Daily Kos: 'Forget the "Terrorism" Crusade!' The Toll on 9/11 Was Tiny

June 15th, 2013 7:15 AM

In the wake of the new leaks about NSA surveillance, the Daily Kos wants the entire War on Terrorism repealed as a vast violation of American civil liberties.

Terrorism, scherrorism, says "Letsgetitdone." We lose many more Americans due to "gun violence" and the "lack of health insurance," so losing 3,000 people on 9/11 is just a smear on the national windshield:

[W]e need to ask: “why don't we have any sense of proportion about terrorism?” OK, 9/11 was terrible. We lost more than 3,000 people. Since then, we have lost very few people to terrorism, apart from fatalities due to our own choices to prosecute wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other places. But right now we lose more than 30,000 to auto accidents, more than 30,000 to domestic gun violence, and 55,000 to lack of health insurance, each and every year....

Forget the “terrorism” crusade! Let's prosecute actual crimes committed against us and use normal police and intelligence work to prevent them or catch the people who commit them. Sure we'll lose some people. I in no way minimize that fact. But not nearly as much every year as we lose to lack of health insurance, the auto, or gun violence right now.

So, let's pay the cost in lives and reconstruction if need be, and get back to normal American freedoms guaranteed by our constitution! Get rid of the Department of Homeland Security! Stop persecuting whistle blowers like Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden, and John Kiriakou, and journalists like Julian Assange...

Show our elected officials that they can't violate the constitution with impunity and expect us to just accept that. Make every one who voted for the Patriot Act, and other unconstitutional measures, pay with their jobs and political careers. Elect new people who will not only repeal the legislation, but impeach the judges, and people in the Executive Branch, who supported these policies.

This was cross-posted from the blog CorrenteWire, which carried this fruitcake item:

Price of CIA’s bin Laden ‘Glory Killing’: 100,000 Polio Cases

In “Chomsky: The Boston Bombings Gave Americans a Taste of the Terrorism the U.S. Inflicts Abroad Every Day,” Mr. Chomsky quotes a Columbia University health scientist, Leslie Roberts, who estimated that the fake vaccination program used by the CIA in Pakistan to hunt down bin Laden may cause as many as 100,000 global cases of polio.