Tag: terrorism

19 suicide bombers

The WSJ editorial section hits on one of the most pervasive yet utterly unsupported myths of 9/11/01:

If 19 terrorists (the number who carried out the 9/11 attacks) each blew himself up at one- or two-week intervals in a shopping mall or a movie theater, America likely would become a seething nation of paranoid shut-ins. That it hasn’t happened tells you something: Al Qaeda doesn’t have a ready supply of competent suicide bombers, domestic or imported, to carry off serious attacks.

I’ve seen this false supposition treated as plain fact again and again. It’s one of the most pervasive media and governmental frames there is: that all 19 members of the “team” on 9/11/01 were 100% in on the plan and had committed themselves to fly planes into buildings. Clearly, the optimal way to plan this mission given the obvious (and ongoing) limit re: reliable, willing, and able suicide bombers (in this case “suicide pilots”) is to tell most of each team that you’re just going to pull the old “seize the plane, fly somewhere, and then make some demands.” Exactly what the passengers thought was going to happen, too. Only one or two members of each team need know the true mission on the day and the remaining three or four are merely muscle, and, ultimately also a kind of unwitting victim of the very attacks they helped carry out. In fact, the fewer “in on it” the better, in that under this analysis you only require one suicidal zealot (and this is always going to be the rarest resource, really) per plane. Thus you potentially had only four “suicide bombers” for 9/11. Not 19. It’s at least conceivable that some of that muscle, also finally realizing what was really going on contemporaneously with the other passengers, were in on the struggle that ultimately ended in the crash in Pennsylvania. Unlikely, but possible. Fundamentally, though, if al Qaeda had 19 suicide bombers they could use to carry out the attacks the WSJ theorizes above: they would have done it. There is no reason at all to believe they did not wish to carry out the most spectacular attack possible with the resources at hand. An unremitting series of attacks spreading over weeks would have fit that bill to a T. That they chose another, extremely spectacular but vastly more concentrated style implies strongly that the resources simply weren’t there for the WSJ-style attack. Period. Not on 9/11, not today.

The economics of suicide bombing and the number of willing participants is, was, and will always be a primary limitation on its use so long as the target nation remains a relatively comfortable place to live. Give people a reason to stick around, minuscule as it may be, mostly they will choose to live. This is the underlying logic of the shoe- and underpants-bomber failures: these guys just aren’t the brightest bulbs in the world…but they’re what’s available that has any reasonable chance of getting the job done. You’ll note that they weren’t planted here prior to attempting their attacks; they weren’t deemed sufficiently reliable for a long-term, slow developing infiltration style plan, apparently.

Worth noting that the Israeli government is still working this terrorism opportunity cost issue out as well. With even modest improvements to the daily lives of Palestinians, most of the quasi-daily attacks would begin to melt away, and without further recourse to walls or super-high security. Even a tiny bit of hope is a powerful incentive to the potential suicide bomber to continue living. And the Israelis will continue to fail to understand it so long as they receive billions in untethered, unregulated support from us. The old Sinclair saw applies [with a minor addition]:

“It is difficult to get a man [or a government] to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”

Index Israel’s support to GDP of the Palestinian territory going forward. Things would change rapidly. Suddenly, their salary would depend on it.

Despite fearful rhetoric to the contrary, terrorism is not a transcendent threat. A terrorist attack cannot possibly destroy a country’s way of life; it’s only our reaction to that attack that can do that kind of damage. The more we undermine our own laws, the more we convert our buildings into fortresses, the more we reduce the freedoms and liberties at the foundation of our societies, the more we’re doing the terrorists’ job for them.

Bruce Schneier (via fraidycats)

Hold them to it

If we didn’t have a feckless Democratic majority, they might be in front of microphones just about now giving a preferably rhyming, two sentence version of this information for the evening news and cablers:

An attempt to blow up a trans-Atlantic flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day would be all-consuming for the administrator of the Transportation Security Administration – if there were one.

Instead, the post remains vacant because Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., has held up President Barack Obama’s nominee in an effort to prevent TSA workers from joining a labor union.

and, while they’re at it, they could see fit to mention that (emphasis added):

Republicans have cast votes against the key TSA funding measure that the 2010 appropriations bill for the Department of Homeland Security contained, which included funding for the TSA, including for explosives detection systems and other aviation security measures. In the June 24 vote in the House, leading Republicans including John Boehner, Pete Hoekstra, Mike Pence and Paul Ryan voted against the bill, […] A full 108 Republicans voted against the conference version, including Boehner, Hoekstra, Pence, Michelle Bachmann, Marsha Blackburn, Darrell Issa and Joe Wilson.

I guess pointing out this sort of brazen hypocrisy from our National Security Party, the GOP, just wouldn’t be polite, and would undermine the extreme and ongoing displays of real comity we’ve seen thus far.

Takron-Galtos revisited

jimray posts:

“Terrorists should not be treated like common criminals in federal court. These detainees are enemies of the state, and should be treated as such by being held and brought to justice right where they are — in Guantanamo Bay.”

— Representative Jerry Lewis (R-CA), criticizing a Democratic play to [transfer suspected enemy combatants from Guantanamo to the United States to stand trial]

It occurs to me that this kind of thinking is exactly backwards – nothing would be more humiliating to a terrorist than to be treated like a common criminal. We need to stop treating these people as if they’re some kind of team of super-villains ready to sow havoc on the U.S. at a moment’s notice. It’s not Lex Luthor or an evil genius Bond villain that we’re up against here – these people are barely literate, delusional and fueled by a misappropriation of religion and blind hatred of a worldview too complicated for them to understand. If that sounds familiar to people like Representative Lewis, it’s probably because it’s also an apt description of the extreme of his own party.

This is exactly right. Why the GOP and many average citizens seem to think our justice system simply cannot handle criminals “like this” is beyond me. A series of regular old trials (and, presumably: convictions and sentences) is precisely how to prevail in this situation over the long haul. We lose when we’re seen to dispatch with our whole system of government because it’s expedient or just more convenient. That dissolution of our government and, by extension, our ability to tinker in world events abroad, is precisely the object of their desire. Bring Osama bin Laden and his associates before the bench, one by one, just like any other common criminal. Nothing would undermine their entire worldview more.

Voight-Kampff (finally) Arrives

The Boston Globe heralds the arrival of the newest in new Terrrist detection services, the picture of which strikes me as slightly…familiar:

The article suggests some (clearly) half-assed potential questions for said interrogations. Might I humbly suggest these more patriotic replacements:

It’s your birthday. Someone gives you a calfskin wallet. How do you react?

You’ve got a little boy. He shows you his butterfly collection plus the killing jar. What do you do?

You’re watching television. Suddenly you realize there’s a wasp crawling on your arm… [wait for first response]

You’re in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise; it’s crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t, not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that?

When necessary, this phrase can be interjected:

They’re just questions, (Name). In answer to your query, they’re written down for me. It’s a test, designed to provoke an emotional response. Shall we continue? Describe in single words, only the good things that come into your mind. About your mother.

I can eat 50 Hiroshimas

Yarr! Pirates attack and seize an oil tanker some 450 miles off East Africa. Despite the obvious and salutary effects on global warming, the steady growth in these pirate attacks has some wondering where it will all end. Some are already figuring these guys must have bigger operations in mind, like hijacking a gas tanker and blowing it up (or just selling it to somebody who will). Something like that would indeed be pretty bad:

“If it was an LNG tanker seized, we’re looking at something potentially catastrophic,” said Candyce Kelshall, a specialist in maritime energy security at Blue Water Defence, a Trinidad-based firm that provides training to governments and companies combating piracy. “An LNG tanker going up is like 50 Hiroshimas.”

We certainly don’t want that happening. Unmentioned, of course, are a few little details. First, said pirates would have to seize this LNG tanker without anyone noticing. Then, they’d have to sail it from the coast of East Africa (presumably, anyway…after all, these guys don’t exactly operate off Long Island Sound) to somewhere much more interesting. Without anyone noticing. Then they’d have to park it within a 50-Hiroshima blast radius of, say, a big city. New York City certainly suits with all the shipping traffic. LA would work too. But again: motor this ship up to and then park this ship in a major harbor without anyone noticing. Then they’d have to blow it up such that it actually exploded catastrophically. This, in and of itself, is actually a non-trivial step. However, conditioned by Hollywood as we are to expecting a colossal, city block flattening explosion after even the most minor fender-bender, this is perhaps the hardest point to make with the public. After all, it’s a well established fact that 99.999% of all elevators suffer catastrophic cable failure within 30 seconds of any unscheduled stop. This, of course, is also followed instantly by catastrophic emergency brake failure…it’s plainly a wonder that anyone survives an elevator ride.

Can we ever get past all the “We’re all going to die! This is the end of the Republic!” nonsense? The second most likely outcome of such a LNG tanker seizure is a 50-Hiroshima detonation way the hell and gone out to sea, being the result of a sailor pressing a button mid-coffee-sip on a US Navy missile cruiser located somewhere well over the horizon. The first most likely is, of course, the surrender of said pirates once their situation becomes clear to them. But either way works out pretty well.

Real security means focusing on the relatively easy to secure, already here type targets that can be turned into seemingly ubiquitous engines of fear, uncertainty, and doubt subsequent to the initial attack. As a rule, we don’t need to be wasting our efforts on the theoretical plots that require professional laboratory conditions aboard an airplane, or that rest upon ridiculously complex, multi-step, slowly evolving plots that, though summarily rejected by the audience in Die Hard 14: This Time It’s Really Personal, are at least 1% feasible…and thus MUST be defended against without consideration of expense or probability of said event while the 98% feasible targets languish because, gosh, that would require some minor outlay of money on the part of Cheney’s hunting buddies. Naturally, these “easy” targets are precisely the ones the Bush administration has repeatedly stressed that it could give a fuck about. Who could have expected that?