Writing earlier this year in Foreign Policy, Harvard professor of international relations Stephen M. Walt notes something many of us have suspected ever since 9/11 — that the threat of terrorist attacks from Muslim extremists has been hugely overblown. His evidence is that in 2009 there were 294 acts of terrorism (in itself a 33% reduction from the previous year), and only ONE of those attacks was staged by Islamists. The vast majority of the attacks came from indigenous European separatist groups (such as the IRA, the ETA, and so on).

Here’s an interesting note from The Economist’s language blog “Johnson”: Mandarin Chinese does not have a direct equivalent for the present participle as expressed in English with the suffix “-ing”, which accounts for some of the challenges of translating English expressions into Chinese as it turns up in the countless funny pictures of signs translated into “Engrish” but also accounts for a new phenomenon where the “-ing” is added as-is for some translations. The habit of tacking “-ing” onto Chinese words is most often seen in coastal cities with a lot of Western influences, but is starting to spread into the interior of the country, too.

It’s no wonder people in this country aren’t willing to find real solutions to real problems…according to a recent poll conducted by Fox News (yeah, I know…) a full 77% of the American public actually believes in the power of prayer to heal people. Even self-identified liberals, who are usually a more skeptical and reality-based group, came in at 65%. Every time I think we have finally bottomed out, there’s evidence that there’s still room to drop.

The National Safety Council has a list of the top 23 causes of death in the United States, and this BuzzFeed post conveniently lists them for you along with some meme-tastic pictures for illustration (several of which regular BKO readers will recognize, I’m sure). It should come as no surprise that the top three are heart disease, cancer, and stroke. Also on the list are being stung by bees (#20), riding a motorcycle (#11), and assault by firearms (#9).

Noticeably absent:

• overdosing on homeopathic medicine
• being executed in an Obama secret death camp for Christians
• being killed by terrorists in an airliner
• and, of course, fleeing from zombies in your new 2011 Ford Fiesta

You could strap a belt full of sticks of C4 and a detonator on your waist and blow yourself up on a crowded bus. Or, you could do what the London Metro Police have done: under the rubric of the so-called “Section 44″ anti-terror law, London police stopped and searched more than 170,000 people in 2008. Of those 170,000 stopped, only 65 were actually arrested under suspicion of terrorist activities. However, apparently nobody at New Scotland Yard, the Ministry of Justice, or the Home Office was able or willing to say if any of those 65 arrests resulted in convictions, which almost assuredly means that NONE of those 65 people were convicted of being terrorists.

A couple of years ago, I ranted a bit about the random bag searches that the MBTA police were conducting as an “anti-terrorism” measure, and what I said about the T cops then applies to the London police now. By abusing their powers for the sake of creating a good show of things, or by misapplying the law as a catch-all to deal with any situation that doesn’t neatly fit into a category of actual crime, not only do the London police diminish the value of actually looking for real terrorists, they are creating their own version of terror through the intimidation of the general public. The people of the U.K. do not have the same broad set of constituional protections of civil liberties that we have in the U.S. in the first place, and modern Britain seems particularly fond of an astonishingly high degree of state coercion in the lives of its citizens, from “ASBO” laws to the vast network of CCTV cameras constantly surveilling the public and now to capricious application of broadly-drawn “anti-terror” laws. About the only thing America still has over Britian in the brutality and opression race is throwing more people in prison.

During the 2008 election season, much of the overblown adoration for Barack Obama came from an assumption that immediately upon assuming office he would sweep away all the encroachments on American civil liberties that Bush (whom my daughter has dubbed “George Asscrack Bush”) and Cheney shoved through the Justice Department under the guise of “anti-terror” policy. As Glenn Greenwald pointed out in a recent Salon article, though, BarryO hasn’t exactly been in all that much hurry to undo things, and has even maintained the previous administration’s assertions for things like wiretapping anyone and everyone. That change we were supposed to believe in still hasn’t found its way off the campaign trail, I guess. What this particular bit of news out of London does, though, is act as a reminder on a couple of levels: first, it reminds us that our own civil liberties are not nearly as curtailed as they could be, which is a good thing. Second, it reminds us that the path from freedom-loving society to ham-fisted police state is a short one with only a few easily-abused justifications, and that even a velvet-covered fist is still a fist. Third, it should scare us all senseless that the transfer of power out of the hands of people committed to abusing it into the hands of people who promised to end that abuse not only hasn’t taken place but that the new administration seems to want to hang on to some of those powers. If you’re a nerd, let me give you the metaphor of Luke Skywalker and his robotic hand and his eventual temptation by the Emperor to destroy Darth Vader as the final push to the Dark Side. Even if you’re not a nerd, I’ll leave you with that thought and the suggestion that Britain is Anakin Skywalker.

It seemed that, within only a few hours into the several days it took for the terrorist attacks in Mumbai to play out, the news media had already dubbed it “India’s 9/11″. Not just the typically overwrought American news organizations, but the Indian media itself, and even such normally non-sensationlist outlets as the BBC rushed to brand the event with that still-portentious label.

The trouble is that the parallels are very few between the two incidents except for what appears to be a lot of time spent planning the details and also the clever subversion of the in-place security systems against themselves to give the attackers quick and easy access to their targets. Equally troubling, at least to me, is that though political violence is not the least bit uncommon in India, usually resulting in many more deaths than the 180-odd victims in Mumbai, the Western media in particular couldn’t seem to give a rat’s ass about the struggle between Muslims and Hindus in India until it affected rich, white American tourists staying in one of the poshest hotels in the world. As soon as some of the released hostages started telling the press that the attackers were singling out Americans and Britons, this went from being a story covered in the “also today” part of the news to being Story Number One, complete with live updates and all the fancy newsgraphics you could handle.

Because Mumbai is a media capital, complete with the world’s largest film industry, money, power, and the people who control both are familiar sights there than they are in Delhi or other Indian cities (except possibly for the outsourcing hub of Bangalore). Jeopardize a few blond-haired-blue-eyed people with well-lined pockets and suddenly you’ve got the latest chapter in The War Against Terror. This also just happens to be perfect fodder for the outgoing Bush people AND the incoming Obama people, all of whom can posture as much as they like without actually having to do anything except issue “statements of condemnation”. America LOVES terrorist attacks when they happen somewhere else! We didn’t even have to interrupt the Thanksgiving football games for those annoying “Special Reports”.

Writing in the New York Times on Tuesday, Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh talks about the important distinctions between 9/11 and Mumbai and also explores his memories about the violence in India in 1984 over Punjab separatists and Kashmir, which resulted in the massacre of over 2000 Sikhs and the assassination of Indira Gandhi. The scope of political violence in India, he says, makes the Mumbai attacks seem relatively minor within India, and he compares the incident more to the Madrid railway bombing of 2004. Resultingly, he says, he thinks the official response by the Indian government should be more aligned with the efforts in Europe that treated the incident as a criminal investigation than the Grand Guignol of 9/11.

Writing in The Nation, contributing writer Lakshmi Chaudhry similarly finds little on-the-ground rationale for making the 9/11 comparison. She also talks about the rush on the part of many to wrap Mumbai up in the web of The War Against Terror, as yet another battlefield in the struggle between God-Blessed America and the Muslim Evildoer Bin Laden, rather than an incident that is almost completely explicable within the framework of long-standing Indian internal strife. She points out that the struggle to frame the incident isn’t even over, as now in the aftermath there is much debate about who the terrorists were, who supported them, and what their larger objectives were. Ultimately, though, she concludes that the enduring symbolism of 9/11 provides a framework for any group which finds itself victimized by terror to explain their grief to the world in a way that they connect with. The danger is in letting the power of the idea outweigh the reality of the situation.

It’s us. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report earlier this week that says that the Department of Homeland Security’s “Terrorist Watch List” now has over 750,000 names of American citizens on it, and that another quarter of a million names will be added to it in the next year.

That’s right, we’re closing in on ONE MILLION SUSPECTS in the United States. No wonder the government needs to tap our phones, filter our e-mail, keep us off airplanes, and arrest us without warrants or speedy trials, we’re fuckin’ dangerous! I’d better go turn myself in before I blow up something! You should too. In fact, I think I’ll rat you out to see if I can get a plea-bargain…I knew there was something shifty-looking about you.

A few weeks ago it was the guys who were going to shoot their way into Fort Dix, and this week it was the crazed Jamaican Muslims who were going to blow up JFK Airport.

These stories play big for a day or two, and all the networks trot out their “anti-terrorism experts”, and the right-wing bloggers get to thump their chests and fling some more poo, and we’re all supposed to stay cowering in our bunkers. This time around, in fact, the chairman of the Arkansas Republican Party went on record saying he thought a few terror attacks would prove what a great job Bush is doing keeping America safe.

The spin cycle on this shit doesn’t last as long as it used to, but it’s still pretty depressing to see that anyone puts the slightest bit of credence into it. I almost punched out my TV when NBC’s “anti-terrorism consultant”, answering a softball lobbed at him by Ann Curry on the “Today” show, actually said he thought the reason these plots happen is because Muslims hate our American freedoms.

For starters, in each one of these plots that shows up, the ham-handed actions of the FBI turn up over and over and over and over. Some informant bankrolled by the FBI infiltrates the group and practically bludgeons them over the head “urging” them to buy guns and explosives, make plans, and so on. J. Edgar “Madge” Hoover would be so proud of the agents following in his footsteps.

Next, even while the Serious Law Enforcement Officials inevitably say that these foiled plots would cause “massive destruction on an unimaginable scale”, once somebody who actually knows what the fuck they’re talking about weighs in, the actual assault being planned turns out to be technically impossible, logistically unfeasible, or downright foolish.

Keith Olbermann had a good piece about this the other night (link goes to the always-informative Crooks & Liars, who usually have these video clips first). Even the current mayor of New York City publicly said people should “get over it” (Bloomberg is being touted as a possible 3rd party/independent candidate for President, BTW, and it would be very interesting to see him up against Rudy “I’m The Hero Of 9/11″ Giuliani).

On the positive side, though, they didn’t really achieve their objective of keeping Scooter Libby’s jail sentence out of the media. I also notice that with each new Republican debate, the already-announced candidates look more and more desperate trying to keep on message with this stuff. So maybe even the die-hards are beginning to see that their jig is almost up.

Hey, guess what!

If we hadn’t gone over THERE in the first place, we wouldn’t have quite so many to fight at all!

This Mother Jones article runs the numbers on acts of terrorism worldwide and finds that they have increased SEVENFOLD since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Mission Accomplished!

First, just so we’re all on the same page, a short lesson I found online the other day: this Flash animation very simply and elegantly explains the whole philosophy of liberty. It’s several minutes long, and gets a bit preachy at the end, but for those of you who find philosophy a little thick, this lays out the central ideas plainly. Among them, the one most pertinent to this conversation is the idea that the threat of force or violence to coerce proscribed behavior is inimical to a free society.

Writing at 3QuarksDaily, Michael Blim takes on the intimidation used by the MBTA Police in the form of random bag searches. Though it took a couple of false starts for the MBTA Police to actually mplement the searches as regular policy, it has been in place now for a couple of years. The MBTA Police do not always pay much attention to the policy themselves, but every once in a while something (like bogus LED signs all over the city) jostles them back to attention and they make more of a show of doing some searches.

As Blim points out, in the last quarter of 2006, the MBTA Police detained 2500 people for random searches. Absolutely none of them turned out to have anything remotely dangerous or illegal, and only 27 of them even set off what would turn out to be false positives from their explosive sniffing dogs and machines. There are approximately 1.2 MILLION riders on the various MBTA trains and buses every single day. The MBTA cops stopped 2500 people out of a total possible number of 98.4 million riders in an 82-day period. That’s 0.002% of the total ridership. As the Massachusetts ACLU notes, that is an “infinitesimally small” number of searches.

In other words, it’s a joke. A complete waste of time and a complete waste of money. Barring the statistical “one-in-a-million” scenario (which they would have to score EVERY SINGLE DAY to be meaningful), there’s no way these searches are the slightest bit effective.

So what’s the real effect of the presence of the cops and the dogs and the bomb-sniffing machines? Intimidation. Whereas the presence of police obviously on patrol for routine criminal activity can indeed provide some deterrent, these police are not on routine patrol. Their job is to consider each and every person on the subways, buses, and commuter trains as suspect. And because their task is done overtly, the glare of suspicion introduces the element of intimidation into the public space.

Let me quote Blim directly, because he says this well:

Further the court seems unaware of the fear such tactics create in ordinary persons feel when they find cops in their face unexpectedly, dressed in black and equipped with guns, a machine, and a dog, and demanding that they surrender their bags.

Let’s be clear — the fear or expectation of violence or punishment is absolutely equivalent to the violence or punishment itself. Don’t agree with me? Ask Dick Cheney or Attorney General Alberto Gonzales about the validity of torture. The threat of torture alone is considered a torturous act in international law. While random bag searches do not reach the same threat level on their own, consider that you can be arrested and detained indefinitely without benefit of counsel or contact with anyone on practically any grounds of suspicion deemed appropriate. And, as Blim points out, the federal courts have ruled that the state has complete and total discretion to determine any action as a threat to itself, trumping the rights of the individual.

Now let’s consider that “philosophy of liberty” piece again, shall we? If you accept the premises of this short lesson as valid, then there’s no way the current MBTA policies, or any of the other “for show” efforts established by public safety agencies in Boston, New York, London, or anywhere else are in any way tolerable in a free society.

And yet they persist, are given legitimacy by the courts, are aggressively pursued by all levels of government and receive a degree of public support from some quarters of society. In short, we have breached the free society as it was imagined and put into practice for more than 200 years and all we have to show for it is fear itself.