TERROR

Dailytimes Pakistan: Scaring America half to death
terrorism is at its lowest level in three decades

The distorted account of terrorism has had extraordinary psychological effect on many in the United States, causing them to think they are exposed to a degree of personal risk that has virtually no foundation in statistics, or indeed in common sense

Foreign ministers of the Group of Eight leading industrial nations met in Paris on Monday to affirm that terrorism remains a “pervasive and global threat.” Just three days earlier, the State Department had announced that terrorism is at its lowest level in 33 years.
In its annual report to Congress on terrorism, the State Department said that the 199 recorded terrorist incidents last year represented a 44 percent drop from the previous year, and was the lowest total since 1969.

There were no terrorist attacks at all in the United States, five in Africa and nine in Western Europe. Nearly all the rest were in Asia (99), Latin America (50) and the Middle East (29). (Forty-one of the total 50 incidents reported as terrorism in all of Latin America last year were bombings of a US-owned oil pipeline in Colombia.)

What the report actually indicates is that virtually all the incidents identified by the US government as acts of “global terrorism” in 2002 occurred in four places: in Colombia; in Chechnya, with its separatist war; in Afghanistan, with the continuing low-scale war; and with the Palestinian intifada. Elsewhere, the Bali tourist bombing caused some 200 deaths.

Before Sept 11, 2001, virtually none of this would have been called terrorism. It would have been called civil insurrection, or nationalist or separatist violence.

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