Bin Laden’s Greatest Damage- Economy or Civil Liberties?

There is no doubt Osama bin Laden accomplished his goal of hurting the United States financially. Just look at the costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Using inflation adjusted “constant dollars” the Congressional Research Center provided these estimated war costs:

While falling far short of World War II, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined have exceeded the combined costs of Vietnam and Korea. And those numbers reflect only the amounts appropriated to cover war-related expenses.

Some reports place the overall cost on the War on Terror in excess of $3 trillion dollars. So, yes, the quantitative data tells that story very well. Painfully well.

What is more difficult to gauge is the extent of the damage to our civil liberties. One can’t build a similar graph depicting such controversial issues as the Patriot Act, Guantanamo Bay, warrantless search and seizure, eavesdropping and spying on American citizens, interrogation techniques which many consider torture, detaining suspects indefinitely without trial, airport pat-downs, and expansion of Executive Branch powers.

Benjamin Franklin advised, “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” Furthermore, as John Adams so wisely explained, “Liberty once lost is lost forever.” Despite the advice of our founding fathers, a McClatchy-Ipsos poll last year found 51 percent of Americans thought, “it is necessary to give up some civil liberties in order to make the country safe from terrorism."

George Bush claims his actions in battling terrorism were not a threat to civil liberties. In an interview on C-Span’s Q&A, Bush said, “I worked assiduously to make sure that civil liberties were not undermined.”




Legal scholar Jonathan Turley, a Constitutional expert, differs. He described on his website how a woman was declared a terrorist under the Patriot Act after spanking her children on an airplane.

Turley claims in a USA Today article that “President Obama has continued, and even expanded, many of the controversial Bush programs. His administration moved to quash dozens of public interest lawsuits fighting warrantless surveillance. Both Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder have refused to investigate, let alone prosecute, officials for torture under the "water-boarding" program — despite clear obligations under treaties for such action. The Obama administration has continued military tribunals and the Caesar-like authority of the president to send some defendants to real courts and some to makeshift tribunals. The administration recently instructed investigators that they can ignore constitutional protections such as Miranda rights to combat terror.”

This is certainly not the America that existed prior to 9/11. As Turley points out, the greatest tragedy is not what bin Laden did to us, “but what we have done to ourselves.” Without a precise means of measuring that damage, the question of whether bin Laden's greatest damage was to our economy or our civil rights may not soon be answered.