Common Dreams
Jessica Corbett
09/11/2018
As the world marks the 17th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks, the Pentagon's latest lowball estimate of just how much the so-called War on Terror has cost Americans is making headlines—despite independent analyses that have come up with far higher figures.
"The collective wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria have cost U.S. taxpayers more than $1.5 trillion since Sept. 11, 2001," CNBC declared Monday, citing a Pentagon report (pdf) from March.
However, after Secrecy News published a copy of that report last month, Stephen Schwartz of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists compared the Department of Defense (DOD) figure with the oft-cited $5.6 trillion estimate put out last year by the "Costs of War" project at Brown University's Watson Institute of International and Public Policy.
And the National Priorities Project (NPP), though it currently estimates war spending at about $4.6 trillion since 2001, has been keeping a running tally for years:
