In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

144 Conclusion i t is now more than a decade since the terrorist attacks of 9/11 that shocked america and set the u.S. government on a policy course that departed profoundly and unexpectedly from the liberal drift of recent decades. By most conventional measures, the war on terror is more or less over. al-Qaeda terrorist networks around the world have been disrupted, and its leaders are mostly dead or on the run. Since 9/11, the handful of al-Qaeda plots and larger number of emulations, some homegrown , have failed in their attempts to successfully carry out a new terror attack on the united States.1 in 2010, Central intelligence agency (Cia) director Leon Panetta placed the number of al-Qaeda members in afghanistan at “50 to 100, maybe less,” suggesting that the organization had been radically diminished as a fighting force.2 in 2011, the killing of osama bin Laden and the postraid review of materials found in his hideaway revealed considerable degradation of al-Qaeda’s remaining organizational capacity. the stated goals of the Bush administration at the beginning of the counterterrorism campaign—to keep americans safe and to punish the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks—have by now largely been achieved.3 But these successes have come at a price when areas beyond the strategic goal of fighting terrorism are considered, and they now appear to have become a permanent feature of american institutions. For several years after 9/11, the Bush administration sanctioned and deployed a program of using torture against terrorism suspects that, when it was revealed, shocked the world and shamed our allies. the ongoing, permanent detention of a large number of individuals without trial—sanctioned permanently by President obama’s executive order of march 7, 2011—departs sharply from the u.S. Constitution and the rule of law, as understood both in the anglo american tradition and in contemporary international law. So too is the retroactively legalized, warrantless electronic surveillance of the american population, and extensive use of ethnic profiling by law enforcement and government agencies. Brooks.indb 144 11/27/2012 9:55:52 AM Conclusion 145 the new set of government surveillance institutions and coercive powers do not have clear limits. according to legal experts and commentators , these new rules and capacities potentially extend to any activist group or critic that the government labels as a national security threat.4 Post-9/11 laws and policies have reversed rights protections sought in the wake of revelations concerning abuses by the Federal Bureau of investigation (FBi) under J. edgar hoover and by the Nixon White house in the Watergate era. the new policies may establish a model for future u.S. governments, and because their reach is global, the rest of the world will likely feel their impact as well. a fundamental empirical paradox is associated with these policies. Post-9/11 counterterrorism policies appear to be founded on an exaggerated view of the risks of terrorism. even in the highly unusual context of 2001, the risk of dying from a terrorist attack in the u.S. was just one in 101,000 (mueller and Stewart 2010). that contrasts with the drastically higher risks of homicide death (one in 22,000), dying in a traffic accident (one in 8,000), and cancer-related fatalities (one in 540). as we noted earlier, even bathtub drowning (one in 79,000) might be seen as posing a far greater risk to american lives in 2001 than osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda did. Proclamations of wartime conditions made earlier during the administration of President Bush suggest another instructive comparison. during World War ii, the annual fatality risk was a sizeable one in 221. But in the years immediately after the 9/11 attacks, al-Qaeda attacks outside war zones killed virtually no americans (mueller 2006). Yet to date, we have spent over $700 billion on counterterrorism measures, above what federal, state, and local governments were spending on counterterrorism programs in 2001 (and not taking into account the costs of the wars in iraq and afghanistan) (mueller and Stewart 2011). evidence-based policy appears to suggest conclusions running contrary to the assumption that war on terror policies are proportional to the reality of terrorist threats. empirically based risk assessments such as these have received surprisingly little attention in the media or, for the most part, in political and policy debates surrounding the war on terror. But they represent an important scholarly background...

Share