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Sci-fi Writers Join War on Terror
yoyoq writes "Homeland Security is looking for suggestions from sci-fi writers. "Looking to prevent the next terrorist attack, the Homeland Security Department is tapping into the wild imaginations of a group of self-described "deviant" thinkers: science-fiction writers."
Here's a suggestion: 9-11 could have been prevented with locks on the cockpit door."
Here's a suggestion: 9-11 could have been prevented with locks on the cockpit door.
Everyone's a snide little clever genius after the fact.
Here's a suggestion: no, it could not have been prevented with locks on the cockpit door. It would have likely been a somewhat different attack, but it still would have happened.
Meanwhile, people still catch colds despite having a supply of tissue in the house.
Here's an idea, why not stop wasting time on this sort of, headline grabbing, nonsense and sort out the existing agencies who are supposed to be responsible for this sort of thing so they can gain some actual intelligence about what the terrorists are actually planning and actually do something to stop that.
If Homeland Security really are trying to think of more innovative solutions they might consider putting a stop to some of the activities the US is or has been involved in which tend to increase the number of available terrorists wanting to attack it. This might involve stopping the CIA kidnapping people and taking them off to be tortured, stop starting pointless wars and stop interfering in other countries in order to install regimes that suit your own purposes.
Our sense of risk is so badly out of whack that we're just being ridiculous--it isn't even hysteria anymore, not after this many years. We're being suckered by a sensationalistic media working in cohorts with government, which always, always wants more power. I'd say it was shocking if I could even muster any surprize at how stupid we're being over this.
Pilots would be blackmailed into opening cockpit doors at the threat of killing everyone in the cabin. Terrorists would learn lock picking. WTC would be brought down by a big truck with explosives instead of planes. Al-Quida would carry out a chemical or biological attack. Let's face it, targets are endless and internal security is only a small part of preventing terrorism. Withdrawing from Israeli-Palestinian conflict on one hand and refusing to do any business with Islamic countries on the other would deprive terrorists of both recruits and resources and have a much bigger effect on new attacks. We can also distinguish religious freedom from calls for violence against everyone and deport or deny visas to extremists of every faith - muslim, christian, scientology, falun gong...
The bogus threat of terrorism has been the greatest bonanza for greedy and power-hungry politicians in recent US and world history. So why would they give that up now?
This group is a professinal think tank, those in the picture all look over 55, and to be a member you need a technical doctorate degree. How much of a "deviant" thinker or "rebel" can they really be? Aren't people that come up with the most inventive and "crazy" ideas a bit younger? I like the idea of employing think tanks, it shows initiative which is vital, but if they really want some results I think they're going to have to attract a different set of thinkers.
Leaving aside the Monday morning quarterbacking there is ample evidence to suggest that the "ideas" of 9-11 from the tactical nature of the attacks to the identities of the attackers was in fact known or knowable. Al-Quaeda was, in fact on the intelligence community's radar screen and warnings about Osama Bin-Laden were prevalent even in Presidential Daily Briefings. Additionally there had been an exercise simulating exactly the kind of attack that occurred. So it wasn't that the idea had not arisen or that noone had suggested things.
Rather, its apparent that the suggestions were ignored. Whether they were ignored because Bush wanted to focus on other things or that the nature of the ideas somehow rendered them ignorable is unclear. What is clear is that they were, in fact, present and had been suggested.
Post 9-11 a great deal of effort has been spent on garnering "ideas" for attack styles on the grounds that "we didn't know". While it is nice to see people expanding their minds it is a little worrisome that they have not done so before. It is also a little worrisome because the new ideas seem to fall into two categories, those that get ignored and those that are overreacted upon.
In the former class we have things such as not throwing children year olds into Guantanamo Bay, and adding armor to protect our troops against IEDs (something that was so badly rejected that the solders were ordered by the White House to remove armor that they had added in the field). A great example of the latter comes from one of Bob Woodward's books on Bush. Some of you may remember that point about a year or so ago when the terror alert levels jumped and new, ominous, warnings came out about Al-Quaeda hijacking trains and filling them with chemicals. It turns out a bunch of guys were sitting around a meeting and one of them said: "You know it would suck if Al-Qaueda stole a train and loaded it with chemicals..." A few days later they lock down all the train stations.
So with all due respect to DHS's desire for new info but I'd like to see them make better use of what they've already got.
How about a sane foreign policy? Like cockpit locks, it won't prevent all terrorist attacks, but less bullying and more actual diplomacy will help. It also wouldn't hurt to examine economic policies and disproportionate consumption of resources. America is a colonial power by fiat and as long as that is so, there will continue to be terrorists.
The sci-fi angle is just silliness, in my opinion.
Rather than screening people coming into the USA why not screen people leaving the USA.
You could come up with a standardised "AQ" (Asshole Quotent) score and refuse exit to anyone scoring more than 100.
Answering "Yes" to questions like "Do you believe there should be Starbucks outlet in every culturaly important site" gets you five points.
Aswering "Yes" to a question like "Do you believe it is acceptable to shout out 'Does anyone in this joint speak English' when visting a foriegn art gallery" get you ten points.
Answering "Yes" to a question like "Do you believe its wrong to provide condoms to people who are HIV positive" gets you 50 points.
By screening people leaving your country in this way you could promote the illusion that USAians are polite considerate respectfull people and you hatred and bombs would be better directed at Candadians or Swedes.
Also candidates for high office could boast about thier high scores come lection time.
Old COBOL programmers never die. They just code in C.
We're flat out of fanciful terrorist ideas to scare the public with and need some new ones. Have you got any? Don't worry if they sound totally implausible, once we're finished sprucing them up only the unpatriotic will be laughing at them.
Yours,
Authorities
People are totally innumerate and they overreact to rare, dramatic events. Everyone went nuts over the VT tragedy because it was "the worst school shooting in history" even though it only killed 30+ people. That's less than an average day's worth of gun deaths, or about six hours of car accidents. Now it's almost six years later and people are still overreacting to 9/11. I mean, 3000 deaths in one day and at the same place is impressive, but it still totals to just one month of car accidents. Think of how miserable we've made ourselves since then. Was it worth it?
Asking "whether the next 9/11 can be prevented" is a dumb question to try to answer. It's like "how do we prevent the next car accident?" The sort of questions we should be asking sound cold and calculating, which is unfortunate because it keeps us from asking them:
- Is it possible to reduce the number of terrorist attacks?
- Is it possible to reduce the number of terrorist attacks to zero?
- What is the probability per year that a terrorist act might affect you?
- What is the probability per year that our self-flagellating counterterrorism efforts might affect you?
- Since 9/11, how many additional hours of your life have been spent in airports?
- How many years of your life have been spent as a soldier overseas?
- How many years of your life have been lost as a soldier overseas?
- Is terrorism even something most of us worry about personally anymore?
It's unfortunate that we have created security monsters like TSA that simultaneously don't work and would be political suicide to get rid of.
My own idea for "preventing the next VT tragedy" was to crack down on the manufacturers of doors, not the sellers of handguns. If it were illegal to manufacture doors with closed loops in their handles, the guy wouldn't have been able to chain the door shut.
you're still not focusing on the disease, and that's fundamental inequality and slavery in this world.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
Yes, but it's a lot easier to declare war on a concept that (more or less by definition) you can't beat by shooting at than it is to solve world hunger and abolish inequality over the entire planet.
Or, to put it another way (for those who still think the US is doing well in Iraq): Think of terrorism like a vicious, unpredictable animal that wants to attack you. That's easy enough. But there's a twist: it gets stronger every time you shoot at it, bomb it or do anything violent towards it. Why are you still shooting at it?
As TFA notes, the 9/11 commission said the attacks were a result, in part, of the government's "failure of imagination". SF writers, unlike some beltway bureaucrats and politicians, aren't lacking in that, at least.
I think that comment very often gets taken out of context in order to justify exotic anti-terrorism schemes. It wasn't a "failure of imagination" in the sense that nobody in their wildest dreams thought that it could happen. I mean, let's face it, there's nothing far fetched about smuggling weapons onto a plane. That's why they have metal detectors at the gates. There's nothing far fetched about hijacking a plane. That's happened dozens, if not hundreds of times, in the past 30-40 years. There's nothing far-fetched about suicide bombers. They blow themselves up on a daily basis in the middle east. There's nothing far fetched about attacking the WTC. That had already happened once. The only "failure in imagination" is the failure to believe that terrorists would combine their most effective and well-known tactics into a single act.
But the worst part is that the "failure of imagination" wasn't the reason that 9/11 happened. It was the failure to prevent people from smuggling weapons onto planes and hijacking them that allowed 9/11 to happen, and those are threats that have been around for a very long time.
It's like Bruce Schneier has said many times, if you're spending time and effort in trying to prevent hollywood movie-style terrorist attacks instead of the routine, more effective (and much more likely) types of attacks, then you're probably wasting your time and resources. We're far more likely to end up with car bombs blowing up bridges or suicide bombers blowing themselves up at shopping malls than we are to end up with some exotic antrhax-infected mutant sharks with laserbeams. Hell, a handful of Beslan-style school attacks executed simultaneously across the US would probably have as big of an impact as 9/11 (look what happened with the relatively minor Virginia Tech incident), and it would probably be easier to implement too.
Let everyone onboard with any weapon (firearm) they are legally permitted to carry otherwise.
From my European perspective this is a Bad Idea. More innocent people are shot in the US than anywhere else in the world.
might as well arm the pilots too while we are at it.
Not as crazy as you think. Some people need to carry guns for their occupations (cops, for instance). What might happen is demonstrated by the case of an armed pilot of Garuda, Indonesian airways. Things more or less evolved in the following manner:
Hijacker (as he enters the cockpit): "This plane is hijacked!"
Pilot (shoots the hijacker) : "Not anymore."
Not a single passenger got injured.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
"...But there's a twist: it gets stronger every time you shoot at it, bomb it or do anything violent towards it. Why are you still shooting at it?..."
Very simple! Our jobs depend on there being a vicious animal that wants to attack us. This was fine during the 60s, 70s and 80s, and we had good job prospects. We got lots of established government funds.
Then, in the 90s, our vicious animal suddenly died on us. We were stuck. We weren't just going to quietly retire. We tried to invent drug barons, organised crime, and minor foreign countries as a new vicious animal, but it wasn't the same.
Now we have Islam! If we had been clever, we could have encouraged this ourselves, and paid Osama to crash those planes. We probably didn't, not because we wouldn't, but because we didn't have the foresight. But now it's happened, we're back in clover.
And we're damn well not going to mess this one up. It's going to last a long time, just like the Russian animal. Have you noticed how we insist that speeches are made stressing that this willl be a 'long haul'? Too right. We're not stupid. Everyone told us that invading Iraq would make things worse. Why do you think we did it?
Well, this is certainly a good brute-force approach. The problem, of course, is that there are a lot of vulnerable places. Schools, shopping malls, stadia, airplanes, hospitals, large buildings, bridges, factories, food processing plants, ports, power plants, electrical grid, network control centers... and the list goes on. So that means millions of guards. Possibly tens of millions. Assuming you're actually going to protect vulnerable places with well-trained guards. In a modern technological densely-populated society, that's a lot of places to protect.
Now if you want well-trained, highly competent guards, you're going to have to pay them more than the typical rent-a-cop rates. That'll be expensive. You'll have to arm them (with at least non-lethal weapons).
Let's say you only need 2.5 million guards in North America. (well under 1% of the population). Of course, they only work 40 hours a week, so you're looking at just over 4 shifts. OK, 10 million guards. Well-trained, highly competent, so you'll probably have salaries of around 50k, and support infrastructure and overhead that doubles that. 100k/year. That's a trillion dollars a year.
Is that really the best way to improve security? I can think of a lot of ways other than spending a trillion dollars on 'well trained guards in [all] vulnerable places'.
And you'll have something much closer to a police state -- either they'll be government guards or corporate guards.
And if you miss just one vulnerable place, then the approach fails. No, I'd rather apply intellect and thought to the problem rather than try and brute force it. I'm not sure the SF writers are the way to go, but I think it's a lot better than going the police state road and spending a trillion a year for the privilege.
-Holmwood
I'm not a Sci-fi writer but here is what I suggest:
Hello! We are not in a movie or a video game. We live in The Real World. People realy die, people realy suffer. We can't just rewind the movie or restart the game.
If you don't want someone to hurt you, don't be his enemy.
Put more simply: The president may be a tool, but that doesn't mean that the people he's railing against aren't also tools, or even much worse than he is. That's the biggest problem I have with "progressives" in this country -- they think evil or incompetence is a kind of zero sum game. If the president of the US is bad, his enemies can't *really* be all that bad, which is totally untrue.
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
I think he was saying that Flight 93 crashed because the people on board it stood up, realized something was going on, and fought for themselves.. not that they specifically had firearms.
----- The internet has given everyone the ability to have their voice heard equally as loud.. even if they shouldn't be
I'd say that saying "fundamental inequality and slavery is the cause of all terrorism" is as simplistic as saying "They hate us because of our freedom."
Let me go off on a minor tangent here, bear with me: The direct purpose of terrorism is to exact a response. The indirect purpose is to use the results of that response, where the results could be any number of things. In the case of 9/11, the clear purpose of the attacks was to cause America to react - nobody could possibly be so stupid as to think the most powerful country on Earth would just ignore thousands of its civilians being killed on its home turf. The only place America was likely to react was the Middle East. Therefore, very likely the purpose of 9/11 was to get the most powerful country on Earth to do a bull-in-a-china-shop act in the Middle East.
Why would OBL want that? OBL's direct aim is not to bring peace and prosperity to Palestine. It's not to ensure oppressed Muslims in Saudi Arabia worship on their own terms rather than the Saudi Royal Family's. It's not to make Afghanistan a modern, wealthy, state able to take care of its citizens. OBL's aim, as expressed repeatedly, is to create an Arab superstate, overthrowing the local governments there, and creating instead a single Islamic nation.
What does any of that have to do with inequality and slavery? Not a great deal. It's all about power, and it's a power struggle between the entrenched incumbent elite and a body that disagrees with them. But the disagreement isn't over the relatively lack of equality, it's a disagreement over an entirely different issue of religious and political significance. Insofar as equality is a factor, OBL feels obliged to use terrorism to achieve his aims because he doesn't have an army.
But if he had an army, he'd use that instead. Equality wouldn't prevent the war, it would just change how its fought. Which isn't really what, I think, you meant.
It's very tempting to look at terrorism as being purely a last resort of the oppressed, but it doesn't always work like that. Terrorism is frequently merely the first resort of those who want power over others, but do not have it yet.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
While I don't disagree with your point that the enemy is bad, even if the President is an idiot, there are plenty of places in this world that are in far worse shape than Iraq was under Saddam Hussein. You've heard of Sudan right? The President just made some sort of speech about it, several years after we learned about the problem and over a year after his administration claimed they would do something proactive about it.
And lets not get into Indonesia and all the problems there that we could have helped with, or Tibet, or Nepal. You do know there was essentially a civil war in Nepal for the last 10 years right? Oh, and the monarch disolved the parliament and basically imposed martial law on the place. What about Thailand, and the military coup that just occured?
Yes, Saddam Hussein was a bad man doing bad things. The point is, however, he was an "evil" we understood how to deal with. He was essentially no threat to anyone but himself and his own people. Yes that's bad, but his conflict wasn't causing issues any different than the others that have been going on at the same time. We did however decide to put on our big boy shoes and step in his playground to pick a fight with him as opposed to others. Why? Because it was a name people recognized (so even if it was the wrong choice at least some people would support it on name recognition alone), it was a profitable place to pick a fight, and it was during a period of economic "recession", which always calls for war. It's the great economic provider for the USA, and has been for a very long time. I won't even speculate at the personal economic gains of the administration, which others probably have far more information about.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
Yes they can. Just use an imaginary or real external threat, tell them that any measures are just for their own security, and denounce anyone who doesn't agree with that as "unpatriotic".
Or just bring bigger guns.
They did win easily. Saddam was toppled in a matter of minutes. But it's becoming blatantly apparent that they were more interested in a prolonged conflict, so they can deluge money on all the defense contractors and other direct supporters of the current administration. Once the money reaches Iraq, there is no legal accountability for anything. If you receive money to build a school, and don't, there's nothing illegal about it as long as you put up a half-assed attempt at trying to build one. (Meaning if you rented a bulldozer and claimed the security for it bankrupted you, you're off the hook.) Heck, 360 tons of cash went missing and the public did nothing about it.
After reading up on how the Department of Homeland Security was basically turned into the equivalent of a government contractor eBay, it seemed to confirm it. I've been told that the standing orders from the people who work there are that the department is not allowed to do anything themselves, they must contract everything out. So again the main focus seems to be funneling money to the contractors.
Contrary to the national media image (which by the way is controlled by their supporters) this administration is not dumb. This administration is quite adept at funneling money from the taxpayers to the contractors. All the rest of what they're doing just seems to support and protect this goal of theirs. As for Gitmo and "getting tough" on terrorists, they just know what show their base wants to see.
Bovine Fertilizer. There's plenty of arms in Iraq. Plenty of violence, too.
And I don't see martial law in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, or Canada where there is much stricter regulation of handguns.
I actually agree with your analysis. Almost completely. But you're missing a key aspect by focusing on Osama bin Laden. ObL is a leader, and this may describe his position - but it doesn't describe the position of the suicide bombers, the foot soldiers, the 9/11 hijackers themselves. In other words, why does anyone listen to ObL (or any similar person - why does anyone listen to Bush for that matter?).
The simple fact is that life for the lower classes in most of the world varies from difficult to an insane hell. This includes presumably advanced nations like the U.S. where it may be merely difficult compared to Saudi Arabia, but its still not something people would choose on its own merits. People have been looking for solutions for a long time, and some of those solutions have had mitigating effects on poverty and oppression, but certainly have not eliminated the deep problems that come with being on the bottom. The worse life on the bottom of the food chain becomes, the more desparate people get, and the more they want to lash out - moreover, the worse things get, the less they have to lose.
There's a passage in the movie Syriana that sums up what I think is going on for a lot of lower and middle class youths in the most oppressive nations - I'm just paraphrasing because I have a horrible memory for detailed quotations:
Communism has failed, capitalism and liberalism have failed. None of the ideologies have lived up to their promises that they would make a better life for us and our families. Things continue to get worse. We must understand we have always had the solution - the Koran tells us what to do, how to live in such a way as to make life better. But we have abandoned our faith. Only by going back to the old ways, the ways of faith, will things improve.
This is (again paraphrased) spoken by a terrorist recruiter roping in teenage boys. ObL, Bush or any other leader can scream all they want, and no one will go fight if the people themselves are convinced that the external threat is threatening them or keeping them from a better life in some way. Most of the terrorist/insurgent/what have you foot soldiers, I suspect, are not engaged in high-level thought about caliphates and theocratic political models. What they are is pissed off that they and their friends are oppressed and dying because of the local tyrant or his foreign allies, and someone has offered them an answer. When the U.S. comes along (whatever the leaders intentions) and bombs the hell out of their town, or soldiers kick their doors in an treat them like criminals, that answer starts to look increasingly correct - at least, its an option that gives them something they can do.