Is the risk of another terrorist attack in the U.S. like the San Andreas fault or like the phone call you’re still waiting for from that cute boy you’ve got a crush on? As time elapses without the anticipated event happening, in other words, does its likelihood increase (like an earthquake in a fault zone) or decrease (like the phone call that never comes)? During the Bush years, I used to ask various conservative pundits if we could ever recalculate the risk of a terror attack downwards as years passed without another hit. The answer was always no. Clark Kent Ervin, a former Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security, encapsulated the conceit that no news is always bad news when it comes to terrorism in a Washington Post op-ed in 2006: “The very fact that there hasn’t been an attack on a soft target in the United States increases the danger of one,” he wrote.
But despite such assertions, public terror rhetoric has gradually, imperceptibly, abated over the last two years. The muted reaction to the disruption of a possible bomb plot against New York City suggests that the public and media have recalibrated the relative risk and importance of the terrorism threat. Of course, the modest coverage of the arrest of suspect Najibullah Zazi may simply reflect the fact that they got him before rather than after an attack. But I would like to think that even if a terrorist did pull off a bombing in a subway or department store, we would react as the British have, seeing terrorism as a horrifying but manageable problem, not as a “civilizational threat,” as it was commonly called during the Bush years.
The change in public discourse is really quite remarkable. Almost gone is a genre I used to call terror porn, which consisted of identifying a target, then positing an evildoer perfectly placed to destroy it. The terror pornographer’s motto was: for every vulnerability, a terrorist. “Got Toxic Milk?,” a New York Times op-ed from May 2005, was a locus classicus of the genre. Lawrence Wein, a professor of management science, detailed the consequences of poisoning the nation’s milk supply with botulism, dwelling lovingly on how the victims would react. But he offered no evidence that any terrorist anywhere had ever contemplated an attack on the nation’s milk supply; he simply conjured such a villain to produce the desired effect.
In fact, carrying off a high-casualty attack of the spectacular weapons of mass destruction variety is difficult, as the negligible number of such incidents over the last fifty years ought to suggest. Those terror methodologies which are relatively easy to accomplish will be duplicated within five years of their first occurrence, according to Rand’s Brian Jenkins—a pattern shown by aircraft hijackings and product tamperings. Senate majority leader Bill Frist predicted in 2005 that a biological attack was inevitable in the next five years. At the time, however, no known terrorist group possessed even a college-level laboratory and they still don’t.
Loose nukes are the most powerful threat we face and unbroken vigilance against them is certainly essential. But despite presumed decades of trying, no terrorist has managed to steal a nuclear weapon, and building one without scores of state-supported physicists and equipment is likely impossible. If a terrorist does manage to set off a nuclear device here, it should be well understood that we will presume that the return address is Iran or North Korea.
To be sure, we should remain on guard, wiretapping the heck out of all suspect communications, and data-mining all publicly available information. But the lowered volume of terror rhetoric is a welcome development. As Ohio State’s John Mueller has pointed out, the greatest damage from terrorism comes from our own reaction to it. If some angry Muslims do set off a fertilizer or hair products bomb in a movie theater, the effect would be magnified if the public sees it as the long-predicted uprising of an army of domestic terror cells, rather than as what history suggests it is more likely to be: an isolated incident, probably to be followed by another long stretch of time without another attack. Unfortunately, after we foolishly created a permanent bureaucracy dedicated to protecting the U.S. against terrorism, a looming terror threat must always be found to justify its care and feeding. But the Department of Homeland Security has adopted a lowered profile of late, and will perhaps simply mutate back into an immigration agency in the future.
It is really lovely to finally see someone exercising their brains about this issue. The attack on the Twin Towers was a work of evil genius. But genius is rare and seldom gets repeated. And the genius principally consisted of discovering a low tech solution with high impact. If you really want to understand the nature of the actual danger the question to ask is, “What sort of low tech barn door are we still leaving open?”
joseph,
I’ve always wondered; is there a way to measure the odds of such a reoccurrence? when you say it was an act of ‘low-tech genius’ and ‘what sort of low tech barn door are we still leaving open,” is there a way to actually inventory and eliminate such oversights?”
It was an awful thing that occurred on 9/11. But what I dislike is how people have been using it to manipulate people toward their agenda. Whether it’s the government or some conspiricist, people constantly do this because it was such traumatic event. I read an interesting post on this topic at this blog: http://lawblog.legalmatch.com/ .
I think all you could do would be to apply some seat-of-the-pants thinking like a terrorist. And you have to take simple possibilities seriously. Much more seriously than fantasies about nukes. It’s been slowly leaking out that for some time now there have been possible plots using hydrogen peroxide [available in any drug store] as an oxidizer for a crude explosive.
And if you think about what other volatile chemicals in that same drugstore that might be used for fuel: petrolium jelly [the main ingredient in napalm], charcoal lighter fluid, motor oil additives, liquid houseplant fertilizer, just to name a few, you can see why there have been so many restrictions on carrying bottles of liquid in luggage aboard airplanes.
One of the things that scares me greatly is a systematic repetition of the Muhammed/Malvo killing spree of late 2002. All the ingredients: high powered rifles, old cars, expressway roadside rest areas, and isolated and vulnerable gas stations, are still readily available. The only reason M/M were apprehended so soon is that they went to the well once too often in the same general area. Add a few bank robberies, and a stolen car or two, to this mix–and people willing to act as “safe houses” in the necessary intervals between killing sprees–and you have something really scary.
So I don’t think the boys and girls at Homeland Security should be focusing mainly on Immigration just yet.
M/M got a lot of media play but IIRC their overall death toll was lower than Columbine or Virginia Tech, let alone Oklahoma City. (Of course, it could be argued that the purpose of terrorism is terror, not destruction, so the media coverage *made* them more successful than their body count alone would indicate.) Surprise counts for a lot in actually carrying out an attack, and repeated incidents (even if you move around) deprive yourself of surprise value. As you point out, going back to the well was how they got caught. AFAIK, al Qaeda has not gone back to the hijacking well — they’re fanatical, not stupid.
Liquids on planes are pure theater. (Actually, planes themselves are probably a now-overguarded barn door, and a sensible planner would go somewhere else.) A long refutation is here, a more or less typical paragraph:
P.S. The risk of a post-9/11 terrorist attack in the U.S. is one — it has already happened. Anthrax. If you count the D.C. snipers, them too.
I wonder why they’re terrorists are so fixated on fancy stuff when simultaneous shooters at a half dozen malls would seem to suit the terrorists’ purpose just as well as a minor bombing.
Perhaps it’s a lot more difficult to enlist and manage suicidal attackers in this country than it is abroad.
Well in places like the US they really do desire to destroy some intellectual symbol of the country itself, like the Twin Towers. After all, they don’t get many chances to destroy anything here. In places like Britain, it is more a matter of finding a good target of opportunity, like the subways. And in Israel all targets are targets of opportunity because the Palestinians are amalgamated in and amongst the Israelis themselves. This started to get fixed with Ariel Sharon and his wall, which cut back suicide terrorism significantly. But Netanyatu has gone back to the procedure of planting new Israeli settlement smack in the middle of the Palestinians on the West Bank, which is what made the Israelis vulnerable in the first place.
Terrorist conspiracies here are extremely difficult to maintain because all the groups of people likely to do it, Muslim or non-Muslim, stand out like a black widow spider on an Angel Food cake. Keeping an eye on them is relatively easy. So the fewer the better if you’re serious about it.
Liquids on planes are pure theater.
Not really. It takes a surprisingly small amount of such liquids to either start a fire or make a big bang. I’ve seen test explosions of such bombs no bigger than a 1/2 gallon bottle of bleach. And on an airplane the target is the thin aluminum skin, particularly around the tail area where you have control surfaces and sometimes engines. It doesn’t require that big of bang to make a breach in such material.
And even if not on planes, a bleach bottle bomb wrapped with a belt of nails would be just as nasty as any made from gunpowder and primers–the makeshift explosive of choice in a country where people reload firearm cartridges to save money.
“Lawrence Wein, a professor of management science, detailed the consequences of poisoning the nation’s milk supply with botulism dwelling lovingly on how the victims would react”
Heather you SO rock.