September 5, 2011 | ISSUE 47•36

Note that everyone who died was shot with a gun. No Islamic extremist has been able to successfully detonate a bomb in the U.S. in the past ten years, not even a Molotov cocktail. (In the U.K. there has only been one successful terrorist bombing in the last ten years; the 2005 London Underground attacks.) And almost all of the 33 incidents (34 if you add LAX) have been lone actors, with no ties to al Qaeda.

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And I think arguments like “the government has secretly stopped lots of plots” don’t hold any water. Just look at the list, and remember how the Bush administration would hype even the most tenuous terrorist incident. Stoking fear was the policy. If the government stopped any other plots, they would have made as much of a big deal of them as they did of these 33 incidents.

America has not suffered a major terrorist incident within its borders since the September 11th attacks almost a decade ago. But it has spent over a trillion dollars on two inglorious wars, in which thousands have perished. It has insulted some of its oldest allies, tortured its enemies and helped inspire a surge in Islamist militancy in many countries. America’s armed forces, though still supreme, are weary and in need of reinvestment. Osama bin Laden is still at large and his former hosts, the Taliban, are running riot. The war on terror, as it was wrongly called, has been damaging to America and the world.

To read “The Longest War” by Peter Bergen, an American journalist and al-Qaeda watcher, is to be amazed afresh at how badly America has handled the affair. Largely ignorant of al-Qaeda, Islam and weak states, the Bush administration’s response to September 11th was, he argues, conditioned more by its existing prejudices and strategic impulses than by any proper assessment of the terrorist threat. The invasion of Iraq, based on false intelligence and mendacious claims of a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, was the most obvious example of this. The administration’s enthusiasm for such interrogation techniques as simulated drowning, which yielded little or no crucial new intelligence, according to Mr Bergen, was another. So, too, was the bungling of the invasion of Afghanistan. In 2002 America had 8,000 troops there and an aversion to nation-building; now it has 100,000 and faces the possibility of defeat.

* Monitored them on closed circuit television.
* Asked them to present photo ID at the airport.
* Required them to walk through a metal detector in order to go to the gate.
* Required them to empty their pockets.
* Required them to take their laptop out of its bag.
* Required them to remove their shoes to go through security.
* Prevented them from carrying more than a small amount of liquids past security.
* Required them to put all containers containing liquids in a clear plastic bag.
* Required them to have their carry on luggage hand-inspected by security.
* Required them to put their checked luggage through an explosives detector.
* Monitored their phone calls.
* Monitored their Internet activity.
* Subjected them to minimally invasive patdowns at security.
* Forced them to walk through a backscatter X-ray scanner that shows their naughty bits to someone in another room.
* Subjected them to invasive and humiliating patdowns.
* Placed them on a no fly list for unknown reasons.
* Kicked them off an airplane for looking suspicious.
* Prevented them from flying because of their religion or ethnicity.
* Roped them into terrorist plots using paid informants and then arrested them for being terrorists.
* Tortured them using sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, sexual humiliation, and extreme temperatures.
* Subjected them to waterboarding.
* Turned them over to governments of countries like Egypt and Syria in order to be tortured.
* Beaten them to death.
* Shot them.
* Shot and killed them.
* Blew them up using laser-guided bombs.
* Killed them in Predator drone strikes.

Where does this thinking come from – if Canadians rate the Charter near the top of the list of things that symbolize their national identity, right up there with the majesty of the land and hockey?

Bruce Ryder, a constitutional legal scholar at Toronto’s York University, looks for an answer in an older cultural theory of Canada. He sees in Canada’s Tory traditions – brought north across the border by Loyalists after the American Revolutionary War – more concern for the well-being of society than for individual freedoms.

“There’s arguably distinct features of Canadian culture that aren’t particularly friendly to civil liberties by dissenting individuals or groups,” he says. “That’s probably stronger than the individual liberties in American traditions.””

Does anyone believe that the purpose of these inconveniences is security? Milan is close – but I think the real goal is the appearance of the attempt. Our security measures are symbolic – they serve to make (the less security conscious) people feel much safer. Actually – that’s not exactly true, they make us feel less safe, because we assume the threat which motivates these measures must be very significant. And I think that is the point, the feeling of fear, and the conservative political implications that fear manifests.

I don’t think the false enemy of “the terrorists” is importantly different from “the communists”. In the end, these performances allow a certain group who find themselves in power, to remain unquestioned in their positions of power.

Systems/institutions which are engineered to repeat and protect themselves, do exactly that.

After World War II, the governments who had sent their armies to fight in World War II directed its resources into fighting the Cold War. This seemed like an overreaction. Those monies were not spent on more socially useful purposes. Now it seems those funds are directed to fighting terrorism – also an overreaction.

Something I think about when waiting in 30 minute lineups in airport security making sure I do not have liquid in amounts in excess of 100 ml.