Terrorism: The Dire Threat of Dolts

The piece was published two days before the tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, four months after the killing of Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, and at a particular moment in the public counter-terrorism conversation. Bruce Schneier's 'security theater' framing had been in print for half a decade; the underwear-bomber and printer-cartridge plots had both involved actors of relatively limited operational sophistication; and a thread of analyst writing — Schneier, John Mueller at Ohio State, the New America Foundation's Peter Bergen, and others — was arguing that the threat profile and the policy response had drifted apart.

The 'dolts' framing in the title gestures at the body of evidence accumulated over the preceding decade: a meaningful share of post-9/11 prosecutions had involved either FBI-undercover-driven cases against operationally marginal defendants, or aspirational plots whose execution depended on capabilities the actors didn't possess. The argument wasn't that terrorism wasn't real — it was that the threat-perception calibration baked into the post-2001 institutional response was producing decisions whose costs (Fourth Amendment erosion, surveillance-architecture build-out, opportunity costs in other policy areas) were not being measured against the actual marginal-risk reduction.

The argument was unfashionable in 2011 in mainstream political discourse — both parties were still aligned on the post-9/11 expansion's general framing — but it has since become more accepted, particularly after the 2013 Snowden disclosures, the 2014 Senate Intelligence Committee torture report, and the broader retrospective work on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.