A ban on toiletries in carry-on bags at Denver International Airport.
A new multimillion-dollar state disaster response center in Centennial.
An $89,000 machine that digs for bodies in the rubble of exploded buildings for the Denver Fire Department.
Creation of a $70 million military program headquartered at Peterson Air Force Base to – among other things – battle domestic terrorism.
Police surveillance of peaceful protests.
Government attempts to snoop in library and cellphone records.
The list of ways the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks still affect our daily lives five years later is long and expensive.
Last week, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington reported $252 billion in extra national-security spending “closely or directly related to responding to or recovering from the terrorist attacks.”
That number did not include $310 billion spent so far on the war in Iraq.
Add in the war and other indirect 9/11 expenses, and the figure rises to $843 billion extra from 2001 to 2006. “That,” wrote study author Steven Kosiak, “is above what would have been provided (for defense, military operations and homeland security) … had funding simply been increased at the rate of inflation.”
No comparable figure exists for Colorado. Suffice to say that without 9/11, Colorado would not have gotten $36.8 million in security grants in fiscal 2005. Nor would it have dropped more than 5 million tax dollars on a “Law Enforcement Terrorism Prevention Program.”
And, added Mark Silverstein of Colorado’s ACLU, the number of Joint Anti-Terrorism Task Forces would not have doubled nationwide.
“Most of the files we try to get, the FBI classifies as ‘domestic terrorism,”‘ Silverstein said of recent efforts to uncover secret police surveillance. Spying on peaceful political activists did not begin with 9/11, Silverstein said. “But government interest intensified in the post-9/11 world.”
So did government excuses for limiting free speech. Authorities used “national security” to keep protesters blocks from a NATO conference at the Broadmoor in 2003.
Whether you might ever again carry deodorant or bottled water on a commercial airliner is unclear. On the other hand, compliments of 9/11, security screening is here to stay, along with suspicion of every traveler with Arab features.
Such a sad fact represents a victory for terrorism. Overcoming it, said Colorado Congressman Mark Udall, “is a generational challenge.”
“My father’s and mother’s generation had to deal with Pearl Harbor,” said Udall, a Democrat from Eldorado Springs. For baby boomers and Generations X and Y, the 9/11 terrorist attacks were the defining “blow to the sense that we were invulnerable on our big island.”
So you now get stories like one in last week’s Denver Post. It reported that Colorado State University “and an anti-terrorism company are testing low-cost devices that detect toxins that could be pumped into the U.S. drinking supply.”
Kosiak anticipates no reduction in security spending unless the U.S. withdraws from Iraq and Afghanistan. Even then, he said, homeland security costs, which have grown from $20 billion to $50 billion a year since 9/11, will not go down.
“If there is another terrorist attack in the United States,” Kosiak added, “you will see the number increase again.”
Udall, a member of the House Armed Services Committee, worries that the word is “when,” not “if.” “The biggest threat right now is a nuclear device exploded in an American city,” he said.
Udall still doesn’t support the war in Iraq. He has, however, “become more hawkish on jihadists.” America, he said, must hunt and kill these radical Muslims.
This is not something the congressman would have said before 9/11. But like airport security lines, it is something Americans must accept as long as a suicidal group of zealots will destroy themselves in order to destroy us.
That may be the most depressing thing about Monday’s anniversary. Five years after terrorism forced us all to change our daily lives, there is no end in sight.
Jim Spencer’s column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at 303-954-1771 or jspencer@denverpost.com. Diane Carman’s column will return soon.
