War On Terror Or War On Freedom?

War On Terror Or War On Freedom?:

A recent major investigative report by the Los Angeles Times sheds light on what all this “war on terror” is actually costing–and actually accomplishing. According to the report, “A decade after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, federal and state governments are spending about $75 billion a year on domestic security, setting up sophisticated radio networks, upgrading emergency medical response equipment, installing surveillance cameras and bombproof walls, and outfitting airport screeners to detect an ever-evolving list of mobile explosives.

“But how effective has that 10-year spending spree been?

“‘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.”

The LA Times report goes on to say, “Like the military-industrial complex that became a permanent and powerful part of the American landscape during the Cold War, the vast network of Homeland Security spyware, concrete barricades and high-tech identity screening is here to stay. The Department of Homeland Security, a collection of agencies ranging from border control to airport security sewn quickly together after Sept. 11, is the third-largest Cabinet department and–with almost no lawmaker willing to render the U.S. less prepared for a terrorist attack–one of those least to fall victim to budget cuts.

“The expensive and time-consuming screening now routine for passengers at airport boarding gates has detected plenty of knives, loaded guns and other contraband, but it has never identified a terrorist who was about to board a plane. Only 14 Americans have died in about three dozen instances of Islamic extremist terrorist plots targeted at the U.S. outside war zones since 2001–most of them involving one or two home-grown plotters.”

The report also notes, “Large sums of Homeland Security money, critics complain, have been propelled by pork barrel politics into the backyards of the congressionally connected.”

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