Jeffrey Voight wrote in message ...


We don't protect the roads, we don't protect the schools, we don't
protect my office building. Why then, do we throw great gobs of money
into protecting the airline industry? It's because it's a visible and
obvious target. All the other targets are either obvious or visible or
both, but they don't get the press the way that a jumbo-jet vaporizing
itself into a building gets press.

Yeah, all good points in your post. My sense is that the special
attention paid to airports and aircraft derives from (1) the capacity
to cause tremendous damage with a single terrorist attack, and (2) the
extremely severe economic and psychological "ripple effect" that
ensues if an airplane is successfully targeted. Even though thousands
of people die in car accidents every year in the US, these occur
usually in ones and twos, and there's at least the perception of
autonomy and control for drivers since so many fatal accidents occur
consequent to (a) driving drunk, (b) failing to wear a seatbelt, (c)
driving at recklessly high speeds, and/or (d) outright daydreaming by
the driver, all of which a cautious and alert driver can avoid.
(Although IIRC some decent percentage of auto fatalities occur even in
the presence of such precautions-- don't know the actual figure.)

OTOH a traveler's safety on an airplane is usually in the hands of
others, and while a single auto crash can be tragic, a single airplane
crash can be catastrophic-- entire families were wiped out when that
Iranian jetliner was accidentally downed in 1988, and the downing of
Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland later in the same year
killed nearly 300 people, including many on the ground. It basically
ruined Pan Am and caused massive economic damage. Since airplanes are
large, rapidly-moving objects filled with fuel, they also have the
potential to cause enormous damage on the ground as well. If
terrorists were to hijack a plane and go kamikaze, as on September 11,
or bomb it during ascent or descent near a major city airport, they
can strike buildings and shopping malls, kill thousands, and
perpetrate enormous property damage. (9/11 alone, IIRC, not only
killed over 3,000 people but caused over $1 trillion in damage.) When
the business air travelers begin to shift to teleconferencing and the
would-be tourists scrap their plans to take little Billy and Jenny to
Disneyworld or London (as occurred post-9/11), there's very severe
economic pain felt on many sides for a long time.

People cancelling their flights like this may not constitute strictly
"rational" behavior, but the human mind isn't rational; there's a
primal urge to feel secure when one's safety is in the hands of
others, especially when entire families are grouped together. That's
why the notion of accepting the fact that some innocent people will be
killed by terrorists every year, however philosophically admissible,
just isn't practical or politically workable when it comes to
passenger aviation; the large number of casualties in the air, coupled
with the death toll on the ground, and all the awful economic
dislocations afterward, make even rare events extraordinarily
detrimental. People often point out that the British people became
psychologically inured to the specter of IRA terrorism over many
decades but, then again, even the worst IRA attacks didn't kill
hundreds of Britons.

I concur with you that much of what the TSA does now in its screening
is ineffectual "window dressing"; however, the solution is not to
dampen the security, but to switch to still rigorous yet smarter
screening methods that actually pay dividends. IMHO frankly this
amounts in large part to doing the obvious: Stop obsessing so much
about pocket knives, nail clippers, and staplers, which just
inconveniences everybody and costs billions of taxpayer dollars (and
it's doubtful a hijacker could use such small items anyway, since
cockpit doors are bolted). Instead, focus more on stopping bombs and
obvious weapons (like something that could actually fire a bullet),
especially if aided by specific intelligence. It probably doesn't
even require much fancy technology. Although there are some recent
advances in plastic explosives and similar chemical detection
technology (http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20010911S0063 and
http://www.aip.org/enews/physnews/2003/split/649-1.html) along with
the bomb-sniffing dogs and hand searches, we probably don't need to
breed Fido 5.0 The Super Sniffer to enhance security; there are some
relatively cheap, patently obvious improvements that can be
implemented chiefly in the background checks and access restrictions
for the teams that service and supply the planes, or load cargo onto
it. Charles G. Slepian
(http://www.voicesofsept11.org/security/062203.php) points out that
it's here, at the "back" of the plane, that security most needs
tightening. We'd probably get a lot more mileage for our taxpayer
money if the TSA stopped frittering away billions on confiscating
people's hair curlers and dentures, and redirected the money to better
control at the back of the plane as well as on more vigorous and
effective counterintelligence. These wouldn't allow for absolute
security of course, but there are some common-sense measures like this
which can boost security substantially and in a cost-effective manner.

the nations that support them [terrorist groups and funders] and allow them to live
and organize and
train and plan in their lands put on a front of being our allies. For
example, it is well known that the Islamic Jihad, responsible for many
terrorist activities in many lands, is based in Egypt - supposedly an ally
of both the US and Israel.

If the Arab Nations were pressured to take a stand, they would either
support the US or support the Terrorist Groups. It might lead to a war,
maybe even a World War, but it would be a war that was fought by nations
using war type tactics. Instead, we are left digging in caves for
terrorists that aren't even there. While I'm not very much of a Bush fan
overall, I think Bush was close to the mark when he demanded that the other
nations cut terrorist funding, and demanded Saudi Arabia turn over its
terrorists and intelligence.

Then he went off on his personal vendetta against Saddam Hussein and
destroyed all his credibility, both within and without.

I totally concur. I found it ironic that Bush launched this war
against Iraq on the pretext of "combating terrorism," when if anything
Iraq had the most tenuous connection to Sept. 11 of any of the Arab
countries. 15 out of 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia; the
ringleader was from Egypt; others were from smaller Middle Eastern
States. And you're right, it was our supposed "allies" who were doing
the most to incite the terrorists, especially Saudi Arabia, by
spreading radical Wahhabism worldwide, teaching their *kids* to hate
Jews and Christians in their textbooks, and blaming their own failures
and corruption on the West. Baathist Iraq was a secular society and
itself targeted by Osama bin Laden; not a single Iraqi was a
participant among the hijackers and Saddam did not support or plan
Sept. 11, yet Iraq was the invaded country of the month. It wasn't
smart for the US to have posted the troops in Saudi Arabia like that
since 1991 (they were there just to enforce the no-fly zones in Iraq
and could have been rotated to more peripheral nations), and the Iraqi
sanctions weren't working, but the main wellspring for terrorism was
Saudi Arabia's corrupt policy and deflection of culpability for their
own inadequacies in the position of a ruling government. Fortunately,
the Saudi officials are starting to cooperate now more intensively,
since the Riyadh bombings in May 2003 at least, because they've
started to realize that they're a target of al-Qaeda as well, perhaps
even the main target, and they'd be wise to shape up quickly before
they wind up with even deeper problems than they already have.

Wes Ulm