Originally Posted by 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.
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.