No, I’m not going to say that terrorism doesn’t exist and that 9-11 et al. were inside jobs, because I don’t think that’s the case, but I do think that terrorism is less of an issue that they, the governments, especially of the United States, make it out to be.
Terrorism is always going to be an issue, and someone who’s determined to cause mass casualties is always going to be able to do it without arousing the suspicions of the authorities; we let pretty much anyone drive cars, which already cause plenty of fatalities in accidents, so it isn’t hard to come up with ways to intentionally kill people with them. Yet, this isn’t happening. Terrorists aren’t running down pedestrians, or burning down schools, or stabbing magistrates, or really killing a significant number of people on Western (in terms of culture, not hemisphere) soil.
The fact of the matter is that terrorists aren’t hitting us (the West, again) on home ground and you can’t just chalk that up to the vast amounts of money being spent on preventative measures—which in many cases are just shams (as recently re-demonstrated by Christopher Soghoian, whose situation got me thinking about the terrorism situation). There simply aren’t that many people out there trying to kill us in the name of terrorism.
However, it is a fantastic excuse to force draconian restrictions on the citizenry—who, as a whole, don’t seem to care that much. Certainly, they didn’t care enough to get George W. Bush out of power. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a staunch conservative or a radical socialist or anything else, when a government so terribly infringes upon your rights, you cannot accept that and you certainly cannot vote them in again and let them have another go at it.