World's biggest scam?

From Salon

The Los Angeles Times examines the staggering sums of money expended 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:

“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,” said John Mueller, an Ohio State University professor who has written extensively about the balance between threat and expenditures in fighting terrorism

American INsecurity (Part 3)

The "War on Terror" (surely an oxymoron if there ever was on), has been called the
The decade's biggest scam by Salon.

Read the full article here. My favourite quote

Last year, McClatchy characterized this threat in similar terms: "undoubtedly more American citizens died overseas from traffic accidents or intestinal illnesses than from terrorism." The March, 2011, Harper's Index expressed the point this way: "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 LA times also did a great report on whether Homeland Security spending paying off.

Osama won

From http://www.theagitator.com/2011/05/02/he-won/

Osama bin Laden’s motivation for the attacks that he planned in the 1990s, and then the September 11 attacks, was to draw the U.S. and the West into a prolonged war—an actual war in Afghanistan, and a broader global war with Islam.

Osama got both. And we gave him a prolonged war in Iraq to boot. By the end of Obama’s first term, we’ll probably top 6,000 dead U.S. troops in those two wars, along with hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans. The cost for both wars is also now well over $1 trillion.

We have also fundamentally altered who we are.

The US focus on terrorism is fundamentally flawed.

The Reuters article has this quote

"I worry that the president's preoccupation with healthcare and other domestic issues has distracted him from what should be the fundamental role of our chief executive: keeping our nation and its citizenry safe from harm," Republican Senator John Cornyn said.

By increasing security theatre and overreacting every time someone tried a terrorist act, the US fails to address the fact that these 'healthcare and domestic issues'are actually far bigger threats to the US nation and citizenenry. For instance:

• More people die from lax US gun laws - heck just today 3 more Americans were killed today by one of their fellow citizens who was "armed with an assault rifle, a shotgun and a handgun"- see http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/08/us/08gunman.html
• Thousands suffer and die needlessly from poor health care - National Geographic states "lack of health insurance is a factor in life span and contributes to an estimated 45,000 deaths a year. See http://blogs.ngm.com/blog_central/2009/12/the-cost-of-care.html
  

When will we start to keep in mind the following?

• The fact that you are far FAR more likely to be killed lighting than by terrorism - people need to get real and stop being afraid?
  
• Decades of self-centered US foreign policy have created these problems in the first place - but no-one seems to be looking at changing this.