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Posts Tagged ‘terrorism’

I suppose the whole notion of declaring a ‘War on Terror’ demonstrates that you have not really grasped how to effectively deal with the extremist tactic of terrorism in the first place, but baby steps are still a good thing.  Fareed Zakaria is driven to have to write the obvious in one of the State’s biggest papers:

The purpose of terrorism is to provoke an overreaction. Its real aim is not to kill the hundreds of people directly targeted but to sow fear in the rest of the population. Terrorism is an unusual military tactic in that it depends on the response of the onlookers. If we are not terrorized, then the attack didn’t work. Alas, this one worked very well.

It’s shameful and disappointing that this needs to be pointed out. At least in the year 2010 there are easily accessible tools that allow for the dissemination of this basic point. You don’t have to go to far back in time to get to a place where the garment rending of scared neo-cons is all that one can hear.

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The other day I was calling myself naive for thinking that perhaps the unsuccessful attempt to bring down a trans-Atlantic flight on Christmas day would not be overblown. Boy was I wrong. It did seem to me that the Canadian response was somewhat more measured as new security was only put into place for flights to the US. It may however be time to break out the ‘naive’ label again. Listening to the CBC News:World Report Podcast on my way into work this morning, I was disappointed to hear that Transportation Minister John Baird is set to make an announcement later on this afternoon about new security measures that will be put into place at Canadian airports. When I switched over to my radio, the top of the hour newscast featured a similar report.

One of the DJ’s made two observations that are relevant here; with all the billions of dollars spent on airport security since 9/11, this attempted attack was (at least partially) foiled by passengers. She also noted that we don’t employ such extreme security measures in other modes of mass transportation, citing the relative lack of security when taking a ferry between Vancouver Island and the Lower Mainland. To my ear it sounded as if the announcer was speaking from a place of fear and wishing for more security. This however seems backwards to me and her observations illustrated that quite well. We don’t have extreme security measures except for air travel as human irrationalities trump clearer thinking when flight is involved. The first point leads me to the conclusion that no matter how much is spent on security it is impossible to prevent all highly motivated individuals from attempting to use airplanes as a way to sew terror. None of this is to say that we shouldn’t be vigilant in regards to air travel and not have any security, merely that a cost/benefit analysis of our security spending is needed and in my non-expert opinion we are already well past the point of diminishing returns on dollars spent.

Stay tuned to the CBC or your Canadian news outlet of choice for more information on what is actually going to change.

Update : By my reading of this news report it appears that the new security measures entail installing the ‘full body scanners’ that we have been hearing about lately at Canada’s major airports to randomly screen passengers, but only those travelling to the US. I don’t have a problem with my privacy being violated by them seeing me ‘naked’; the privacy commissioner’s office is placated on that front, so I am too. I do think that they are a waste of resources, but the US masters have mandated them from on high, so I don’t really what options we have. As we get more extreme with screening, the frequency with which we see false positives like this will go up. I don’t even want to think how much money in lost productivity this screw up over honey cost.

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The title ‘Naive Me’ has so much breadth and depth that it would probably make for a good regular feature, but in this particular case I am referencing Abdul Farouk Abdulmutallab’s failed attempt to blow up a trans-Atlantic flight on Christmas Day. After my initial sigh of relief that this was a failed attempt, resulting in no casualties, I feared the impending drum beat of how unsafe we are, how if this attack had been successful it would have been ‘devastating’ and of course, how all of it inevitably was the fault of President Barack Obama. Matt Yglesias had a post up that had a very cogent response to the attack which also illustrated the potential for misuse of the incident for partisan political gain:

Obviously, people shouldn’t be lighting anything on fire inside airplanes. That said, all the big Christmas airline incident really shows to me is how little punch our dread terrorist adversaries really pack. Once again, this seems like a pretty unserious plot. And even if you did manage to blow up an airplane in mid-air, that would be both a very serious crime and a great tragedy, but hardly a first-order national security threat.

And then there’s Peter King:

“This was the real deal,” said Representative Peter T. King of New York, the ranking Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee, who was briefed on the incident and said something had gone wrong with the explosive device, which he described as somewhat sophisticated. “This could have been devastating,” Mr. King said.

Ultimately, it does no favors to anyone to blow this sort of thing out of proportion. The United States could not, of course, be “devastated” by anything resembling this scheme. We ought to be clear on that fact. We want to send the message around the world that this sort of vile attempt to slaughter innocent people is not, at the end of the day, anything resembling a serious challenge to American power. It’s attempted murder, it’s wrong, we should try to stop it, but it’s really not much more than that.

Exactly. Rep. Pete King has demonstrated time and again that he is an unserious moron not deserving of the media platform his office gives him and Matt voiced a perfect response to his nonsense. The Canadian media seemed to report on the incident as it happened and it received no more attention than it deserved. I didn’t notice too much other trumped up hyperbolic speak on the ‘dread terrorists’ from the American media and usual suspects on the right, and very prematurely figured that perhaps the US had grown and matured, responding in a responsible manner to this criminal act.

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