There is no question that the current level of fear of terrorist attacks is highly irrational. I should make it clear that I am not saying that terrorist attacks within the US are unlikely. Quite the contrary. It is very likely that there will be repeated attempts at bombings targeting innocent people within the US and that some of these will undoubtedly be successful and result in casualties. Given that the US is engaging in warfare in countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, and bombing those countries and killing civilians in the process, there is no doubt that some people there, or people here who have sympathies with those being killed, are going to be enraged enough to seek revenge and use groups like al Qaeda or its proxies as vehicles to do so.

What I am saying is that being obsessed with taking extreme measures to prevent such attempts is irrational. The US is a big country that is still fairly open. It is impossible to prevent people who are willing to martyr themselves for a cause from harming other people. This is the reality we have to learn to live with if we are to maintain our sanity, let alone the freedoms and civil liberties that make life worth living.

As Evan DeFilippis writes:

The odds of dying on an airplane as a result of a terrorist hijacking are less than 1 in 25 million — which, for all intents and purposes, is effectively zero — according to Paul Campos, a law professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder. By comparison, the odds of dying in a normal airplane crash, according to the OAG Aviation Database, are 1 in 9.2 million. This means that, on average, pilots are responsible for more deaths than terrorists.

In the same vein, the average American is 87 times more likely to drown than die by a terrorist attack; 50 times more likely to die by lightning; and 8 times more likely to die by a police officer, according to the National Safety Council’s 2004 estimates. I can go on, the point is this: the risk of a terrorist attack is so infinitesimal and its impact so relatively insignificant that it doesn’t make rational sense to accept the suspension of liberty for the sake of avoiding a statistical anomaly.
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Would it be appropriate for the TSA to populate public parks, restaurants, casinos, zoos and public transit, all in the name of security? After all, in 2006 the Department of Homeland Security listed those places as “top terrorist targets.” And if we were to use the same logic forwarded by TSA-proponents, we would say that because people aren’t required to go to these places, it’s okay to coerce them into abridging their rights. It’s their choice, after all. Yet, we obviously wouldn’t accept such a system if it were implemented, so why do we accept the same humiliating system at airports?

Over at Mother Jones Kevin Drum argues that such comparisons are meaningless because people fear death from terrorism more than deaths from other routine causes and thus want their governments to take extreme measures to prevent it.

If, for example, I hear one more person compare the number of deaths from terrorism to the number of deaths from car accidents, I think I’m going to scream. Human beings react differently to accidental death than they do to deliberate attacks from other human beings. This is human nature 101. If you honestly think that the car-terrorism comparison is persuasive to anyone, you are so wildly out of touch with your fellow humans that there’s probably no hope for you.

I disagree. I think it is Drum who is out of touch. We live with the possibility of ‘deliberate attacks from other human beings’ all the time, in the form of muggings and assaults and murders. Even people living in high crime areas do not lock themselves up in their homes or demand the setting up of bomb detection equipment at every intersection. Drum has bought into the government propaganda that there is nothing worse than dying from a terrorist attack. If you look at countries that have had had long periods of random and deadly terrorist activity (Peru, Sri Lanka, Spain, Northern Ireland, India, etc.), you find that people just factor it in as a slightly elevated risk in their lives. They know that it is just bad luck if they are in the wrong place at the wrong time. If you are in a crowded place or at some big ceremonial function or somewhere where some major political figure is present, the odds of being harmed go up slightly. People gauge for themselves if the trade-off is worth it. Some avoid such places and events, others don’t. But for the most part people just go about their normal lives not worrying about being killed by explosives. That was the attitude of everyone I knew during the extremely long and violent period in Sri Lanka.

It is preposterous to think that people in America are intrinsically more fearful than the people in those other countries. What has happened is that they have been beaten down. Rather than appealing to people’s bravery and resilience, appeals that uplift and ennoble the human spirit, the US government seems to go out of its way to demoralize Americans by portraying them as weak and helpless and fearful, needing the protective arm of the government to go about even their normal daily routine.

The US national anthem correctly pairs the phrase ‘the home of the brave’ with ‘the land of the free’ because it is only brave people who are truly free. Shakespeare put it even better in Julius Caesar (Act 2, Scene II) saying “Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once.”

Those who are fearful are only too willing to trade away their freedoms. As Benjamin Franklin said, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

I did not know much about this year’s winner of the Nobel Peace Prize except that I’d heard that he was a critic of the Chinese government and had been jailed by them for expressing his views, which made me instinctively supportive of him. But Tariq Ali points out that irrespective of Liu Xiaobo’s merits as an opponent of China’s authoritarian government, he is not actually much of a peace advocate.

For the record, Liu Xiaobo has stated publicly that in his view:

(a) China’s tragedy is that it wasn’t colonised for at least 300 years by a Western power or Japan. This would apparently have civilised it for ever;

(b) The Korean and Vietnam wars fought by the US were wars against totalitarianism and enhanced Washington’s ‘moral credibility’;

(c) Bush was right to go to war in Iraq and Senator Kerry’s criticisms were ‘slander-mongering’;

(d) Afghanistan? No surprises here: Full support for Nato’s war.

He has a right to these opinions, but should they get a peace prize?

Apparently, the Nobel committee at one time even “thought about giving Bush and Blair a joint peace prize for invading Iraq but a public outcry forced a retreat.”

Given that the Peace Prize was given last year to Barack Obama who has escalated the war in Afghanistan and is steadily raining down bombs on that country as well as Iraq, Yemen, and Pakistan and killing hundred of innocent people in the process, perhaps they should rename it the War Prize.

In an earlier post, I said that it seemed like the failed recent attempts to bring down airplanes using incompetent people with half-baked plans may not be signs of incompetence on the part of al Qaeda as popularly perceived but may be part of a strategy to take advantage of two things: the ridiculously high levels of manufactured fear of the US public combined with the huge money-making counter-terrorist industry that is exploiting this fear.

After all, if al Qaeda wanted to really kill people, all it would have to do is set off bombs in shopping malls, sporting events, movie theaters, megachurches, and the like. They seem to have little or no interest in such acts. But, you may object, what about the alleged terror plots against bridges and buildings in Times Square, Miami, Portland, Baltimore, etc. that have been recently foiled with great fanfare?

Paul Craig Roberts lists all such terror ‘plots’ that have been uncovered so far and notes that there is a common thread that runs through nearly all of them, apart from their ineptness, and that is that in each case the authorities were actively involved in instigating fairly dimwitted people to become part of the plot, by posing as al Qaeda operatives to entice them. So al Qaeda was not behind the plots, the FBI was.

One recent ‘plot’ that was uncovered was in California where a convicted criminal was recruited by the FBI to pretend to be a devout Muslim, attend a mosque, and talk about jihad incessantly. He so alarmed the other mosque attendees that they got a restraining order against him forbidding him to attend. But it was trumpeted as another terrorist plot uncovered!

Another ‘plot’ that was uncovered was in Baltimore, where the FBI targeted a young Muslim convert who had made some incendiary comments on Facebook to lure him into agreeing to a plot.

Joe Quinn also examines the role of the authorities in these plots, especially the highly publicized Miami one which seemed to involve a bizarre religious sect whose members seem to be at a minimum borderline deranged.

The only bombing plan uncovered so far that seemed to be spontaneous was the Times Square bomber.

So what is going on?

The sad fact is that here are many young people who are not very bright and are angry for all kinds of reasons. As Robert Pape points out, one major reason is that they are Muslims angered by what they see as indiscriminate killing by the US government of their co-religionists in other countries. But there are other reasons for anger that have no connection with Islam or al Qaeda, such as abortion, fears of gun control, opposition to government in general and taxes in particular.

Then there are those who are so poor and desperate that if you dangle some money in front of them they may be willing to do things they would not otherwise have considered. Combined with the stupidity and bravado that some young men tend to have, it would not take much for people with almost unlimited money and other resources (as the government has) to persuade such people to sign on to some half-baked plot and then later unmask it as another ‘success’ in the war on terror.

As Roberts says:

If you are not too bright and some tough looking guys accost you and tell you that they are Al Qaeda and expect your help in a terrorist operation, you might be afraid to say no, or you might be thrilled to be part of a blowback against an American population that is indifferent to their government’s slaughter of people of your ethnicity in your country of origin. Whichever way it falls, it is unlikely the ensnared person would ever have done anything beyond talk had the FBI not organized them into action. In other cases the FBI entices people with money to participate in its fake plots.

The real question is why the government is going to such lengths to do so. Roberts harbors dark suspicions:

When the US government has to go to such lengths to create “terrorists” out of hapless people, an undeclared agenda is being served. What could this agenda be?

The answer is many agendas. One agenda is to justify wars of aggression that are war crimes under the Nuremberg standard created by the US government itself. One way to avoid war crimes charges is to create acts of terrorism that justify the naked aggressions against “terrorist countries.”

Another agenda is to create a police state. A police state can control people who object to their impoverishment for the benefit of the superrich much more easily than can a democracy endowed with constitutional civil liberties.
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The “war on terror” provides an opportunity for a few well-connected people to become very rich. If they leave Americans with a third world police state, they will be living it up in Gstaad.

He points out that Michael Chertoff, “former head of US Homeland Security, is the lobbyist who represents Rapiscan, the company that manufactures the full body porno-scanners that, following the “underwear bomber” event, are now filling up US airports. Homeland Security has announced that they are going to purchase the porno-scanners for trains, buses, subways, court houses, and sports events. How can shopping malls and roads escape? Recently on Interstate 20 west of Atlanta, trucks had to drive through a similar device. Everyone has forgotten that the underwear bomber lacked required documents and was escorted aboard the airliner by an official.”

So now we have the bizarre combination of al Qaeda, the government, and the private counter-terrorism industry all having different motives but working towards the same goal: to keep the nation in a state of perpetual fear.

She has an excellent article that is well-worth reading in full but I will give you a few paragraphs to whet your appetite.

The Espionage Act was crafted in 1917 — because President Woodrow Wilson wanted a war and, faced with the troublesome First Amendment, wished to criminalize speech critical of his war. In the run-up to World War One, there were many ordinary citizens — educators, journalists, publishers, civil rights leaders, union activists — who were speaking out against US involvement in the war. The Espionage Act was used to round these citizens by the thousands for the newly minted ‘crime’ of their exercising their First Amendment Rights.
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I predicted in 2006 that the forces that wish to strip American citizens of their freedoms, so as to benefit from a profitable and endless state of war — forces that are still powerful in the Obama years, and even more powerful now that the Supreme Court decision striking down limits on corporate contributions to our leaders has taken effect — would pressure Congress and the White House to try to breathe new life yet again into the terrifying Espionage Act in order to silence dissent.
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Let me explain clearly why activating — rather than abolishing — the Espionage Act is an act of profound aggression against the American people.
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As I noted in The End of America, if you prosecute journalists — and Assange, let us remember, is the New York Times in the parallel case of the Pentagon Papers, not Daniel Ellsberg; he is the publisher, not the one who revealed the classified information — then any outlet, any citizen, who discusses or addresses ‘classified’ information can be arrested on ‘national security’ grounds. If Assange can be prosecuted under the Espionage Act, then so can the New York Times; and the producers of Parker Spitzer, who discussed the WikiLeaks material two nights ago; and the people who posted a mirror WikiLeaks site on my Facebook ‘fan’ page; and Fox News producers, who addressed the leak and summarized the content of the classified information; and every one of you who may have downloaded information about it; and so on. That is why prosecution via the Espionage Act is so dangerous — not for Assange alone, but for every one of us, regardless of our political views.

She calls on people to demand the repeal of the Espionage Act.

Pratap Chatterjee in The Guardian has an interesting article on how advocates of civil liberties and human rights quickly succumb to becoming advocates of the imperial presidency when they join the government. He gives as examples people like Harold Koh, dean of the Yale Law School, and John Yoo, professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley. Both had secure jobs in which tenure is given to empower people to challenge authority, tradition, and conventional wisdom without fear of repercussions. But as soon as they were given government positions, they became advocates for some of the most repressive policies against human rights.

If even tenured professors can be so easily subverted, this shows why we need structures outside of the establishment to maintain transparency and uphold true democratic values. Institutions like WikiLeaks challenge the power structure and we should support them.