The statutes that followed
In a discussion of foreign policy, drones and the expanding use of governmental power under the cover of war, Bob Zadek asked Chris Preble of the Cato Institute to supply the statutes that followed the attacks. Zadek put it that the statutes were passed in great hurry, that it took virtually a few days for the Patriot Act to be passed, and that it was drafted and sitting there, just waiting for the perfect opportunity War – A Rationale For Extra-Constitutional Power? (2013).
Preble named the two most important ones. The USA PATRIOT Act allowed for a range of surveillance and other investigatory powers handed to the federal government under the guise of preventing future terrorist attacks; in Preble’s account it shifts the burden of proof from the government to the individual, and the classic principle of innocent until proven guilty has been eroded in some instances under it. The second was the Authorization to Use Military Force, the original authorization to go into Afghanistan, which Preble described as fairly specific to the events of 9/11 and to those individuals and persons involved in the planning and execution of that attack. More than eleven years on, he said, individuals who were seven or eight years old at the time of the attacks are somehow being targeted under that authority; his preference was for it to be sunsetted after combat operations in Afghanistan drew to a close, with a year or two allowed to wind down. He also named the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, calling it at best a mixed bag and citing a paper by a former colleague, David Rittgers, calling for abolishing the department War – A Rationale For Extra-Constitutional Power? (2013).
Preble conceded the President’s authority to defend the country in the event of an imminent attack and said that has always been the case. Against the claim that the Constitution was designed for a different era with different threats, he argued the reverse: the threats were much greater when the Constitution was created in 1787, and the threats of today pale in comparison. He noted that the Cato Institute has handed out or sold something like five million copies of the Constitution over its history, and recalled serving in the US Navy in the waning days of the Cold War, when the threat posed by the Soviet Union was serious and legitimate and the country was defended without resorting to a wholesale violation of civil rights and civil liberties War – A Rationale For Extra-Constitutional Power? (2013).
TSA and the security apparatus
Jim Bovard, described by Zadek as an author and investigative journalist who has made a study of TSA, traced the agency to the period after 9/11 when, in his phrase, folks had blind trust in government. In the time since, he said, two presidents and a lot of federal agencies taught us it was folly to trust the government, yet because TSA is entrenched it has blocked a lot of efforts to loosen its stranglehold on American travelers Seeing Through TSA’s Security Theater With Jim Bovard (2015).
Zadek pressed a broader constitutional argument: when the government seeks to encroach on basic core rights, it must do so in the least intrusive way possible and assure Americans that there is no less intrusive way to accomplish the goal. TSA, he said, is an example of just the opposite — the most expensive and the least effective rather than the least expensive and the most effective, intruding on the liberty of all Americans with the broadest brush possible Seeing Through TSA’s Security Theater With Jim Bovard (2015).
Zadek also advanced a claim he acknowledged would sound certifiable: that TSA is, by the dictionary, a terrorist organization, because the tactic of terrorism is to instill terror for the purpose of accomplishing a political goal. He estimated that the terrorists spent about $400,000 to bring down the three planes during 9/11, plus perhaps a million dollars on explosives in somebody’s jockey shorts and something in the heel of somebody’s shoe, and argued that their work was done — leaving behind a country that for the next fifteen years spent possibly a trillion dollars and compromised many of our most important institutions. Bovard declined the label, saying he would not call TSA a terrorist organization; it relies on fear-mongering and arbitrary power, he said, but is more like the secret police known in some European nations in the 1800s and in a lot of nations in the 20th century. Zadek supplied the comparison to the Stasi in East Germany, which Bovard accepted Seeing Through TSA’s Security Theater With Jim Bovard (2015).
Bovard cited a confidential Inspector General report, leaked in late May or early June, finding that agents testing the screening process were able to smuggle weapons and bombs past TSA screeners and whole-body scanners 95% of the time. He added that TSA has not caught any terrorist, despite spending billions and hassling millions of Americans. Zadek noted the agency’s likely reply — that terrorists do not try because they know they will be caught — and said that is belied by the 95% failure rate. Bovard attributed the absence of further attacks on American airplanes partly to structural changes, including cockpits being much tighter and much more difficult to enter than before 9/11, and most importantly to the fact that airline passengers would no longer be passive in a hijacking attempt as they were on 9/11 Seeing Through TSA’s Security Theater With Jim Bovard (2015).
Intelligence failure and the birth of TSA
Zadek asked listeners to imagine that 9/11 never happened but that the government announced it was afraid of hijacking and built TSA in exactly the model it now has. Americans, he suggested, probably would not have stood for it — which means the direct cause and effect is that 9/11 gave birth to TSA. His further point was that 9/11 represented an intelligence failure and could have been avoided: a self-inflicted wound by America on itself, preventable by intelligence agencies being in better communication. The fix, in his framing, was yet another failure costing profound inconvenience and cost to no benefit, since TSA does not prevent 9/11 events from happening — it was an intelligence failure, not an airport security failure Seeing Through TSA’s Security Theater With Jim Bovard (2015).
Bovard called it an intelligence and law enforcement failure, with all kinds of warning signs that the feds simply disregarded, and added foreign policy to the ledger: the country was making a lot more enemies than people chose to recognize, and current drone attacks in a whole lot of countries were sowing seeds of hatred that could come back to bite us. He cited his book Terrorism and Tyranny, published a dozen years earlier, in which he made the point that killing foreigners is no substitute for protecting Americans Seeing Through TSA’s Security Theater With Jim Bovard (2015).
9/11 as the template for later crises
Zadek opened a 2020 conversation with Jeffrey Tucker by asking what the coronavirus was doing on a liberty-oriented radio program. His answer was that the coronavirus, like 9/11, belongs to a class of sudden, unexpected, apparently existential threats to Americans’ well-being — threats that are unprepared for, somewhat scary, and amplified by a press that encourages and exacerbates the fear. Whenever one of these threats pops up, he said, government is quick to act, and the action it follows is an immediate exertion of new powers over citizens. Every one of these events, 9/11 included, immediately results in new-found or dusted-off but existing governmental powers over us; the quarantine and limitations on movement were the current instance, and he asked whether the assertion of power was appropriate and constitutional Big government can’t save us from coronavirus (2020).
Tucker was introduced as editorial director of the American Institute for Economic Research, author of eight books in five languages, most recently The Market Loves You: Why You Should Love It Back, editor of the Best of Bastiat, and author of the article that was the subject of the conversation, “Must Government Save Us from the Coronavirus?” Big government can’t save us from coronavirus (2020).
9/11 and the wars
John Mueller, in a discussion of China, Russia and military spending, argued that the United States would not have gone into either the war in Afghanistan or the one in Iraq had 9/11 not taken place. He called it a shock which we massively overreacted to, and said the intense anxiety it caused had not been necessary. Quoting Bernard Brodie, the defense analyst, he offered the observation that one way of keeping people out of trouble is keeping them from getting the tools with which they can get into it: had there been no military in 1965, the country could not have gone into Vietnam, and had there been no forces to invade Afghanistan in 2001 or Iraq in 2003, hundreds of thousands of people would not have been killed in those borders and subsequent occupations China & the Stupidity of War (2022).
Mueller characterized post-Vietnam policy as vast proclamation and half-vast execution, with 9/11 as the major aberration, and said that under Trump and certainly under Biden the country was moving back to that stage — staying out of wars while remaining an active and important international citizen China & the Stupidity of War (2022).
Across episodes: the same question, extended
The question — whether a sudden threat justifies permanent new powers — is argued in all four episodes, and what changes is the referent rather than the argument. Preble in 2013 supplies the statutory inventory and the sunset proposal for the Authorization to Use Military Force; Bovard in 2015 supplies the agency-level case study and the 95% Inspector General figure; Zadek in 2020 extends the template from 9/11 to the coronavirus quarantine; Mueller in 2022 extends it to the wars themselves, arguing that 9/11 was the aberration that produced Afghanistan and Iraq. Each guest advances the treatment in his own domain, and no excerpt shows a later speaker revising an earlier one.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not describe the 9/11 attacks themselves, their date, the number of victims, or the identity of the attackers beyond Zadek’s reference to three planes and box cutters. They do not state what the Patriot Act’s provisions were in detail, which amendments any cited case turned on, or the outcome of any litigation over the statutes named. The Inspector General report is described only through Bovard’s account of a leak, with no title, author or publication venue given. The coronavirus discussion is represented here by its opening segment alone, so Tucker’s own arguments are not in evidence.