ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
Next month is the 15th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Since that day when nearly 3,000 people died, the U.S. has spent hundreds of billions of dollars trying to make the country safer. In a year-long investigation for The Atlantic, Steven Brill asks whether it worked, whether we are any safer today than we were 15 years ago. Welcome to the program.
STEVEN BRILL: Thanks, good to be here.
SHAPIRO: For those who are too young to remember - I mean, this was 15 years ago - describe what life was like before 9/11, what the security situation was for most Americans.
BRILL: Well, it really was a different time. For example, you know, coming into the studio, I mean, I can promise you that on September 10, 2001, no one would have stopped me in the lobby asking me for my ID. I can promise you that when I got to the airport, if I had a bottle of water with me, I would have been able to, you know, take it on the plane. I wouldn't have had to take my shoes off. The minimum-wage security guards who are employed by the airlines at the airport wouldn't have hassled me very much. Indeed, if I had a knife up to four inches in my briefcase, they wouldn't have cared. And, you know, it was a different world.
SHAPIRO: You write that by your calculation the government has spent $100 billion to $150 billion on homeland security programs or equipment that did not work and far more than that on programs that were worth the cost.
BRILL: Right, exactly. So the September 12 era, as I call it, I think features the best of America and American politics and the worst of America.
SHAPIRO: Give us an example in each column one use of money that was wasteful and inefficient and one that you think was money well spent.
BRILL: The easiest target for waste was a program - actually, it was two or three programs - announced to put technology on the southern border, cameras and sensors and motion detectors, all this stuff that would keep people from crossing over the border. When President Bush announced what was to be a $5 billion program, he called it the most advanced technology ever deployed at the border. Two billion dollars later, after they had installed just a fraction of the stuff, they canceled the whole program because the sensors - the alarms went off if mosquitoes flew over the border.
SHAPIRO: (Laughter).
BRILL: And the whole thing was just a complete fiasco. But that would be one example on that side of the ledger.
SHAPIRO: And on the side of the ledger where you think money well spent.
BRILL: There was a gas main from New Jersey through Manhattan and up into New England that was, you know, completely unfortified or shielded on the Upper West Side, and very quietly, you know, they constructed a cement protection around it. And that kind of stuff happened all the time all over the place.
SHAPIRO: Having read this long, detailed article that you spent a year researching, my takeaway is that the answer to the question, are we any safer, is yes, we're a little safer than we were pre-9/11, but we can't expect zero fatalities from terrorism. And I wonder whether zero fatalities from terrorism is a realistic expectation. What should the goal be?
BRILL: Well, as I make real clear in the article - at least I hope I do - it is unrealistic to think that we can prevent all terrorist attacks, especially if you define a terrorist attack as, you know, someone who goes into a gun store and buys an assault rifle and then, you know, goes into a shopping mall or a theater and shoots a lot of people and yells out something in Arabic because he read something on the internet. There is just no way to prevent that except by doing something about an assault weapons. That's unrealistic.
The answer to the question of are we any safer - we have done a lot, a lot of really good work by a lot of really good people to make us safer. But at the same time they've been doing that work, the world has spun more out of control. You have more potential terrorists who are feeding into the funnel at the top that all the prevention forces have to stop at the bottom.
SHAPIRO: Steven Brill wrote the cover story "Are We Any Safer?" for the new issue of The Atlantic. Thanks very much for your time.
BRILL: Happy to do it. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.