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Aff—Non-Unique: No Terror Threat



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Aff—Non-Unique: No Terror Threat

Terrorism isn’t an existential threat – Obama confirms, intelligence hasn’t found any terrorists


Mueller and Stewart 15 (John Mueller and Mark Stewart, professor of political science at Ohio State University and engineer and risk analyst at the University of Newcastle in Australia, 2-24-2015, "Terrorism poses no existential threat to America. We must stop pretending otherwise," Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/24/terrorism-poses-no-existential-threat-to-america)//MJ
One of the most unchallenged, zany assertions during the war on terror has been that terrorists present an existential threat to the United States, the modern state and civilization itself. This is important because the overwrought expression, if accepted as valid, could close off evaluation of security efforts. For example, no defense of civil liberties is likely to be terribly effective if people believe the threat from terrorism to be existential. At long last, President Barack Obama and other top officials are beginning to back away from this absurd position. This much overdue development may not last, however. Extravagant alarmism about the pathological but self-destructive Islamic State (Isis) in areas of Syria and Iraq may cause us to backslide. The notion that international terrorism presents an existential threat was spawned by the traumatized in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Rudy Giuliani, mayor of New York at the time, recalls that all “security experts” expected “dozens and dozens and multiyears of attacks like this” and, in her book The Dark Side, Jane Mayer observed that “the only certainty shared by virtually the entire American intelligence community” was that “a second wave of even more devastating terrorist attacks on America was imminent”. Duly terrified, US intelligence services were soon imaginatively calculating the number of trained al-Qaida operatives in the United States to be between 2,000 and 5,000. Also compelling was the extrapolation that, because the 9/11 terrorists were successful with box-cutters, they might well be able to turn out nuclear weapons. Soon it was being authoritatively proclaimed that atomic terrorists could “destroy civilization as we know it” and that it was likely that a nuclear terrorist attack on the United States would transpire by 2014. No atomic terrorists have yet appeared (al-Qaida’s entire budget in 2001 for research on all weapons of mass destruction totaled less than $4,000), and intelligence has been far better at counting al-Qaida operatives in the country than at finding them. But the notion that terrorism presents an existential threat has played on. By 2008, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff declared it to be a “significant existential” one - carefully differentiating it, apparently, from all those insignificant existential threats Americans have faced in the past. The bizarre formulation survived into the Obama years. In October 2009, Bruce Riedel, an advisor to the new administration, publicly maintained the al-Qaida threat to the country to be existential. In 2014, however, things began to change. In a speech at Harvard in October, Vice President Joseph Biden offered the thought that “we face no existential threat – none – to our way of life or our ultimate security.” After a decent interval of three months, President Barack Obama reiterated this point at a press conference, and then expanded in an interview a few weeks later, adding that the US should not “provide a victory to these terrorist networks by over-inflating their importance and suggesting in some fashion that they are an existential threat to the United States or the world order.” Later, his national security advisor, Susan Rice, echoed the point in a formal speech. It is astounding that these utterances – “blindingly obvious” as security specialist Bruce Schneier puts it – appear to mark the first time any officials in the United States have had the notion and the courage to say so in public. Whether that development, at once remarkable and absurdly belated, will have some consequence, or even continue, remains to be seen. Senators John McCain and Lindsay Graham have insisted for months that Isis presents an existential threat to the United States. An alarmed David Brooks reported that financial analysts have convinced themselves that the group has the potential to generate a worldwide “economic cataclysm.” And General Michael Flynn, recently retired as head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, has been insisting that the terrorist enemy is “committed to the destruction of freedom and the American way of life” while seeking “world domination, achieved through violence and bloodshed.” It was reported that his remarks provoked nods of approval, cheers and “ultimately a standing ovation” from the audience. Thus even the most modest imaginable effort to rein in the war on terror hyperbole may fail to gel.

Terrorist threats overblown – terrorists only have regional interests


Norton-Taylor 14 (Richard, writer for The Guardian on defense and security and former security editor, “Islamist terror threat to west blown out of proportion – former M16 chief,” The Gaurdian, 7-7-14, http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/jul/07/islamist-terror-threat-out-proportion-former-mi6-chief-richard-dearlove)//MJ
The government and media have blown the Islamist terrorism threat out of proportion, giving extremists publicity that is counter-productive, a former head of Britain's intelligence service has said. Sir Richard Dearlove, chief of MI6 at the time of the Iraq invasion, said that Britons spreading "blood-curdling" messages on the internet should be ignored. He told an audience in London on Monday there had been a fundamental change in the nature of Islamist extremism since the Arab spring. It had created a major political problem in the Middle East but the west, including Britain, was only "marginally affected". Unlike the threat posed by al-Qaida before and in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks 13 years ago, the west was not the main target of the radical fundamentalism that created Isis, (the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant), Dearlove said. Addressing the Royal United Services Institute, the London-based security and defence thinktank, he said the conflict was "essentially one of Muslim on Muslim". He made it clear he believed the way the British government and the media were giving the extremists the "oxygen of publicity" was counter-productive. The media were making monsters of "misguided young men, rather pathetic figures" who were getting coverage "more than their wildest dreams", said Dearlove, adding: "It is surely better to ignore them." The former MI6 chief, now master of Pembroke College, Cambridge University, was speaking to a prepared text hours after the ITV programme Good Morning Britain broadcast an interview with a Briton who had appeared in an Isis video saying he was recruited through the internet and was prepared to die for his cause. Abdul Raqib Amin, who was brought up in Aberdeen, appeared in an online video last month with two men from Cardiff urging western Muslims to join the fighting with Isis. He told Good Morning Britain: "I left the UK to fight for the sake of Allah, to give everything I have for the sake of Allah. One of the happiest moments in my life was when the plane took off from Gatwick airport. I was so happy, as a Muslim you cannot live in the country of kuffars [non-believers]."Amin added: "I left the house with the intention not to go back, I'm going to stay and fight until the khilafah [rule of Islam] is established or I die." Dearlove said he was concerned about the influence of the media on the government's security policy. It was time to take what he called a "more proportionate approach to terrorism". MI5, MI6, and GCHQ devoted a greater share of their resources to countering Islamist fundamentalism than they did to the Soviet Union during the cold war, or to Irish terrorism that had cost the lives of more UK citizens and British soldiers than al-Qaida had done, Dearlove noted. A massive reaction after the 9/11 attacks was inevitable, he said, but it was not inevitable the 2001 attacks would continue to "dominate our way of thinking about national security". There had been a "fundamental change" in the nature of the threat posed by Islamist extremists. Al-Qaida had largely failed to mount the kind of attacks in the US and UK it had threatened after 9/11. It was time, he said to move away from the "distortion" of the post-9/11 mindset, make "realistic risk assessments" and think rationally about the causes of the crisis in the Middle East.


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