This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, September 12th, 2011.

I'm Caleb Brown. The risk posed by Al Qaeda was never military. It was never

existential and in comparison to other risks

isn't particularly large.

It's not that we shouldn't worry about terrorism, but it should be rationally related

to the risk it poses.

Gene Healy, Vice President at the Cato Institute, comments.

Well lately it seems like there's not a lot of good news out there, so it's terrific news to be able to say that after September 11th

2001 we've gone 10 years without a major follow-up attack and people talk about the lessons of September 11th. And maybe one

lesson that we can learn after 10 years is to stop talking about Al-Qaeda as a quote unquote existential threat to America.

But some people seem pretty resistant to that lesson and pretty determined to keep talking

about al-Qaeda as if it's an invincible force.

In Wednesday's Republican debate, for example, Newt Gingrich in response to a question about abolishing the Department of

Homeland Security, he helpfully pointed out that there are people out there who want

to kill us and so therefore we need the

ability to quote respond to massive events that could kill hundreds of thousands

of Americans in one morning. Is there any evidence at all, I think we should

ask, that that's the level of threat we're facing from Al-Qaeda?

Obviously, Al-Qaeda doesn't represent a military threat and so the a lot of the military

spending that we've engaged in over the years would seem wasteful and I think a lot

of libertarians would agree on that, but to the extent that terrorism does pose some threat to Americans, what's the size of that threat?

Well, Cato adjunct scholar John Mueller has looked at it in a

...