A recent comment amidst the constant "traitor/hero" pie fight caught my attention, and I decided to do a detailed diary on the issue it raised (this is not a call-out diary and I am not responding specifically to the comment or to the person who posted it.) The comment stated:
I think reasonable people can have disagreements about how big the threat is
In reality, however, the size of the "terrorist threat" is one thing that reasonable people CANNOT reasonably disagree about . . .
We can count, and we can add, so we can count how many terrorist attacks happen within the US in typical years and how many people die from them. (EDIT: My mistake--these figures are US State Dept figures for people killed by non-domestic terrorists WORLDWIDE in these years, not just figures within the US.) And what we get is:
Year Killed
2003 625
2002 725
2001 3547
2000 405
1999 233
1998 741
1997 221
1996 311
http://en.wikipedia.org/...
And if you look at the global picture for a typical year, you get:
Table 1: Terrorist attacks and casualties worldwide by month, 2012
Month Total Attacks Total Killed
January 595 1378
February 461 801
March 515 789
April 579 843
May 684 873
June 591 1189
July 571 1010
August 615 953
September 520 877
October 614 986
November 570 794
December 456 605
Total 6771 11098
Of the countries where those terrorist attacks and deaths occurred, the US is not even in the top ten. Indeed, as the State Department notes:
Although terrorist attacks occurred in 85 different countries in 2012, they were heavily concentrated geographically. Over half of all attacks (55%), fatalities (62%), and injuries (65%) occurred in just three countries: Pakistan, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
EDIT: These figures include domestic terrorists. This State Department report also notes that a total of 17 Americans were killed by terrorists, worldwide, in the year 2012.
Source: US State Department PDF file: http://www.state.gov/...
That gives roughly 12,000 deaths from terrorist attacks worldwide per year, on a planet with 7 BILLION PEOPLE. That is 0.0000017% of the population. And most of those are a direct result of our own "Global War on Terror".
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Now you can argue if you want that the "real number" of attacks and deaths is higher or lower than these depending on how one defines a "terrorist attack",or whether one includes DOMESTIC terrorists in the US (which the NSA does jackshit about, but which account for most "terrorist attacks" in the US), but I have seen NOBODY, ANYWHERE, under ANY definition, claim that there are more than an average of 1,000 deaths per year in the US from terrorist attacks. That is in a nation with 350 MILLION PEOPLE. That is 0.0000029% of the population.
We can also see from the US figures (EDIT--my mistake--these figures are for terrorist deaths WORLDWIDE, not just within the US) that after 9-11, despite billions of dollars and thousands of lives spent on a global "war on terror", the number of people killed in terrorist attacks is not statistically different than the number of people killed BEFORE the "war on terror"--indeed if anything it went UP. Going strictly by the numbers, the "War on Terror" has had zero measurable effect on anyone's "safety".
So them's the numbers. That's the size of the "threat". The US has a vanishlngly small number of deaths per year from terrorism, is the target of a vanishingly small number of total global terrorist attacks, and the total number of terrorist attacks and deaths worldwide is itself vanishingly small. That is the size of the "threat" that we are, as a society, peeing our collective pants over. The size of the "threat" is solidly established, even if we include error bars and the most expansive possible definitions. It is simply not open to rational argument or disagreement. The numbers are what they are.
What we CAN rationally argue over is how "threatening" that "threat" actually is, and how large the "response" to it should be, given the risk analysis. We've already seen that even the most alarmist estimates cite fewer than 1,000 Americans killed per year from "terrorism oh noez!!!" To put that in perspective, about 1,500 people win at least $1 million in state lotteries each year in the US (http://wiki.answers.com/...). Yes, that's right---according to the cold hard numbers, you (as in YOU, yourself, individually, the one peeing your pants because the terrorists want to kill you oh noez !!!!) have a 50% higher chance of becoming a millionaire by winning the lottery this year than you do of being killed by a terrorist attack this year. Each and every year. Think about that for a moment.
It may also be helpful to compare the "risk" of dying from a terrorist threat with the "risk" of dying from several other causes, to better assess whether our massive national-security "response" to "terrism oh noez !!!!" is in any way commensurate with the actual "risk" from the "threat":
– You are 17,600 times more likely to die from heart disease than from a terrorist attack
– You are 12,571 times more likely to die from cancer than from a terrorist attack
— You are 11,000 times more likely to die in an airplane accident than from a terrorist plot involving an airplane
— You are 1048 times more likely to die from a car accident than from a terrorist attack
–You are 404 times more likely to die in a fall than from a terrorist attack
— You are 87 times more likely to drown than die in a terrorist attack
– You are 13 times more likely to die in a railway accident than from a terrorist attack
–You are 12 times more likely to die from accidental suffocation in bed than from a terrorist attack
–You are 9 times more likely to choke to death on your own vomit than die in a terrorist attack
–You are 8 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist
–You are 8 times more likely to die from accidental electrocution than from a terrorist attack
– You are 6 times more likely to die from hot weather than from a terrorist attack
(
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/...)
Given the actual measured size of the terrorist "threat", I conclude that (1) the risk of dying in a terrorist attack is vanishingly miniscule, (2) there is simply no way whatsoever that any action by anyone anywhere at any scale can reduce that "risk" to "zero" even in a police state, (3) the whole "war on terror" has had, by the cold hard numbers, absolutely no effect at all on "keeping Americans safe from terrorists", and therefore (4) it's time to stop wasting our blood and treasure and civil liberties on a futile effort to "protect us" from a "threat" which is itself virtually nonexistent. So I am entirely willing to dismantle the entire national-security state, all of it, and in exchange I will happily take the vanishingly small chance that a terrorist oh noez !!! will blow up the shopping mall where I am buying socks. After all, I'm far more likely to get killed by a car walking across the mall parking lot. (shrug)
As a society, our reaction to "terrism oh noez!!!" is entirely emotional and irrational. As a society, we are, literally, terrorized. And fear is the mind-killer.