Just 436,000

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whac-a-mole game

Terrorists, terrorists, everywhere: in our airports, on our highways, eyeing our power plants, hating us for such freedoms as our right to practice our religious convictions… oh, wait. OK, then, our right to drink the milk we please… nope, not that one either. Hmmm: how about our right to buy the light bulbs we prefer?

Well, whatever. For 14 years now, our rulers have insisted that terrorists scheme to kill us while spending $4.4 trillion of our taxes to kill them first. Alas, it’s a losing battle: Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) warned two months ago that the threat is still so strong cops should monitor mosques in American cities. And John Pistole, formerly the TSA’s chief deviant, fretted in December, “The threat today is unfortunately more expansive than what it was four-and-a-half years ago.”

Is it me, or does the war on terror resemble an inconceivably expensive Whac-A-Mole: The more you targets you hit, the more pop up? And at least 3.1 million Americans are whacking away: The Department of Homeland Security alone boasts “more than 240,000 employees” who allegedly “secure the nation from the many threats we face.” Then there are the untold millions of their “federal, state, local, and private sector partners.” Just one of those “local partners” adds 700,000 cops to the anti-terrorism forces, what with police departments lining up for DHS grants so they can train guys who write traffic-tickets to tackle al-Qaida. And we haven’t even mentioned the armed forces (1,369,532 active duty; 850,880 reserve).

Recall, too, that the world is full of American lapdogs — sorry, allies — fighting our enemy, too. So there must be millions upon millions of terrorists out there, right?

For an answer, we’ll turn to a census of sorts the Feds themselves publish each year. Titled “Country Reports on Terrorism,” it presents research from the State Department. Yeah, I know: not much credibility and even less veracity there. But let’s have a look anyway. After all, we’re footing the bill for this tome. And no doubt King, Pistole and the rest of our rulers have studied its findings extensively before sacrificing our $4.4 trillion and countless lives worldwide to their war on terror.

Naturally, freedom-hating terrorists are too busy manufacturing bombs to fill out the “short” census our freedom-loving government inflicts on us, let alone its notorious “long” form. The “Reports” depend instead on educated guesses of how many members each of 54 “Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTOs)” claim. (Who decides to dignify a set of angry loudmouths as a “Foreign Terrorist Organization?” The “Secretary of State in accordance with section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act [INA].”) Sometimes, those guesses yield a comparatively firm figure: “Estimates put… membership… at fewer than 100.” Other times, “membership… range[s] from the hundreds to a few thousand.” The word “approximate” appears 21 times. And the population of 16 “FTOs” is flatly “unknown.”

No matter. What say we add these numbers together for a rough idea of how many terrorists oppose us? Indeed, wouldn’t you presume someone at Homeland Security or the Pentagon had already done so? And perhaps they have — I mean, there is a limit to bureaucratic stupidity, is there not? But if so, they’re keeping mighty quiet about the total.

And I can see why. You’ll be shocked at how many terrorists have America in their sights as we combine those 54 rosters. But first, a word about our methodology. Because we’d far rather be safe than sorry in modern Amerika, we’ll err on the side of generosity. For example, we’ll interpret “several” or “few” as “five,” so that “several hundreds” becomes 500 and a “few thousand,” 5,000. We’ll count higher rather than lower estimates (“400-600 members” yields 600); “fewer than” as that number (i.e., “fewer than 2,000” adds 2,000 to our computation); and to compensate for those 16 “unknowns,” we’ll double whatever figure the total of the other 38 groups yields.

So how many hundreds of millions of terrorists have declared jihad on us?

Ahem. The State Department’s own figures, even with our extremely lavish reading, yield a total of only 435,940.

Yep, you read that right. Mere thousands. Not even half a million. And remember we’ve erred extravagantly on the plus side. Not only did we double our total because of the “unknowns,” we also included the “approximately 750 ETA members” in “Spanish and French prisons” as well as “supporters” of groups (i.e., “At its peak, IG [Gama’a al-Islamiyya] likely commanded several thousand core members and a similar number of supporters” added 10,000 [5,000 “core members” and 5,000 supporters] to our total, though IG has now “substantial[ly] decrease[d]”).

Ah, but it gets worse. The “Reports” also specify “Location/Area of Operation.” Most of the “FTOs” are surprisingly modest, confining themselves to their own backyards. The State Department claims that for inclusion in its list, the “organization’s terrorist activity or terrorism must threaten the security of U.S. nationals or the national security (national defense, foreign relations, or the economic interests) of the United States.” But it’s hard to see how Peru’s “Shining Path” — whose “Location/Area of Operation” is the “rural areas” of Peru, “specifically the Huallaga Valley and the Apurimac, Ene, and Montaro River Valley…” — even remotely threatens the ol’ homeland. Ditto for the “Continuity Irish Republican Army” (“Location/Area of Operation: Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland”), the Abu Sayyaf Group (which “operates primarily in the Philippine provinces of the Sulu Archipelago, namely Basilan, Sulu, and Tawi-Tawi; and on the Zamboanga Peninsula” as well as “in Malaysia”), or Tehrik-E Taliban Pakistan (“Location/Area of Operation: Federally Administered Tribal Areas, Pakistan”).

In fact, the State Department doesn’t mention “USA” as the “Location/Area of Operation” for a single one of the 54 “FTOs” in its list. (FTOs do occasionally attack individuals who invade their countries, such as the Communist Party of Philippines’ “killing three American soldiers in four separate attacks… in 1987.” But the solution to that seems obvious, doesn’t it?) So we’ll simply have to take our rulers’ word for it when they swear that swarms of terrorists itch to murder us.

Good thing politicians never lie!

–Becky Akers

Personal Liberty

Becky Akers

is a freelance writer and historian who publishes so voluminously that whole forests of gigabytes have died. You’ve heard of some of the publications that carry her work (Personal Liberty Digest™, Christian Science Monitor, Washington Post, Barron's, New York Post); others can only wish you’d heard of them. She’s also written two novels of the American Revolution, Halestorm and Abducting Arnold. They advocate sedition and liberty, among other joys, so the wise reader will buy them now, before they’re banned.