“Number of American civilians who died worldwide in terrorist attacks last year: 8 — Minimum number who died after being struck by lightning: 29. That’s the threat in the name of which a vast domestic Security State is constructed, wars and other attacks are and continue to be launched, and trillions of dollars are transferred to the private security and defense contracting industry…”
Columnist Glen Greenwald has written a piece focusing on the biggest scam of the decade, “Exaggerating, manipulating and exploiting the Terrorist threat for profit and power,” and how 10 years after 9/11, despite limitless fearmongering, terrorists pose no more threat to Americans than drowning in a bathtub.
“We hear over and over again how ‘the world changed on 9/11′, but it’s important to point out that the only genuine change has been the growth of a gigantic and oppressive Homeland Security surveillance state that feeds on fear and ignorance of the facts.”
In his outstanding article, The decade’s biggest scam, Greenwald analyses the amount of money spent on, “Patently absurd domestic “homeland security” projects: $75 billion per year for things such as a Zodiac boat with side-scan sonar to respond to a potential attack on a lake in tiny Keith County, Nebraska, and hundreds of “9-ton BearCat armored vehicles, complete with turret” to guard against things like an attack on DreamWorks in Los Angeles. All of that — which is independent of the exponentially greater sums spent on foreign wars, occupations, bombings, and the vast array of weaponry and private contractors to support it all — is in response to this mammoth, existential, the-single-greatest-challenge-of-our-generation threat.”
Greenwald cites Ohio State University professor John Mueller’s study, as well as Harper’s Index and a McClatchy article, to expose the security state boondoggle.
“Number of American civilians who died worldwide in terrorist attacks last year: 8 — Minimum number who died after being struck by lightning: 29.” That’s the threat in the name of which a vast domestic Security State is constructed, wars and other attacks are and continue to be launched, and trillions of dollars are transferred to the private security and defense contracting industry at exactly the time that Americans — even as they face massive wealth inequality — are told that they must sacrifice basic economic security because of budgetary constraints.
“The number of people worldwide who are killed by Muslim-type terrorists, Al Qaeda wannabes, is maybe a few hundred outside of war zones. It’s basically the same number of people who die drowning in the bathtub each year,” Mueller told the L.A. Times, while the McClatchy piece explains how, “undoubtedly more American citizens died overseas from traffic accidents or intestinal illnesses than from terrorism.”
Despite Americans being hit with crippling austerity measures, security state insiders are confident that their piece of the pie will not be significantly reduced. Even worse, they all but admit that the entire Homeland Security cash cow is based on little more than hot air and fearmongering.
“Polls still show that there is increasing public concern about another terrorist attack. It is this fear and an unrealistic American perception of risk that will continue to propel some aspects of the market,” a recent edition of industry publication National Defense noted.
Greenwald also explains how most of this anti-terror behemoth is not aimed at foreign terrorists, but is targeted against American citizens as a tool of homeland oppression, designed to “impose domestic order, preserve prevailing economic prerogatives and stifle dissent and anticipated unrest.”
The fact that intestinal illnesses pose a greater threat to Americans than the target of a multigenerational, multi-trillion dollar global war is a good example to illustrate the absurdity of Homeland Security, but there are several others.
Figures collected by Mueller in the same study cited by Greenwald clearly show that Americans are just as likely or more likely to be killed by accident-causing deer or severe allergic reactions to peanuts than they are in terrorist attacks.
So when you find yourself confronted with an array of self-proclaimed “terror experts” soberly lecturing you about how “the world changed on 9/11,” and how the attacks necessitated a Homeland Security slush fund of epic proportions to “protect America,” just remember that it’s all a giant scam.
The war on terror, and the onslaught of domestic repression that came with it, is based on the completely phony pretext that terrorists pose any more threat to Americans than bowel complications, rare weather events, or wandering animals.
Last word goes to Greenwald;
“Exaggerating, manipulating and exploiting the terrorist threat for profit and power has been the biggest scam of the decade; only Wall Street’s ability to make the Government prop it up and profit from the crisis it created at the expense of everyone else can compete for that title. Nothing has altered the mindset of the American citizenry more than a decade’s worth of fear-mongering. So compelling is fear-based propaganda, so beholden are our government institutions to these private Security State factions, and so unaccountable is the power bestowed by these programs, that its growth continues more or less unabated.”
