"Terrorism" in perspective.
If we are ever to get our sense of proportion back about so-called terrorism, we need a logarithmic scale for disasters like the one they use for stars. Only the very brightest stars in the sky are First Magnitude; divide the brilliance by ten for Second Magnitude stars, by a hundred for Third Magnitude, and so on. Ranking human disasters by the same system, only those that could kill, say, half the population in question would be First Magnitude. For the twelve million Jews who lived in Europe in 1939, the Holocaust was a First Magnitude calamity: half of them were dead by 1945. At the global level, a First Magnitude disaster would be one thatkilled around three billion people: it is possible to imagine a return of the Black Death, for example, that would kill three billion people, and an all-out global nuclear war could reach the same casualty level.
Divide by ten, and a Second Magnitude global disaster is one that kills in the low hundreds of millions of people. A "clean" Third World War with relative restraint in the nuclear targeting of cities and no nuclear-winter effects would fall into this range. The AIDS epidemic may ultimately prove to be a Second Magnitude disaster, although a very slow-moving one. Divide by ten again, and we are down to Third Magnitude disasters like the First and Second World Wars and the Spanish influenza outbreak of 1918-19, which all killed 10 to 50 million people. An Indo-Pakistani nuclear war would be a Third Magnitude disaster, as would be an Israeli decision to unleash its nuclear arsenal on its Arab neighbours.
Divide by ten once more, and we are down to Fourth Magnitude events, only one-thousandth as big as First Magnitude ones. Big or long-lasting local wars like Korea 1950-53, Vietnam 1965-73, and Sudan 1983-2003 fall into this range, killing two or three million people. The slaughter in the Great Lakes region of Africa that began with the Rwanda genocide of 1994 and continues today in Eastern Congo probably qualifies by now as a Fourth Magnitude event. An out-of-control nuclear meltdown in a densely populated area or a megaton range bomb exploded at the right height over a very large city could also cause deaths at a Fourth
Magnitude level.
Divide by ten yet again, and we drop to the level of purely local
catastrophes like the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, the Krakatoa explosion of
1883, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945, and the wars in former
Yugoslavia in the 1990S, each of which killed in the quarter-million range.
Potential Fifth Magnitude calamities in the present include the Big One along
the San Andreas fault in California, an average year's famine toll in
Ethiopia, or a successful terrorist attack on a major city using a
ground-burst nuclear weapon.
Another division by ten, and we drop to Sixth Magnitude events like the war in
Iraq in 2003, the 2004 earthquake in Iran, and the Arab-Israeli War of 1967,
all of which caused 20,000 to 50,000 fatal casualties. Worst-case scenarios
for highly successful terrorist attacks using biological weapons very rarely
rise above this level.
And a final division by ten brings us down to Seventh Magnitude events like the IRA's war in Northern Ireland from 1969 to 1998,the Second Intifada in Israeli Palestine from 2000 to the present, and the 9/11 attacks on the United States in 2001, all of which have caused on the order of three thousand deaths. About as many Americans die each month from gunshot wounds as died in the Twin Towers, the Pentagon, and United Airlines Flight 93, and those losses, unlike the terrorist attacks, recur every month. So why is terrorism regarded by both the U.S. government and media as the world's number-one problem?
Does it perhaps have to do with their agenda to destroy our constitutional liberties, and exert vast military terror on their contrived enemies?
Just who was it that attacked the Pentagon on Sept. 11?
New Database Debunks Terrorism Myths
Jeanna Bryner Live Science Thursday, May 24, 2007
The majority of terrorist attacks result in no fatalities, with just 1 percent of such attacks causing the deaths of 25 or more people.
And terror incidents began rising some in 1998, and that level remained relatively constant through 2004.
These and other myth-busting facts about global terrorism are now available on a new online database open to the public.
The database identifies more than 30,000 bombings, 13,400 assassinations and 3,200 kidnappings. Also, it details more than 1,200 terrorist attacks within the United States.
Less Than 0.01% Of Homeland Security Cases Are Terrorism Related May 28/07
So why does the government say terrorism is DHS primary focus?
A report issued Sunday by independent research group The Transactional Records Action Clearinghouse (TRAC) found that in the last three years there have only been 12 charges of terrorism out of 814,073 cases.
This once again highlights that the terrorist threat to America is vastly over hyped and is being used by a criminally controlled government as an excuse to police the world and foment a domestic police state to crush any dissent amongst the American people.
Are these people suppose to "protect" us from something?
Explosives lost in airport gaffe - By Allan Little, BBC News, ParisThe plastic explosives could be anywhere in the world, police say Plastic explosives were mistakenly loaded onto a plane at a Paris airport after security officials lost track of it during an exercise, police say.
Around 150 grams (about five ounces) of explosive were slipped into the bag of
a passenger during sniffer dog training at Paris Charles de Gaulle airport.
The bag ended up on one of 90 flights leaving at the time, and police are now
trying to track it down.
They stress the explosive is "no more dangerous than a bar of chocolate".
But airlines, airports and police forces around the world have been alerted.
It was a routine exercise that went wrong. An embarrassment but not, French
police insist, dangerous.
The package of explosive was put in a bag at the airport on Friday to see if
police dogs could detect it.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4069785.stm
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