The absolute worst case? You guys got it wrong. The worst case isn't that 10 people bent on seeing their maker gets to smuggle a few deciliters of some explosive onboard, mix it up successfully and blow some airplane out of the sky.

The worst case is what happens after they succeed. Yet again another layer of reactive security. Yet another round of detoriating civil rights and yet another round of searching for demons that noone sees, mostly because they are not there and yet another round of feeding frenzy by the press and yet another round governments and agencies running out of control of scaremongering.

Now, let's say that a fully loaded 744 does depart the skies somewhere and 300+ souls do depart their loved ones in a highly tragic matter, still, the 300 are the most high profiles that same day, but at the current running their numbers do not by far get close to the good few hundreds that will be killed the same day in "the war on terror", and those numbers are nowhere close to the good few thousands being killed by the lack of attention to the developing nations and run down societies that in the beginning of all this seems to be be the very breeding grounds for totalitarian regimes and current recruiting areas for fantatics.

If a third of the energy and money spent in e.g. Iraq and Afghanistan had been used to peacefully coopt the neccesary regimes, and start managing and nurturing the nations mostly in north east africa and the middle east that needs it, then you'd had a lot more good will against the western world than we do today.

Instead we are far more likely to see the current western regimes run amok at the first and best chance at another turn at tightenting the screw. On their own people, their own nations and raking up yet more hatred and dissent in parts of the world that don't need it... *sigh*

I'll go back to my whisky and try not to bite on the next troll to come along here.

-A