Thanks PetroDollar, for the great sources and quotes. This debate reminds me of something I read recently which basically sums up cognitive dissonance.
For you, HonestPessimist:
Americans now cower, terrified of brown skinned "terrorists" and immigrants. Americans non-chalantly accept torture, "preventative" war, and the end of freedom as "necessary evils" to preserve "security". Security and safety are the primary concerns of most Americans: a cowardly people, a cowardly nation. Just plain chicken-shit.
Americans lap up propaganda (The War on Terror, The War on Drugs, The Scary Mexican Hordes....) like bovines sucking on a salt lick: the same blank eyes... same befuddled minds.
Americans watch paramilitary SWAT teams attack poor people on shows such as "Cops" and call it "entertainment" (Fahrenheit 451 has arrived). They delight in watching murders, rapes, and serial killers (witness "CSI", "Law & Order", slasher films,...). But they find sex on film, or in magazines.. to be "obscene".
When American journalists quote (anonymous) US government officials.. without verifying their assertions... Americans call it "objective reporting". When Arab journalists show real civilian victims of American bombing,.. Americans call it "biased journalism" or "propaganda".
When an American election is rife with cheating, corruption, and suspicious activity its called "an imperfect system but the best in the world". When Hamas or Chavez win elections generally declared "fair" by the international community, Americans call it "anti-democratic".
War is peace. Attack is defense. Truth is false. Freedom is obedience. Obedience is security. Propaganda is objective.
Democracy is anti-democratic.
In god we trust.
The question is this, is there a real terrorist threat? Lets look at the statistics from the US DOS and the Rand Corporation:
Interesting, Terrorism didn't really exist until around 1970, cooincidentally the same year oil peaked in America. Also cooincidentally, we got a spike around the time of world-wide oil supplies started peaking, or getting close. Personally, I don't believe in coincidence. Recently, Jeff Wells of Rigorous Institution, wrote:
And I'm reminded again of former German Cabinet Minister Andreas von Bulow's advice:
"When in doubt, it is always worthwhile to take a look at a map: where are raw materials resources, and the routes to them? Then lay a map of civil wars and conflicts on top of that - they coincide. The same is the case with the third map: nodal points of the drug trade. Where this all comes together, the American intelligence services are not far away."
As we can obviously see, the average fatalities since 1968 are around 500-600 per year. The total since 1968 is 17,166.
We almost definitely killed more innocent Iraqi's in the first few DAYS following the 2003 Invasion.
In October of 2004, the Lancet journal released a report:
"Making conservative assumptions, we think that about 100,000 excess deaths or more have happened since the 2003 invasion of Iraq," researchers from Johns Hopkins' Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland, said in a report published online by The Lancet medical journal on Thursday.
"Violence accounted for most of the excess death and air strikes from coalition forces accounted for the most violent deaths," the report added.
So how do we measure a threat, worthy enough of dropping bombs on tens of thousands of women and children?
Here are some more fatality statistics:
Tobacco 435,000
Poor Diet and Physical Inactivity 365,000
Alcohol 85,000
Microbial Agents 75,000
Toxic Agents 55,000
Motor Vehicle Crashes 26,347
Adverse Reactions to Prescription Drugs 32,000
Suicide 30,622
Incidents Involving Firearms 29,000
Homicide 20,308
Sexual Behaviors 20,000
All Illicit Drug Use, Direct and Indirect 17,000
Non-Steroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drugs
Such As Aspirin 7,600
Marijuana 0
What's next? the "War on Sexual Behaviors", or the "War on Aspirin"
Yet, otherwise intelligent people believe we need to spend close to a trillion dollars per year, to make sure that "terrorists" don't come and kill us? Brilliant, and of course, before 9/11, and Oklahoma City, which at the very least, the Bush and Clinton administrations let happen, there were almost no terror-related fatalities in the US
Here is another quote for all you patriotic retards out there who just can't handle having your world view disrupted, shows us what we have learned 100 years later... nothing.
We Americans claim to be a peace-loving people. We hate bloodshed; we are opposed to violence. Yet we go into spasms of joy over the possibility of projecting dynamite bombs from flying machines upon helpless citizens. We are ready to hang, electrocute, or lynch anyone, who, from economic necessity, will risk his own life in the attempt upon that of some industrial magnate. Yet our hearts swell with pride at the thought that America is becoming the most powerful nation on earth, and that she will eventually plant her iron foot on the necks of all other nations.
Such is the logic of patriotism.
-Emma Goldman 1908
The thing that gets me is, that the WHOLE WORLD outside the US, knows the war on terror is phony. It is unimaginable to think otherwise.
