the airport, which they believed would devastate JFK and, apparently, cripple the entire economy of the United States. They had no connections, money, or explosives. They also had no plan, only the vague outlines of a scheme built on ignorance and daydreams. “They were foolish,” the spokesman for the company that operates the fuel system at JFK told Time immediately after the charges were announced. Blowing up a tank would be extremely difficult, he said, and even if that were accomplished, the explosion could not travel through the connecting pipes to other tanks, as the plotters assumed, so even if the plot went off exactly as they imagined, it would have been a decidedly modest affair. No matter, though. Mauskopf’s description of an attack that would have inflicted “unfathomable damage, deaths, and destruction” got headlines around the world.