Over half of Americans believe the CIA's extreme interrogation methods were justified; less than 30% came out in opposition to using torture. Terroristic violence is not a new phenomenon, and neither are the vicious methods used by the state to try and stop it. Hundreds of years of this cycle later and we are no closer to stopping terrorism of any kind.

I am curious to see the hundreds of years of cyclical data that supports such an assertion.

It is no assertion to say terrorism is a new phenomenon, and by way of any given day's news headlines, neither is it controversial to say we aren't any closer to 'ending' it. Anarchist terrorism plagued the United States and Europe for decades in the 19th and into the early 20th century. Russia alone suffered 20,000 anarchist attacks during the movement's run, leading to the rise of international policing and state intelligence sharing as we know it today. Richard Bach Jensen's piece on the International Campaign Against Anarchist Terrorism shows just how parallel our modern thinking is with the struggles of the authorities and the state during that period. With the state terror - nonstate terror back-and-forth throughout decolonization and New Left terror that occurred between anarchy and Islamist terrorism, we can see quite evidently that safety against all terror is and has been a delusion that drives states to paranoiac behavior that runs contrary to its belief systems and values.