Originally Posted by PatrickHenry1775
Before the summer of 2001, who would have thought that terrorists would hijack airliners and use them as guided missiles to crash into office buildings?
Actually, there was another spy thriller by Tom Clancy which used this very scenario. It was published in 1996.
Executive Orderr was the title.
Originally Posted by PatrickHenry1775
Many terrorists generally are creative, they tend to think outside the box. On the other hand, TSA/DHS appears to merely react. One goofball tried to light shoe bombs, so now TSA runs the shoe carnival. Two Chechen "Black Widows" bombed two airliners, so TSA gropes women.
The hallmark of guerrillas is their ability to be unpredictable, and nimble enough to change strategy 180' - and then change again and again. The "let's close the barn door now that the horse has bolted" mentality is one that they can count on since large organizations find it hard not to get bogged down in layers of relatively paralyzing accountability - usually metamorphosing into CYA .
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Originally Posted by PatrickHenry1775
The obsession with airports means that terrorists are likely to strike targets that are less guarded. My guess is ports, but possibly also refineries. Perhaps some of the facilities just south of Philadelphia on the Delaware River. This would fit the recent template of a spectacular strike in a large population center. The fact that oil is involved would cause economic uncertainty, to say the least, and would be an additional benefit of such an attack.
I wish I could remember the name of the trashy-pass-the-time-on-an airplane book that I read in the past 4 months that had this exact scenario. It involved the smuggling of nuclear device into the country and then using the inland waterway to maneuver it into the north east.
I have been saying since 9/12 that we are unlikely to see a well organized attack just like the last one. It has always been clear that CYA and attempts to calm the lowest common denominator of public fear is behind the billions we spend on "security" at airports.
To that extent, the terrorists won something very significant.
But it goes farther. We
know that attacks on rail and public transit are alternate methodologies. The explosion in the Paris Metro, the London underground, the attempt in Spain. Heck, during the day of the Red Brigade, arms needed only to be smuggled into the ticket concourse of an airport to create a horrible slaughter. To this day anyone with an Uzi and the will to die could do the same.
For an attack to be "successful", the economic base of the country does not need to be brought down in one swell foop. A real terror campaign seeks to paralyze a people. The Nazi use of small rockets against London in WW II was such an attempt. There was no idea that these small devices would win the war or destroy the city.
If - IF - there were terrorist cells operating in this country we would see the bombing of undergrounds rail services in NYC; there would be explosions in places like the Lincoln Tunnel; there would be small devices going off to interrupt the rail system between cities.
How many miles of track are there across America? Have you ever driven cross country? Thousands and thousands. It is impossible to prevent track destruction timed to cause certain derailment. You can bet that one of these would throw the country into a tail spin - the effect of a series on the American psyche is hard to imagine.
A small device at Yankee Stadium - it wouldn't even have to penetrate the laughable "security" used in such places. What better place to detonate than in the very crowded bottle necks created by these stupid pat-downs?
I sometimes rent a truck from a Budget outlet here in SFO. The same outfit rents out self-storage units. There are directly under highway 280. Is there any control over what someone puts into these units? Nope. Would it be possible to bring the freeway down during rush hour? I don't know.
The point is that if you look around and think like a novelist or a terrorist, I bet that anyone could come up with dozens of vulnerabilities in an hour.
Yet these kinds of attacks are not occurring. To me this simply means that the resources to carry them out are not available to the imaginary terrorists that OBL has successfully set us to guarding against at great cost in money, civil liberties, and ability to focus on other problems.