Originally Posted by
cardiomd
[Snipped for brevity...]The 9/11 student pilots were pretty obvious by today's standards and poor students, but were still largely ignored. Pilot background checks will be a bit more thorough nowadays, and people will be more likely to report "suspicious" pilots, but there are far too many trainees and junior pilots for this sort of thing to be perfectly reliable. Having a sympathetic pilot or two somewhere in America would be quite valuable to a terrorist organization.
Argh. Terrorist "organizations" are mostly loosely affiliated groups of wackjobs whose particular brand of wackotude happens to be similar. The idea that al Qaeda is some vast, global, well-organized, well-funded, well-trained paramilitary organization akin to SPECTRE* is simply not so; it stems from the American arrogance that "no little group of loonies could have pulled off something as complex as 9/11 right under the noses of the smartest, coolest, badest-assed country on Earth! They MUST be some sort of super-duper terrorist Legion of Doom, with resources all over the world!" Nope. Simply not true.
The sad truth is that small terrorist groups (I refuse to call them "cells" because that implies that they're small parts of a huge network, like the French Resistance or the Bieber Fan Club) are perfectly capable of pulling off large, well-planned, successful attacks. In fact, they're much more likely to be successful. You see, everybody knows that the best way to keep a secret is to NOT TELL EVERYBODY, so the more people you have in your al Qaeda Local Lodge #578, the more likely you are to have one of them get cheesed off that he wasn't elected Grand Poobah or given the keys to the Mystery Machine, and either split the group or go squeal to the FBI out of spite.
Besides, 9/11 wasn't nearly as complex as we like to think. Sure, it wasn't easy, but the hardest part of the whole plan was finding 20 guys who were both crazy enough to kill themselves and not stupid enough to go postal in the terminal and give the whole thing away before they got off the ground. Coordination? One guy picks four flights and buys 20 tickets. Timing? Heck, the AIRLINES took care of the timing on 9/11 - the flights were all scheduled. Precision? Well, there I have to hand it to the hijackers; 75% of them were able to hijack the planes, find their targets, and fly the planes into them. I don't doubt that, had the passengers on United 93 not rebelled and been within a hair's breadth of re-taking the plane, it would have hit its intended target, as well. But I have to give as much credit to the flight instructors in Florida who unwittingly taught the hijackers their air navigation skills, as I do to the hijackers themselves.
Basically, although there is danger, and there are nutbars out there who want to kill us, the threat is so wildly overblown by paranoia that we've put ourselves back into a never-ending Cold War that will eventually lead us to destroy ourselves, or the rest of the world to step in and put an end to the madness.
All of this has happened before. All of it will happen again. And when it happens, it's never pretty.