Skip to content

The Permanent Anti-Terrorism State

Ted Koppel: “At home, the U.S. has constructed an antiterrorism enterprise so immense, so costly and so inexorably interwoven with the defense establishment, police and intelligence agencies, communications systems, and with social media, travel networks and their attendant security apparatus, that the idea of downsizing, let alone disbanding such a construct, is an exercise in futility.”

“Will terrorists kill innocent civilians in the years to come? Of course… The challenge that confronts us is how we will live with that threat. We have created an economy of fear, an industry of fear, a national psychology of fear. Al Qaeda could never have achieved that on its own. We have inflicted it on ourselves.”

Crossposted from Wonk Wire.

Recent Stories

House panel wants anti-drone systems at US defense facilities

Straight talk about the ‘big, beautiful bill’

UN agencies in dire straits amid threatened US funding cuts

Lawmakers applaud resumption of US military aid to Ukraine

Supreme Court allows Trump mass layoffs to move forward

Trump slams Putin, touts self-made tariff deals and muses on gold leaf