repudiated al qaeda, that still leaves you with a bunch of people who could do bad things. how do you think oit? i think you ve got it exactly right. very small numbers of people can inflict catastrophic harm, and the american people expect their government to protect them against those remote possibilities. it sand very difficult threat to counter. but how do you react to the point that i wrote that reuel, i was delighted to see that he agreed with which is that the s been a massive bureaucratic o verreaction. rstandable.is deun my old mentor samuel huntington once said america s great strength in military affairs was bigness, not brains. that from world war ii on was whenever we saw a problem you d throw a lot of money at it and that was the way you salve it. but do we really need all of this? i mean, we spent, one scholar calculated we spend $5.5 billion to counter the anthrax scare. you know, you add it all up, you re talking about hundreds of
overreaction. now is the time to begin en rethinking the balance between security and liberty and rebalancing somewhat. now, here s the scary part. i made every one of these points before. but when i say it today, it seems controversial, and that tells you something about the polarized, dysfunctional political atmosphere we are living through right now. i think it has something to do with the fact that the right wants to maintain an atmosphere of fear and, therefore, accuses me of being cavalier about security. and the left can t stand the thought that george w. bush might have done a few good things after 9/11. so the result is nine years t after the attacks we cannot have a sober, rational conversation on the topic. but we at gps will persist. you ve heard my views. you will hear from four seasoned experts. two conservatives, two independents or liberals, two republicans, two non-republicans. we are terrorizing ourselves, fareed. we as americans, we have terrorized ourselves. we
tribal areas. and now we ve got yemen. so i mean, this is turning into an endless war. and it s got little to do with al qaeda, and i think a lot of this has to do with overreaction to 9/11.wo rick, do you worry that you know it s the ground zero islamic center, whether it s the koran burning, that an atmosphere where there is, you know, a greater sense of being under that to al qaeda actually worsens our security o because you lose the support of the local muslim communities? is that a fair tension to worry about?, well, yes, it is. but i think in new york and in the united states more broadly, the muslim community is highly supportive of our efforts to keep the country safeot and is really not a hot bed of radicalism as you say. nonetheless, it s only very small numbers that are required to stage an attack. the year 2009 was by far the most active year in terms of home grown terrorist plots.