Discussed in this essay:
Non-Stop, directed by Jaume Collet-Serra (Universal Pictures; 2014)
Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them, by John Mueller and Mark Stewart (Simon & Schuster; 2006)
Review of the Department of Homeland Security’s Approach to Risk Analysis, by the National Research Council (The National Academies Press; 2010)
* * *
A Boeing 777, a kilo of cocaine, a bomb, two PTSD-suffering Iraq vets and a pair of U.S. Air Marshals. Those are the basic ingredients of Non-Stop, a recent film in which a rugged, alcoholic Liam Neeson saves a plane full of bewildered passengers. Released during the cinematic doldrums of March, the movie isn’t looking to bend genre or effect profound social change. But like many law enforcement thrillers, Non-Stop touches incidentally upon a few political topics, and among them is the effectiveness of the Federal Air Marshals Service (FAMS).
Take the first scene: Neeson pours some whiskey into a mug while waiting in his Chevy truck pre-flight. On the radio, a commentator—(whose rhetoric is plucked from a June 2009 speech by Rep. Jimmy Duncan (R-Tenn.))—derides air marshaling as a waste of taxpayer money. “Flying around the country first-class while getting paid must be one of the easiest jobs out there,” he shouts.
At first, we’re bound to agree. Neeson is already blurry-eyed, and once on the plane, he tries to order a gin and tonic. His co-marshal, we soon find out, is smuggling a suitcase full of blow, which, unbeknownst to him, also contains a time bomb.
Yet despite these early faux pas, Neeson soon begins to redeem himself and, transitively, the Service. Using a variety of savvy detective skills, he realizes that the passengers are being picked off by small poisonous blow-darts. Then, he sets about killing the culprits, and he lands the plane safely after mitigating the bomb’s blast. In the end, he’s a hero—but his heroism is shrouded in a fog of professional incompetence and political skepticism. So the film frames the question: Are Jimmy Duncan and his budget-minded cohorts correct, or are air marshals, in fact, worth it?
Stepping back from the world of coke-stuffed suitcases and poisoned blow-darts, the answer to the latter question appears to be “no.” There are about 4,000 air marshals currently employed by the federal government and, despite the objections of the airline industry, they do fly first class. The program costs about $860 million a year, and, since 9/11, when the agency was beefed up from a shell organization with 33 employees and a $4.4 million budget, it has thwarted exactly zero acts of terror. FAMS leads to the arrest of about four people annually at the price of $215 million a pop—all on relatively minor charges such as public drunkenness and sexual harassment. And, as of 2009, there had been more air marshals arrested, than citizens arrested by air marshals.
According to a 2008 investigation by ProPublica, “more than three dozen” marshals had been charged with crimes, and several agents had used their position to commit felonies ranging from drug smuggling to pedophilia to conspiracy to commit murder. Among the more lurid tales is that of marshal Shawn Nguyen who repeatedly smuggled drug money and cocaine across the country—just like the co-marshal in Non-Stop—referring to himself as the “man with the golden badge” in a conversation with an undercover FBI agent.
Given the statistics (and the juicy anecdotes), one wonders how FAMS has continued to lumber along in its current state. Who, I found myself asking, makes the cost-benefit analyses for FAMS, for the TSA, and for the Department of Homeland Security more generally? Who calculates which programs are worth it, and which are a waste?
* * *
The answer, I found out, is no one.
This is the conclusion hinted at by political science professor John Mueller of Ohio State University and Mark Stewart, a statistical engineer from Australia, in their 2006 book Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them. One of the key findings of the work is, in effect, a non-finding: during the course of their research, they were able to locate no internal discussions, public reports, government personnel or sources of any kind that could explain how the DHS justified their outlays—outlays which have amounted to more than $1.4 trillion since 9/11.
At the time, Mueller conceded that these calculations might have been buried away in the DHS’s internal documents—that they were unpublished, or otherwise unavailable to his modest academic research team. A 2010 report by the National Academy of Sciences, however, found this latter interpretation to be too generous, and Mueller’s original suspicion correct. Despite an exhaustive, two-year long investigation, no one from the NAS could find a single expenditure for which a DHS cost-benefit calculation had taken place. Put another way, the presumption in the DHS was that if it could be spent, it was worth spending, and any risk, no matter how negligible, was worth the Department’s resources. “Either they’re willfully negligent, or they just don’t know what they’re doing,” said Mueller to the HPR.
When asked about the DHS’s allegedly sloppy methods, the Department’s most stalwart advocate in Congress, Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, didn’t so much defend the Department’s methods as deflect blame away from the agency. “I would say if we based expenditures on threat analysis, rather than on political pressures, DHS would be more effective,” he said to the HPR. “[But] if I was going to make a criticism of the expenditures of Homeland Security, I wouldn’t blame the Department as much as I’d blame Congress.” He points out that the DHS answers to over 110 congressional committees, subcommittees, and government agencies. There are a lot of mouths demanding to be fed, claims King, and Homeland Security is caught in the unenviable position of political mother-bird.
When I asked Mueller about King’s defense, however—about the idea that the DHS was the innocent victim of pork-veined political pressure—he’d have none of it. “I’ve become very fed up with the idea that DHS officials are under so many pressures that they can’t behave rationally.”
He claimed that much of the DHS’s waste was self-inflicted and self-promoted—and that he had a “dark suspicion” that the DHS avoided studying the cost-effectiveness of its programs because the findings could undermine many of the Department’s core operations.
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Looking at the political pressures that have come to bear on the DHS, one doubts the political victimization narrative put forth by Peter King, at least to some extent. While the DHS has responded to the demands of parochially minded legislators in a positive way, the Department has systematically ignored government demands to cut fat—or even to take a hard look at current practices.
As part of the 9/11 Commission Act of 2007, for instance, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), a sub-bureau of the DHS, was legally required to conduct a cost-benefit analysis of a program to scan incoming containers in American ports for nuclear material, to see if it would be, in fact, worth it. No such analysis ever occurred, and when the Government Accountability Office (GAO) discovered this during a 2009 audit, it again ordered that such a study take place. But again, nothing.
On the GAO’s website, the audit is labeled “Closed—Not Implemented.” A change in the “political and economic environment,” the CBP claimed, was sufficient grounds to dismiss the GAO’s request against Congress’ will.
Here’s another story: when the TSA began to implement full body scans at airports at the price of $1.2 billion a year, the GAO again called for an analysis. Again, no luck. The DHS simply ignored the requests of the GAO, and, as a result, nobody has any proof that said scanners, which have led to a three-year contentious public debate over matters of privacy, are anything but a squirmy waste of money.
* * *
To these findings, the average citizen could be excused for asking, “Who really cares?” The federal government, after all, isn’t known as the paragon of cost-effectiveness, so why pick on the Department of Homeland Security in particular? To this, I’d claim that the early history of the DHS is unique and unorthodox in a way that demands we ask hard questions about the legitimacy of its current programs.
To elaborate, in 2002, in the wake of the September 11 attacks, the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld trio, riding a wave of public support and paranoia, pushed through Congress the greatest reorganization of the federal government since the creation of the Department of Defense in 1947. The result was the DHS—a $50 billion-per-year federal agency, wedged uncomfortably between the intelligence community and domestic law enforcement, and charged with the amorphous task of “protecting the Homeland.” Within a few years, critics were calling the DHS a “knee-jerk” reaction to the tumultuous events of the early naughts, which was true in that its creation was the result of collective passion and fear, not of a calculated policy decision by legislators or experts. There’s nothing wrong with this form of genesis per se, but thirteen years onward, I hope I’m not alone in wondering which of the Department’s programs can be justified by reason—and by extant threats—in addition to public passions that are slowly, but noticeably moderating.
What’s clear now, even to Rep. Peter King, is that there are plenty of programs that cannot be justified in terms of reason; in fact, many programs cannot even begin to be justified, which is why the DHS has not attempted to do so. The above programs regarding nuclear and body scanners are examples of this tendency, but there are many other, more conspicuously unjustifiable DHS programs that have benefited from the Department’s lack of self-evaluation.
One such program, to give an example, would be the Law Enforcement Support Office, which doles out disproportionate weaponry—police tanks, rocket launchers, etc.—to rural and small town police departments the nation over. I’ve already written about this issue at length, but suffice it to say that thinly populated counties and villages with as few as 8,000 residents are routinely granted mine-resistant, heavily armored military assault vehicles worth many hundreds of thousands of dollars. “There are parts of this country that are not going to be attacked in a million years, and yet we give them money for the most sophisticated technology in fire trucks and first responder technology,” said King.
A second example would be the DHS’s fetishizing of small business security, even though no small business has been the victim of terrorism—as defined by the FBI, and all other government agencies—in the modern era. By 2005, to elaborate, 7,000 small businesses had received a total of $3 billion in anti-terror grants—85 percent of which had failed to establish their own eligibility under the DHS’s own guidelines—and Dunkin Donuts raked in $22 million alone. After an AP exposé, the Department apologized for the administrative oversights, but among the other grant recipients that have recently slipped through the program’s still-porous cracks are a perfume shop in the Virgin Islands and a boutique dog barber in Utah. And these businesses are just two in a long list of grantees who perform quotidian commercial functions, and are—reason would dictate—practically invulnerable to terrorism.
A third and, for our purposes, final example would of course be the Federal Air Marshals Service—not the one of Hollywood’s imagination or of Liam Neeson’s cunning—but the real one, which has come to be a symbol of everything that’s wrong with the DHS: the agency in which 4,000 bored cops fly around the country first class, committing more crimes than they stop, and waiting to be among the 0.1 percent of agents making one of those rare, ephemeral $200 million arrests.
Image credits: washingtonpost.com, nybooks.com
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