GUWonder

I doubt many small attacks or one, a few or many big ones would cause America to "withdraw" -- short of any near total biological or nuclear holocaust type scenario "going live" and being seen as a real possibility on a national scale. [It's just not a way people react when they believe they have military superiority and it's not a way political leaders find to be a marketable approach to the majority.] This scenario of a near-total/total national-scale holocaust is not currently realizable by non-state actors. And no state actor with such potential resources -- even 10 years from now -- is going to gamble without a belief that it can take out the other player in one quick blow with no possibility for trace back when off-shore second strike capability exists at certain levels.

OBL, according to his own sons, knows that America won't withdraw due to pressure from outside forces. OBL's only hope is that the US goes the way of the Soviet Union by following a path of imperial hubiris and overstretch that leaves it no choice but to withdraw. His sons know that he believes that to be the only way to have his objectives advanced in any realistic fashion.

Teacher49

I understand your points. However America has had a history of periods of isolationism even when it was one of the strongest and richest countries. I cannot see that America would ever admit to being cowed, but I can imagine that ceasless attacks of the sort that Israel has experienced might cause a reevaluation of where resources are most needed.

In the end, it is all conjecture and I hope we never find out what America's repsonse would be to more attacks.

Doppy

So this would mean the lack of attack on 9/10/01 meant that Al Qaeda didn't have the resources/capacity to carry out an attack.

But quite the opposite was true: the attack required years of planning to get right. Thus, I don't buy the "lack of attack = no future danger" line of thinking.

Doppy

How is Schneier an "alarmist"? He advocates not being afraid and thinking rationally about the issues, such as recognizing that there is a level of risk that we just have to live with. The alarmists are the ones who say we need a police state because we're all going to get blown up imminently otherwise.

While it would be an awful tragedy, wouldn't we be better off getting on with our lives than sitting at home brooding about the attack all day?

But just above you were complaining that a shopping mall attack wouldn't generate a sufficient level of fear?

The tiny amount of oil in ANWR will have almost no impact on our energy security, or global energy security. All that money invested in future technologies could, however.

Dovster

Agreed. In general, Al Qaeda uses a different strategy than does, for example, Hamas.

Hamas will send out a poorly-trained person with instructions to blow himself up wherever he can find a good target. It will do this repeatedly, hoping that every so often one will succeed.

Al Qaeda does not follow this pattern. It prefers increasing its chances of success by using well-trained members and careful planning. At the same time, it has specific targets (and very often multiple, related, targets for simultaneous attacks).

GUWonder

Al-Qaeda doesn't routinely or always use well-trained members and careful planning. It's got people like Richard Reid and Moussaoui. (They were actually to be used by a KSM-contact and some in the ISI know that well.)

Teacher49

We differ only in degree. I did not mean to suggest that such an attack or smaller ones will NEVER occur. I am saying that the danger is way overblown. If terrorists and terrorism was as ubiquitous as the amount of our resources and thinking and rhetoric devoted to them would suggest, then we would be having these attack NOW and many of them.


I believer that we will see attempts every once in a while. I come back to an old line of reasoning: if we lose 3,000 to an attack every ten years while in the same period we lose 500,000 to auto accidents - manyh of them preventable - yet we devote an insignificant amount of our resources to that prevention as compared to the on-going panic about "terrorism", then something is awry in the way we are thinking. And of course we don't lose 3,000 people to terror every ten years while we do lose 500,000 to traffic fatalities.

I pick traffic fatalities just as a generic examples of problems that we face that are more real and present than the danger of terror attack. I don't want to get bogged down in a point for point comparison of the phenomena. Pick another: cancer, SIDs, drug abuse, untreated mental illness....

FWAAA

Your post is an excellent discussion of the benefits of risk management and the failure of risk avoidance. Unfortunately, the morons in our government at all levels (take your pick - I don't mean this a political swipe at any one person or party) only know risk avoidance. So we check several hundred million shoes each year, even though it's obvious that none of them feature a shoe bomb. We invent new machinery (puffers) to search pax bodies for nonexistent bombs. The list goes on and on.

The attacks of September 11 were a success (from the standpoint of the terrorists) because the crews and passengers of the first three airplanes didn't predict the end result. Nobody at the government (which held Moussoui in custody at the time) told the airlines not to turn over the controls to hijackers. Nobody told the airlines to really resist a hijacking.

The attacks of September 11 had nothing to do with the airport security checkpoints or the items permitted in carryons. Yet that's now our focus. Everyone is a potential terrorist and must be "cleared" to ensure they have no pocketknife nor other prohibited item. To the tune of billions and billions of dollars.

Yes, there are still terrorists. But they aren't as numerous as our leaders claimed on September 11 nor are they all that numerous now. Yet every trip to the airport reminds us that "Everyone is a terrorist and might have a shoe bomb.

We even now resort to killing mentally ill passengers after we claim they said the word "bomb" during the boarding of their flight home. And far too many people give the ^ ^ to that tragedy.

Doppy

I agree with this. I think we need to put most of our terrorist money into preventing the really catostrophic attacks. Nuclear (regular or "dirty"), for example. Critical infrastructure.

whirledtraveler

I don't know if anyone's thought of this one, but it's such a stretch, I don't think it's bad to mention it. What if terrorists have plastic explosives surgically implanted in their bodies. I don't know if any detection scheme could find that short of x-ray.

FWAAA

eyecue has repeatedly posted that surgical implantation of plastic explosives would result in nearly immediate death (like that's really a problem?) - so fast, in fact, that a human bomb would die before the body could be detonated in a target-rich environment. I'm not certain he's correct.

Additionally, I'm not certain that it could be adequately shielded to prevent ETD detection.

GUWonder

Sort of thought of a long time ago, but not as surgically implanted but rectally ported. Plastic explosives that came into Pakistan on a flight from the US (VA to be specific) in 1996/1997 that Panalpina had paperwork for found its way into India by this method.

Anything drug couriers are willing to do can be done by terrorists too.

Teacher49

According to a Columbian movie. "Maria Full of Grace," cocaine is muled via compressed tube enclosed in rubber or latex sheaths and swallowed and which, if they burst in the gut, mean certain death.

Bags of silicone and saline are routinely inserted behind the breast -- why not plastique?

FWAAA

Excellent point. Perhaps the explosive could itself be encapsulated within some silicone? Even assuming that eyecue is correct (that explosives are highly toxic), wouldn't that likely protect the suicide bomber long enough to wreak their terror?

Doppy

If the contention that the bomb material would be quickly fatal is correct, I don't think that getting an "explosive" boob job and then getting on a plane sounds too feasible. Typically one is not in particularly good shape for at least a day or two after surgery.