{"id":20746,"date":"2013-07-19T09:08:06","date_gmt":"2013-07-19T17:08:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=20746"},"modified":"2013-07-21T13:01:19","modified_gmt":"2013-07-21T21:01:19","slug":"scary-non-existent-terrorism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2013\/07\/19\/scary-non-existent-terrorism\/","title":{"rendered":"Scary, Non-Existent Terrorism"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Nearly 12 years after the 9\/11 attack, virtually every single element of national security policy &#8211; from the occupation of Afghanistan, to the drone war, to a massive NSA surveillance apparatus, to a defense budget that outpaces the rest of the world combined &#8211; is justified by citing terrorism as a threat. Together these policies amount to trillions of dollars, the decay of the rule of law, rampant government criminality, and the evisceration of the the constitutional rights of millions of Americans.<\/p>\n<p>What does this terrorist threat really amount to though?<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.state.gov\/j\/ct\/rls\/crt\/2012\/210030.htm\">According to the State Department<\/a> a mere 10 Americans were killed by terrorism in 2012. None of them in the U.S.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><b>U.S. citizens worldwide killed as a result of incidents of terrorism: 10<\/b><br \/>\n<b>U.S. citizens worldwide injured as a result of incidents of terrorism: 2<\/b><br \/>\n<b>U.S. citizens worldwide kidnapped as a result of incidents of terrorism: 3<\/b><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Nine out of 10 of those killed were in Afghanistan, the remaining one in Iraq. One of the injured was in Afghanistan, the other in Iraq. The three instances of a single person being kidnapped occurred in Nigeria, Somalia, and Yemen.<\/p>\n<p>Instead of tormenting Afghans in a military occupation that costs more than $120 billion per year; instead of empowering the NSA to snuff out the Fourth Amendment and collect and store the communications of all Americans; instead of wasting almost <a href=\"http:\/\/antiwar.com\/blog\/2012\/02\/20\/the-real-us-military-budget-1-trillion\/\">$1 trillion<\/a> annually on defense spending mostly as a wealth transfer to rent-seeking corporations; instead of granting the president the kingly power to assassinate anyone, anywhere, at any time &#8211; maybe we just shouldn&#8217;t go to the above-mentioned countries. Then our terrorism casualty rate will be <em>zero<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Nearly 12 years after the 9\/11 attack, virtually every single element of national security policy &#8211; from the occupation of Afghanistan, to the drone war, to a massive NSA surveillance apparatus, to a defense budget that outpaces the rest of the world combined &#8211; is justified by citing terrorism as a threat. Together these policies [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":86,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-20746","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20746","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/86"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20746"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20746\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20761,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20746\/revisions\/20761"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20746"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20746"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20746"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=20746"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}