(TAC) It’s time to count the cost of America’s 2-decade “war on terror.”

As recently reported, the war in Afghanistan launched in the wake of the 9/11 attacks cost $2.26 trillion. That comes to over $300 million spent every single day over the span of two decades.

But that doesn’t begin to account for the total cost of the broader “war on terror.”

According to a study by the National Priorities Project at the progressive Institute for Policy Studies, the U.S. has spent $21 trillion on “militarization, surveillance, and repression,” in the years since 9/11.

Those trillions were spent to fuel the military-surveillance-police-state that has grown astronomically, fueled by the terror war since 9/11.

Of that total, the Pentagon spent about $16 trillion, including over $7 trillion for military contracts, along with an additional $3 trillion on veterans’ programs. Analysts included the Department of Defense (DoD) budget and all direct costs of war, nuclear weapons activities at the Department of Energy and elsewhere, intelligence expenses including the CIA, international military assistance, military retiree benefits and the selective service system, and smaller military-related expenses at the National Science Foundation, Maritime Administration, and other federal agencies in their calculation of military spending.

The war on terror has expanded the U.S. military footprint around the world.

“Beyond the forever wars, the U.S. military has more than 750 outposts in around 80 countries, with about 220,000 U.S. troops stationed permanently abroad as of June 2021.”

Over the last 20 year, the Pentagon handed out nearly double the amount of money to military contractors than they did in the prior two decades.

“Over the last 20 years, contractors took in more than $7.2 trillion in DoD funds, compared to only $4.7 trillion in the 20 years before that, which included the peak years of the Cold War and nuclear weapons.”

Meanwhile, domestically, the Department of Homeland Security blew through $949 billion.

This unconstitutional agency was created in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and centralized control over dozens of existing federal agencies. The study authors call the DHS “an agent of repression.”

“DHS has surveilled political groups and infiltrated communities, violently repressed protest, and waged a war on immigration, often in direct coordination with the military and other law enforcement agencies.”

Through the TSA, the Department of Homeland Security has also turned flying into a privacy nightmare, forcing passengers to stand in line in their socks, endure invasive searces complete with groping that would be deemed sexual assault in many states, and for a time, acquiesce to naked body scanners.

Federal law enforcement spent $732 billion in the last 20 years. The study authors say spending on federal law enforcement programs is relevant “because the militarization of police and the proliferation of mass incarceration both owe much to the activities and influences of federal law enforcement. The same agencies use the same militarized tactics to combat terrorism, crime, and narcotics.”

All of this money was supposedly to keep us safe from the “terrorists,” but as with all government programs, the police and surveillance state took on a life of their own.

“Twenty years later, the War on Terror has fed a sprawling security apparatus that was designed for counterterrorism but has also taken on immigration, crime, and drugs.”

Granted, many of these agencies would have spent considerable sums of money even without the War on Terror, but 2-decades of war-footing put spending on hyperdrive.

Of course, it’s impossible to calculate the loss of liberty the people have suffered do to this never-ending war. The war on terror has spilled over into the war on drugs. Militatized police have terrorized people inside their own homes because they were suspected of having a plant. Meanwhile, the U.S. government has claimed the authority to indefinitely detain American citizens on U.S. soil without due process in the name of this terror war. And the surveillance state spies on virtually every American, listening in on phone calls, accessing email and vacuuming up reams of private data without cause, much less a warrant as required by the Fourth Amendment.

As James Madison observed:

“No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”

You can’t have limited government and perpetual war. The founders understood this and created a Constitutional system to protect liberty from overreaching government. Americans have allowed the government to unfetter itself from its constitutional restraints in the name of security. And we have all paid the price. These undeclared wars have cost countless lives, trillions of dollars in treasure and have eroded our liberties here at home, just as James Madison predicted.

Source: http://www.renegadetribune.com

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5 COMMENTS

  1. "Azurite Crystal" is basically right.

    The official mainstream "wars" on this or that have been "wars" on the unsuspecting public: to keep them misinformed and misguided.

    Let's take the 'war on cancer' as an example…

    If the public were to scrutinize what the medical industry and its government pawns are telling them about the 'war on cancer' instead of blindly believing what they're saying, they'd find that the cancer industry and the cancer charities have been dismissing, ignoring, and obfuscating the true causes of cancer while mostly putting the blame for cancer on the individual, denying or dismissing the serious harms from orthodox cancer treatments and chemical toxicants, and resorting to deceptive cancer statistics to "educate" (think: mislead) the public that their way of treatment is actually successful — read this well referenced scholarly article's afterword on the war on cancer at https://www.rolf-hefti.com/mammogram.html (scroll down to the afterword that addresses the fraudulent 'war on cancer').

    The "war" on anything is almost always one big fraud, whether it is actual military war, the war on drugs, the war on poverty, or the war on cancer, because huge corporate interests are the leading motive for these "wars" instead of their officially advocated missions.

    The orthodox cancer establishment has been saying a cure for cancer "is just around the corner" and "we're winning the war on cancer" for decades. It's all hype and lies (read Dr. Guy Faguet's 'War on cancer," Dr. Sam Epstein's work, or Clifton Leaf's book, or Siefried's work on this bogus 'war'). The criminal medical establishment deliberate and falsely self-servingly claims and distorts a 'win' in the bogus 'war on cancer' when the only notably win is a reduction in lung cancer due to a huge reduction in smoking, which has nothing to do with their cancer treatments. Lying is their mode of operation.

    Since the war on cancer began orthodox medicine hasn't progressed in their basic highly profitable therapies: it still uses primarily and almost exclusively highly toxic, deadly things like radiation, chemo, surgery, and drugs that have killed millions of people instead of the disease.

    As long as the official "war on cancer" is a HUGE BUSINESS based on expensive TREATMENTS (INTERVENTIONS) of a disease instead of its PREVENTION, logically, they will never find a cure for cancer. The upcoming moonshot-war on cancer inventions, too, will include industry-profitable gene therapies of cancer treatment that are right in line with the erroneous working model of mechanistic reductionism of allopathic medicine. The lucrative game of the medical business is to endlessly "look for" a cure but not "find" a cure. Practically all resources in the phony 'war on cancer' are poured into treating cancer but almost none in the prevention of the disease. It's proof positive that big money and a total lack of ethics rule the official medical establishment.

    It's just like with any bogus official "war" ('war on drugs', 'war on terrorism', etc) — it's not about winning these wars but to primarily prolong them because behind any of these fraudulent "war" rackets of the criminal establishment is a Big Business, such as the massive cancer industry. The very profitable TREATMENT focus of conventional medicine, instead of a PREVENTION focus which these official medical quacks (or rather crooks) can hardly make any money off, is a major reason why today 1 of 2 men and 1 in 3 women can expect a cancer diagnosis at some point in their lifetimes yet that rate was multiple times lower 5 decades ago when the phony 'war on cancer' began (1 in about 16). That fact alone proves we are NOT winning the war on cancer.

    At the same time, this same orthodox cancer cartel has been suppressing and squashing a number of very effective and beneficial alternative cancer approaches. You probably guessed why: effective, safe, inexpensive cancer therapies are cutting into the astronomical profits of the medical mafia's lucrative treatments. That longstanding decadent activity is part of the fraud of the war on cancer.

    What the medical establishment "informs" the public about is about as truthful as what the political establishment keeps telling them. Not to forget, the corporate media (the mainstream fake news media) is a willing tool to spread these distortions, lies, and the scam of the war on cancer.

    Does anyone really think it's a coincidence that double Nobel laureate Linus Pauling called the 'war on cancer' a fraud? If anyone looks closer they'll come to the same conclusion. But…politics and self-serving interests of the conventional medical cartel, and their allied corporate media, keep the real truth far away from the public at large. Or people's own denial or indifference of the real truth.

  2. Dr. Fauci: “Heck, No, I Haven’t Been Vaccinated”
    By Michael Baxter from REAL RAW NEWS
    The Deep State’s primary Covid-19 vaccine peddler, Dr. Anthony Fauci, boasted to colleagues at the NIH that he has not taken and will not take the Covid jab, said a former NIH employee who claims Fauci personally fired him in June for “violating or considering to violate non-disclosure agreements” pertaining to vaccination protocols.
    Our source, who wishes to remain anonymous at this time, told Real Raw News that he’d been wrongfully terminated—unjustifiably because he never signed non-disclosure paperwork on the Institute’s Covid-19 policies. And the reason he never signed said paperwork is that he had worked for NIH’s Division of AIDS, which was largely excluded from Covid-19 plandemic response meetings and vaccine development.
    For ease of reading, RRN will refer to our source as Brian Stowers. RRN has vetted Stowers’ education and employment history, and we found no reason to believe he had a vendetta against Fauci or that he would engage in deception; his credentials seemed unimpeachable. As a Level 2 lab technician, his primary duty at the NIH was spinning blood through a centrifuge and passing results to his superiors. Nothing glamorous.
    Although he had no exposure to Covid-19 data, he had been exposed to Dr. Anthony Fauci’s hubris and overbearing presence.
    “At least once a week, Fauci made rounds through the departments. He liked to stick his nose in everyone’s business, belittle and ridicule people for no good reason. Anyway, on February 15, 2021, about two months after the FDA gave emergency use authorization to Pfizer’s vaccine, Fauci strolls into our department and tells us that we ought to encourage our friends and family to get vaccinated at the earliest possible date. But he tells us lab workers—there were about 9 in the lab at that moment—to delay getting vaccinated until, as he put it, ‘we see what happens,’” Stowers said.
    A long, uncomfortable silence followed Fauci’s statement, our source added.
    According to him, one lab worker asked Fauci why the vaccine was safe for friends and family but not for NIH employees.
    “Fauci’s face turned red. He was clearly angered by the question. He started berating us, telling us we weren’t qualified to question his judgement. If we didn’t follow his guidance, we’d be jeopardizing the health of our friends and family, Fauci told us. He was on a tirade for like 5 minutes, and cussing like a sailor,” Stowers said.
    Then Stowers asked Fauci, respectfully, whether he had been vaccinated.
    “What kind of question is that? Not that it’s any business of yours, but, no, heck no, I haven’t been vaccinated. And I don’t plan to be, at least not for a long time, if at all…If I take the vaccine and get sick from it, then what? I’m too important here to take that risk. You all are, too—that’s why I’m telling you to wait. But you can be replaced; I’m irreplaceable. The administration needs me to helm this response,” Fauci reportedly said.
    Four months later, unexpectedly, Stowers received a termination letter claiming he had violated the Institute’s confidentiality clause. The notice bore Fauci’s handwritten signature.
    “I knew fighting would be pointless. I got 6-month’s severance package and figured that would be enough to hold me until I found new work, and I have,” Stowers said.
    In closing, Stowers said Fauci never wore a mask inside NIH facilities, only when, in Fauci’s words, “outsiders and interlopers and media” were nearby.
    Real Raw News

  3. Let me tell you my true story.

    Truth be told, 35/40 years ago, I was so mentally destroyed from my last marriage breakdown, the second and last one, that I wanted to commit suicide and as it turns out, I am a jumper from the top of high buildings and on the run in to jumping off and killing myself, just before I launched myself into eternity, I had an out of body experience – for want of a better explanation, a cone of light and silence descended over me and a voice came into my head and said “there is nothing wrong with you physically, this is all financial” and I stopped, turned around and walked away and that is the only reason I am still here today.

    15 years ago, roughly, I went with the female friend who I was caring for (part time paid carer), to a convention about fortune telling and other “weird” things that women generally believe in and while I was there we saw a guy doing Aura photos and both my friend and I, had ours done.

    Now, everyone has a motivation to their own cause, but I have never explained mine, so here goes.

    My Aura photo was 90% Gold and 10% Purple and when I looked at the card which came with my photo, there was nothing about Gold on it, so I had to inquire what Gold meant and I was told that Gold was nearest to perfection – that was 15 years ago.

    I decided then, that I wanted to be 100% Gold and I would do everything I could in life, to benefit others, to achieve my 100% Gold rating before I die and that is my motivation to push my free salt water cure for Covid, in the hope that I can save more than I lose, to vaccines.

    I have always had an easy connection with all animals, they take to me like, just like that and I personally think that they can see the Aura’s we each give out and determine if we are good or bad instinctively – I am an “animal whisperer”.

    So to Covid.

    Biden and newspapers have got the majority of you running around in confusion and the more confused you get, the easier it is to control you and have you do their bidding = vaccines.

    There is only one issue you should keep in mind to the exclusion of all else and that is Covid and how to avoid getting it – nothing else matters.

    Do my free salt water cure, stay on that, don’t get pulled or pushed away from my simple cure and live a long life, without any of the pressures to conform to the majority rule and vaccines – it is as simple as that:

    The Achilles Heel of Coronavirus, is while it is still in the developing stage as Coronavirus/Covid in the warm, wet areas inside the nasal passages of your head (nose) and before it gets to become Covid in your head and lungs, 10 to 14 days later.
    If Coronavirus is not treated with my free iodine salt clean water cure to flush out your nasal passages, as soon as possible, or during self isolation, it becomes Covid, which is where the money is.
    You cannot catch Covid! Always breathe through your nose and keep your mouth shut, because you really don't want the Coronavirus to seed itself in your lungs!!
    My free salt water cure has "absolutely nothing" to do with 40 trillion lipid packages of graphene and mRNA test vaccines you get with one shot.
    Treating Coronavirus with my free iodine salt clean water cure, flushes out the nasal cavity and kills Coronavirus, before it gets to be Covid, irrespective of if you have had mRNA vaccines or not.
    Mix one heaped teaspoon of iodine salt in a mug of warm or cold clean water, cup a hand and pour some of the solution in, then sniff or snort that mugful up into your nose, spitting out everything which comes down into your mouth, by so doing, you flush out your nasal cavity, where Coronavirus lives.
    If you get a burning sensation (which lasts for 2-3 minutes) then you have a Coronavirus infection.
    When the soreness goes away, blow out your head with toilet paper and flush away, washing your hands afterwards and continue doing my salt clean water nasal cavity flush cure, morning, noon and night, or more often, if you want, until, when you do my free salt water cure, you don't experience any soreness at all in your nasal cavity.
    While you are at it, swallow a couple of mouthfuls and if you get a burning sensation in your chest, then you are killing the Covid/Bronchitis there too, so keep it up, each time you do a salt water sniffle, until the soreness in your head and lungs goes away – job done.
    Pour some of the solution on a flat surface and allow to dry and see what you have then. This is what coats the nasal passages in your head and kills Coronavirus/Covid off. You can see why it is so effective. This is what I have done for the past 27 years and I am NEVER ill, nor do you need to be either.
    Please pass it around to everyone who wants to give it a try.
    "Even so, a key issue is that the current vaccines block severe disease but do not prevent infection, said Dr. Gregory Poland, a vaccine scientist at the Mayo Clinic. That is because the virus is still capable of replicating in the nose, even among vaccinated people, who can then transmit the disease through tiny, aerosolized droplets" Reuters – what my free salt water cure stops.
    He added that “Current vaccines are great at preventing [CO1] serious infection deep in the lungs, but not at blocking infection in the upper airways. What's needed is a nasal-spray (vaccine) that would stop the coronavirus from taking hold at all.” – what my free salt water cure does and stops.
    No soreness when you do it, it feels like you are flushing your head with water, if you get sore reaction, you have a virus so deal with it, exactly as I have described above – did a sniffle today – Me, all OK!!
    We all need a cure which works instead of these vaccines, when you get a Coronavirus infection – now you have one.
    Do not use saline water bought online, use iodine based kitchen or sea salt, it is the iodine in the salt, which kills Coronavirus dead and by cupping a hand and pouring some of the salt water from the mug in and sniffing or snorting the lot up your nose, it flushes all of your nasal passages out, including around the brain bulb and brain stem, so no “Long Covid” for you.
    More to the point, try it on anyone with a Coronavirus infection and see what happens to the virus and how quickly it is killed in the nasal passages of the head. No Coronavirus, no Covid it would otherwise become. – Simple
    Help me save your life, so that you can help me achieve my 100% Gold Aura status, then win/win for all of us.
    Keep safe – Richard (smile)

  4. Extremely Urgent : August 31, 2021
    The WHO has been replaced by the "Global Health And Wellness Consortium"
    Effective immediately All Covid Vaccines Must be destroyed as they have been deemed
    Biological Waste/Weapons . Please view Ratified in the Hall of Records Order to Cease and
    desist Immediatly Covid Vaccines . and also Cures for Covid/Corona Virus
    Anyone continuing to administer Vaccines Will be held accountable in their personal and
    Professional Names On a Civil And Criminal Basis.
    Please Forward in Your City , State, Country to all Doctors, Hospitals , Pharmacies, Police Officers,State Governments, Militaries, News Media , Business's , Lawyers and all other's involved in promoting or administering Covid Vaccines. It is now Illegal
    Please Print the Cease and Desist order and give to any law enforcement unaware.

    https://pgovsd.agency/wp-content/uploads/fluentform/ff-f4092188a84f1bb0ddb0039df5ee4d66-ff-Clear-Global-Health-and-Wellness-orders.pdf

  5. These wars are nothing more than money grabs
    Every kinetic war is about power and money, mostly getting nations to set up central banks for the British Pilgrims to control.
    War on Cancer, same.
    War on Drugs? Same
    War on climate change? Same
    Its all funneling US tax payer money to globalist elites and nothing more.
    Getting opium to overdose American citizens on was the only accomplishment that came out of the 20 year Afghan war
    Now the US stepped aside so China can take all their mineral resources
    Trillions in precious minerals

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