This page has been archived and commenting is disabled.
There Are Far Fewer Terror Attacks Now Than In the 1970s
The terror threat is greatly exaggerated. After all, the type of counter-terror experts who frequently appear on the mainstream news are motivated to hype the terror threat, because it drums up business for them.
The same is true for government employees. As former FBI assistant director Thomas Fuentes put it last week:
If you’re submitting budget proposals for a law enforcement agency, for an intelligence agency, you’re not going to submit the proposal that “We won the war on terror and everything’s great,” cuz the first thing that’s gonna happen is your budget’s gonna be cut in half.
You know, it’s my opposite of Jesse Jackson’s “Keep Hope Alive”—it’s “Keep Fear Alive.” Keep it alive.
Fearmongering also serves political goals. For example, FBI agents and CIA intelligence officials, a top constitutional and military law expert, Time magazine, the Washington Post and others have all said that U.S. government officials “were trying to create an atmosphere of fear in which the American people would give them more power”. Indeed, the former Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge admitted that he was pressured to raise terror alerts to help Bush win reelection. Former U.S. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski – also a top foreign policy advisor to President Obama – told the Senate that the war on terror is a “a mythical historical narrative”.
Indeed, the government justifies its geopolitical goals – including seizing more power at home, and overthrowing oil-rich countries – by hyping the terror menace. So the government wants you to be scared out of your pants by the risk of terrorism. No wonder national security employees see a terrorist under every bush.
But terrorism has actually dramatically declined in the United States. Daniel Benjamin – the Coordinator for Counterterrorism at the United States Department of State from 2009 to 2012 – noted last month (at 10:22):
The total number of deaths from terrorism in recent years has been extremely small in the West. And the threat itself has been considerably reduced. Given all the headlines people don’t have that perception; but if you look at the statistics that is the case.
Indeed, the Washington Post noted in 2013 that the number of terror attacks in the U.S. has plummeted since the 1970s:
Indeed, you’re now much more likely to be killed by brain-eating parasites, texting while driving, toddlers, lightning, falling out of bed, alcoholism, food poisoning, a financial crash, obesity, medical errors or “autoerotic asphyxiation” than by terrorists.
Obviously, a huge number of innocent Americans – 3,000 – were killed on 9/11 … a single terror attack.
However, 9/11 – like the Boston Bombing (and the Paris terror attack) – happened because mass surveillance replaced traditional anti-terror measures. Similarly, Cheney and company were criminally negligent.
And the “War on Terror” has been counter-productive, and only increased the terrorism problem.
If we had stuck with tried-and-true anti-terror techniques, high-fatality events like 9/11 would never have happened.
- advertisements -
It's like that here now nmewn. You get used to flying in an area and its not active but the next time you fly in it is active restricted. You have to give a 4 to 5 nm buffer around the boundaries and actually know exactly where they are, and what's active, before you fly. ATC won't tell you where it is, they'll just remind you to stay clear of the active airspace, and that's only if they remember and you're in actual controlled airspace. If not you're it all falls on you to not stumble in. Given the US is totally paranoid it would be a pretty big deal to fly toward a reactor as SOP in that case may be something extreme, like scram the reactors (federal regs and the plants insurance cover probably mandates that sort of action be taken). That's seriously expensive and disruptive so they will react pretty sharply. Just got to stay the hell away from restricted airspace.
"Given the US is totally paranoid it would be a pretty big deal to fly toward a reactor as SOP..."
Well hopefully we're getting over that, the normal people anyways.
Yes TPTB are giving it the ole college try (reduced now to the media inspired mild panic about measles) but its increasingly falling on deaf ears as far as I can tell.
Of course one can still get relatively close to the Crystal River nuke plant by boat.
Ahhh!!! Run for your lives!!!...lol.
"No wonder national security employees see a terrorist under every Bush." - pun intended
And Jesse means Keep Fear Alive, he makes a buck on pimping fear just like the gov and CIA, sure there is a cozy relationship between the three.
We need more hippies and Black Power movements.
You just can't depend on Arabs for anything.
http://www.globalincidentmap.com
http://www.thereligionofpeace.com
Funny that the terrorist dont do any damage to anything of any import.
I fear you are correct.
Think how few there are if you don't count false flags.
I think they counted civil rights violations.
Without the false flags you wouldn't HAVE much going on... no unwarranted invasions of other countries, no blowback from those invasions... hell, thionk of how peaceful the world could be......
How about plotting by year the ratio of the amount spent on Homeland Security divided by the number of attacks that year.
If we spend an infinite amount of money, can we be assured that there will be zero attacks that year? :)
For the record, I am against the security state, mass warrantless data collection by the government, cameras on every corner, etc.
But I dislike sloppy thinking, too. The problem is that GW bemoans the rise of the security state but notes, seemingling not realizing it, that it is directly correlated to a decrease in domestic terrorist attacks. Therefore, if the intent of the security state is to reduce terrorism within the US, it would seem to be working.
If the security state could be limited to this one positive outcome, I guess it could be acceptable, but as we all know, people who have power will, in time and without fail, abuse that power. So, we should admit the security state is effective at supressing certain types of activity, which actually the problem when it grows too large and fearsome to be controlled and crushes basic freedoms and liberty for whatever reason it pleases. If the security state were ineffective, it would not be something to fear.
To other issues. Terrorism is a tremendous global threat. Since 2006, 128,932 people worldwide have been killed be terrorists. we can safely assume 3 times that number have been maimed and wounded. (http://www.statista.com/statistics/202871/number-of-fatalities-by-terror...).
Of greater concern is average lethality of each attack is increasing. Since 2006, terrorist attacks killed on average 29% more people per attack than in 2006, showing an increased productivity, if you will. Worse still, terrorist productivity has increased 920% since 1970 when terrorist attacks killed on average 0.2 people per incident. They are becoming much more leathal, and since 2001, more common.
It is not a small or insignificant problem. The rub is, like anything else, how we choose to deal with this problem. But to say it is insignificant is misleading.
BLOWBACK!
It doesn't matter how much money is spent, Uncle Fraud will always fabricate more "incidents" in order to keep the fear going which will accrue public acquiescence to titanic amounts of money being spent. (note the FBI constantly assisting mental defectives into staging some sort of terror event so that they can arrest and claim that they thwarted an event)
You can't have a War on Terror without regular terror events.
their template: google OPERATION NORTHWOODS
https://archive.org/stream/OperationNorthwoods/operation_northwoods#page/n11/mode/1up
I did, but not google (just because, well fuck google), I ducked it. The above link is a good read, it's the actual declassified document. Only about 13 pages. If you think that your gubment is not a lying POS, then hit the link above.