{"id":3655,"date":"2010-01-18T10:46:14","date_gmt":"2010-01-18T18:46:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/wordpress\/?p=3655"},"modified":"2010-01-18T10:46:14","modified_gmt":"2010-01-18T18:46:14","slug":"terrorisms-risk-curve","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/terrorisms-risk-curve\/","title":{"rendered":"Terrorism’s risk curve"},"content":{"rendered":"

The logic of anti-terrorism measures seems to be that if one bad event happens, such as the 12\/25 plot, the risk of similar bad events suddenly shoots up exponentially.\u00a0 Thus the airport shut-downs <\/a>over the last two weeks in reaction to minor security breaches, the no-liquids and no-shoes flying bans, and the rush for body scans.\u00a0 I\u2019m dreading a cross-country flight tomorrow, since there are only so many books I can lug into an airport in anticipation of security delays (yes, Kindle would solve that problem).\u00a0 Surely this sense of a precipitously elevated risk following an attempt or an actual attack is of questionable logic, though perhaps the reaction is unavoidable.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

A New York Times<\/em> analysis<\/a> points out that<\/p>\n

the enemies on American soil in 2009, rather than a single powerful and sophisticated juggernaut, were a scattered, uncoordinated group of amateurs who displayed more fervor than skill.\u00a0 The weapons were old-fashioned guns and explosives \u2014 in several cases, duds supplied by F.B.I. informants \u2014 with no trace of the biological or radiological poisons, let alone the nuclear bombs, that have long been the ultimate fear.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

To a former assistant director of the CIA, 9\/11 was the benchmark for Al Qaeda strength, against which the 12\/25 plot come up short:<\/p>\n

\u201cSending one guy on one plane is a huge step down,\u201d [Mark M.] Lowenthal said. \u201cThey\u2019re less capable, even if they\u2019re still lethal. They\u2019re not able to carry out the intense planning they once did.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Times <\/em>elicits a consensus among Lowenthal and others \u201cthat the country is far safer than it was in 2001.\u201d\u00a0 But the country was safe even in 2001.\u00a0 The 9\/11 attacks were a logistical coup, but they suggested that Al Qaeda had no biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons, otherwise it would have used them instead of box cutters and a mastery of flight schedules.\u00a0 Moreover, there is no evidence that Al Qaeda affiliates have or in the foreseeable future will have the sophisticated lab equipment and technical capacity to develop such weapons.<\/p>\n

The number of terror plots then as now was minute.\u00a0 More Americans who are not gang-affiliated are killed by deranged shooters like the St. Louis factory worker <\/a>on January 7 or the Las Vegas social security claimant <\/a>on January 4, or by ordinary criminals, than by Islamic terrorists.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It is precisely the extraordinary safety of our lives that allows the Times <\/em>and other environmental fear-mongers to peddle specious environmental scares to an eager audience, such as the claim that our drinking water may be unhealthy <\/a>or that a chemical in plastic bottles may be unsafe<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0 People want to feel at risk, it seems.\u00a0 An entire health publishing industry is devoted to coming up with new things to worry about and take precautions against.\u00a0 But modern technology and science have banished so many of the diseases and calamities that once devastated human existence that we have to look hard to find things to worry about.\u00a0\u00a0 Our search for threats extends even to those accomplishments that have eradicated so much suffering and inconvenience, such as our remarkable and magnificent waterworks and our friends the plastics.\u00a0\u00a0 Obviously, Islamic terrorism is a breeding ideology with outsized ambitions, but I am not certain that the amount of resources and attention we devote to it is commensurate with the size of the risk.\u00a0<\/p>\n

That having been said, if you believe that Islamic terrorism is<\/em> a civilizational threat, the Pentagon’s review <\/a>of how the radicalization of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan went unnoticed–so politically correct as to ignore the role of political correctness in the oversight and to deny that Islam is related to whatever “self-radicalization” problem the military has–cannot be reassuring.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The logic of anti-terrorism measures seems to be that if one bad event happens, such as the 12\/25 plot, the risk of similar bad events suddenly shoots up exponentially.\u00a0 Thus the airport shut-downs over the last two weeks in reaction … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[15],"tags":[210,353],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3655"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3655"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3655\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3657,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3655\/revisions\/3657"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3655"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3655"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3655"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}