Whatâs
Wrong Today:
Last Sunday, two Congressional
leaders who chair their respective branchâs intelligence committees spoke to
the news bunnies about terrorism and our need to spend more on the NSA to fight
terrorism, even while they voted to send more weapons and aid to terrorists in Syria.
We are talking about Mike
Rogers, (R-MI) who heads the House Permanent
Select Committee on Intelligence, and Dianne Feinstein, (D-CA) who heads
the Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence. Letâs review the hypocrisy: Rogers & Feinstein were
scaremongering the American people with the Syrian jihadis, yet both had voted
to give the Syrian rebels $ millions in arms. These two have to know what
we all know, that some Syrian
rebels are calling for terrorist attacks on America. And weâve known
for a while that much
of the weapons weâre shipping to Syria are ending up in the hands of Al Qaeda.
From Juan Cole:
Feinstein and Rep. Mike Rogers took to the airwaves on Sunday to warn that
Americans are less safe than two years ago and that al-Qaeda is growing and
spreading and that the US is menaced by bombs that canât be detected by metal
detectors.
It appears that Feinstein
and Rogers were trying to demonstrate a
âneedâ for the country-wide NSA dragnets that sweep up digital information
about most Americans. The Guardian
quotes Rogers as saying that al-Qaeda
groups had changed their means of communication as a result of the Snowden/Wikileaks disclosures about US surveillance programs, making it harder to detect potential plots
in the early planning stages: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)
amongst ourselves here in this country about the role of our intelligence
community that it is having an impact on our ability to stop what is a growing
number of threats…And so we’ve got to shake ourselves out of this pretty soon
and understand that our intelligence
services are not the bad guys
Marcy Wheeler at Empty
Wheel explains the hypocrisy: (bracketed comment below by the Wrongologist)
Rogers voted to give arms to the Syrian rebels. And while he may hope they
donât go to the al-Qaeda affiliates…he has no guarantee that wonât happen and
is willing to take the risk.
If
Rogers were really, really concerned about the Jabhat al-Nusra, [Syrian al-Qaeda]
he wouldnât be risking upping its
firepower with Americansâ tax dollars as a justification for monitoring who
your 15 year old daughterâs calls on her cell phone.
They are saying that
we are less safe than we were two years
ago. In fact, Rogers
said that âthousandsâ of Westernersâ
have gone to fight in Syria. But the FBI estimates
the number to be fighting in Syria at 24. Thatâs just two dozen.
And is
there any real reason to think that Americans are less safe than a couple of
years back? Not according to CNNâs Peter Bergen, who looked at
the actual numbers. Bergen relies on a New
America Foundation study of Americans and residents indicted or killed over
the last decade, showing that those numbers show terrorist incidents to be
going down. From Bergen:
to have been involved in plots against the United States between 2011 and 2013
received training abroad from a terrorist organization — the kind of training
that can turn an angry, young man into a deadly, well-trained, angry, young
man
The total number of
indicted extremists has declined substantially from 33 in 2010 to nine in 2013.
And the number of individuals indicted for plotting attacks within the United
States, as opposed to being indicted for traveling to join a terrorist group
overseas or for sending money to a foreign terrorist group, also declined from 12 in 2011 to only three in 2013.
Further, according to WaPo,
the types of organized groups that carry out terrorist attacks are extremely
diverse:
(GTD in the
caption above stands for Global Terrorism Database). If you are interested, the
University of Marylandâs Global
Terrorism Database is a useful tool for tracking these events.
Al-Qaeda
dominates the above list, and the two Eco-terrorism groups have been
particularly active, though they are both declining.
But aside from that, terrorist groups seem to come in all types. The report
notes:
Farouk Abdulmutallabâs Detroit suicide bomb attempt on Northwest Airlines
Flight 253
The TTP attack was
Faisal Shazhadâs attempt to detonate a bomb in Times Square
Members of the
Minutemen American Defense, an anti-immigration militia group targeted a
Mexican-American family
The KKK assaulted
someone, and the Justice Department sent razor blades in envelopes to
those conducting experiments on animals. (Note that the “Justice
Department” referred to here is an animal-rights group, not the federal
agency)
Recent plots
in the United States also do not show signs of direction from foreign terrorist
organizations such as al Qaeda, but instead are conducted by individuals who
are influenced by the ideology of violent jihad, usually because of what they
read or watch on the Internet. Indeed,
of the 45 homegrown extremists who were indicted, convicted or killed between
2011 and 2013, 18 are known to have communicated with other extremists over the
Internet or posted materials related to their radicalization online.
Finally, your odds
of dying in a terrorist attack are still far lower than dying from just
about anything else. In the past five years, the odds of an
American being killed in a terrorist attack have been about 1
in 20 million (that’s including both domestic attacks and overseas
attacks). As the chart
below from the Economist shows, that’s considerably smaller than the
risk of dying from many other things, from post-surgery complications to ordinary
gun violence to lightning: (Chart was cropped by the Wrongologist. Approximately 3400 Americans have died in terror-related attacks since 1970)
Rogers
& Feinstein: Not as catchy as Rogers & Hammerstein. Hate to quote
George Michael, but âguilty feet have got no rhythmâ…
Rogers
& Feinstein have nerve: They support the Syrian jihadis and then point to Syrian
jihadis as the reason why the NSA must stay deeply in the shorts of the
American people.
The
threat maybe increasing, but that is not proven by the data.
If
your government is fighting wars in the name of freedom, the entire rationale
is flawed if your government denies basic, Constitutionally-mandated liberties to
its citizens.
Then,
the terrorists win by default.
