interesting jumpstart to the conversation here:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-dao ... 06445.html

Are Deaths From Terrorism Qualitatively/Morally Different?

The establishment approach to counter-terrorism is based on an implicit assumption that there is a fundamental difference between the death and destruction caused by terrorist attacks and that caused by crime, hunger, disease and other such threats.

This unspoken assumption is used to justify the suspension of rules and standards that are employed when dealing with other causes of death and injury. And it explains a disproportionate urgency in contending with a single existential threat over others (global warming, environmental degradation, poverty, gun violence, etc.).

UNICEF's State of the World's Children 2008 says that "every day, on average, more than 26,000 children under the age of five die around the world, mostly from preventable causes." Would we -- should we -- suspend basic ethical principles and sidestep the rule of law to address this catastrophe? Do we hear major speeches and breathless news reports about this ongoing tragedy?

MADD tells us that "on average someone is killed by a drunk driver every 40 minutes. In 2007, an estimated 12,998 people died in drunk driving related crashes..." Would we -- should we -- utilize indefinite detention, torture, and other violations of constitutional principles to solve the problem?

The same holds true for dozens of other threats. For example: "A woman is battered every 8 to 10 seconds in the United States (3-4 million times per year). As many as 17% of adult pregnant women are battered. The number of teenagers that battered during pregnancy may be as high as 21%." Do we create secret prisons and 'enhanced' interrogation tactics to deal with the perpetrators? Should we? Do we obsess about it the way we do about a flu epidemic or a nationally televised song contest?

My point is not that we shouldn't do everything possible to prevent terrorism and to punish terrorists -- it's that we should do so with no greater urgency and no less adherence to the law than we do other forms of deadly violence and preventable death. And if anything, I'm arguing that we should do more about the problems listed above, not less about terrorism.

I'm sympathetic to the assertion that preventing death from violence should be a top priority, reasoning that "the decision by an individual or group of individuals to destroy or inflict damage on others, to rob them of their freedom, to strip them of their dignity, to dehumanize them, is fundamentally worse than any other mortal threat we face. Violence is an affront to our souls, a stain on our humanity." Still, I don't understand why we should have laxer laws and ethics for dealing with one kind of murder over another, simply because the murderer had a different reason to carry out his/her crime. Nor do I comprehend why the terrible things done to people in America and across the globe should elicit less of a focus than terrorism.

Every new day on this lonely planet brings a fresh litany of horrors: children raped and beaten and hacked to death, women abused, people dying of starvation and preventable diseases, innocent people thrown in prison and forgotten, the earth poisoned and polluted.

Over a million people lose their lives to violence and millions more are injured and maimed every year. Death and injury by terrorist attack is no more horrific than a young girl being stoned to death in Somalia (for being raped) or a baby being thrown out of a car window in Florida. We need to handle both issues with the appropriate alarm and with the same sense of justice and fealty to the rule of law. We must do away with the flawed notion that combating terrorism requires a unique set of guidelines -- that somehow deaths from terrorism are qualitatively/morally different.

Violence and preventable death in all forms should be our utmost priority and we should do everything we can, within the law and within the parameters of basic decency and morality, to bring an end to them.

Didn't you work as a journalist? Can you not answer this question for yourself?

Sensationalism = $

$ = Prosperity

Prosperity = Power

Fuck with a nation's perceived power and you fuck with the only thing it has.

Result = defense at all costs

Simple.

but the other causes of violence don't require to spend billions on defence and intelligence.. how would those boys live? and the representatives and officials get their lucrative after-office jobs?

A drunk driver would struggle to wipe out three thousand people in one event.

Far less than 26,000 children die from preventable causes in the US or UK every day.

yeah because who gives a shit about little children dying if they're not white little children.

I don't have any evidence but I should imagine that the victims of the London bombings reflected a fairly broad cross section of society.

Actually, this has been topic of discussion at every vaccine conference that I've ever been to. I think that the author is fundamentally wrong. The issue is one of scale, not moral outrage. How can large-scale death that can be traced to a single, well-defined cause be averted? The fact that thousands of people died in a single terrorist attack on 9/11 made our officials and the public believe that this was the case. Clearly terrorism is a more complex issue than the government at the time believed. Epidemic control is not, though. I think that it was misguided of the author to make light of that. If the swine flu had been as deadly and as infectious as the 1918 pandemic strain, then quarantine measures, including restricting the free movement of individuals, would save many lives. One of the reasons that the 1918 pandemic killed so many people was the hesitancy of public officials to institute proper public health procedures for fear of alarming the public. Other issues such as global warming, environmental degradation, even poverty have multiple causes, and there is disagreement even among experts on how best to deal with them. Yes, we could do more, and not doing enough may be a moral failing, but it's not an indication that we believe that some deaths have greater moral weight than others.

yes they were but I was talking about the second part of your comment... we shouldn't care 26,000 children die every day because those children are in Africa or Asia rather than in NY or London?

they would if they had the money to, terrorism is just the cash crop for security at the moment

I see the deaths on 9/11 as morally different than a child who died of Malaria in Africa.

still?

That's so cool that people have no concept of what "initiation of force" means anymore.

Yes. One is revenge and ideologically driven murder, one is callousness. The people who were killed on 9/11 also had the capacity to help the other group, but that capacity (and most national motivation to act) was removed with the attack. I can appreicate the author's argument that increasing spending on humanitarian causes by a tiny fraction of what is spent fighting terrorism could save more lives than airport scanners. I get that. I just think the immediate threat to our ability to help others in future must be addressed. It's like in a depressurising airplane when you must put on your own oxygen mask first before helping others. A nuked DC cannot allocate more funding to help Africa.

I feel I must mention that I consider the lives of most of those who died on 9/11 as more vauable to humanity than a sick child in the African desert, so that may be clouding my judgement.

Totally different argument, but who "initiated force" is a subject of debate. Some might go so far as to say that America's neglecting the world's impoverished was a major motivating factor behind 9/11, and that the act of denying assistance constituted use of force.

Why do you think that?

I haven't responded to this thread, nor have I felt the desire or need to respond, based on the fact that I think the opening article is poorly written and full of shit, so to speak. Not really deserving of discussion.

I'd like to say something about contributing to the advancement of humanity or the futility of prolonging life without at the same time providing a structure for ecnomic and social development, but if I'm honest with myself, I think it comes down to ingrained nationalism and the fact that I was inside the WTC the weekend before it happened and it could have be me. So, pride and fear is the final answer.

Wow, you're brutally honest.

If you had gone the contributing to humanity route, I was ready to rip you a new one.

i think our government has a greater responsibility to protect its own citizens than other citizens, but as for deaths as a whole, i feel that every human is born with the same inherent value to their life and therefore i can't discriminate that one death is worse than another except along fairly strong moral lines, such as if one has killed another (not universally but in general murder situations), then i feel less compassion for them in death than i'd feel for an innocent bystander killed to at least some degree. that might be a little unclear how i said that though..

anyway, the point of my post is that for the most part i don't think the lives of any group are any more valuable than the lives of any other group, but that doesn't change that i might be more affected or have a stronger feeling for 3000 americans killed or a relative or friend dying. but i think that's a different issue than what's being discussed here.

I'll go down that route. Starving children in africa are unlikely to do anything but breed more starving children in their teen years, and probably die from AIDS at some point in their 20s or early 30s. Even if they don't die from AIDS, they will contribute to the too-large population of Africa which, if it begins to industrialize like India has, will have a catastrophic effect on the environment.

The people that died in the WTC probably had a relatively large percentage of professionals who would most likely contribute far more to society in their lifetimes than 10 times their number of starving african children.

That was hasty, but I'd love to hear your argument.