I'm a little rushed for time, but here are a few thoughts.
First, if you want to accept the "more people get killed by accidents" argument, then the US should not have entered WW2 after Pearl Harbor. There were something like 40,000 people killed on the highways that year, and only 3,000 at Pearl Harbor. The instrumentality wasn't that different - planes flying to kill people. Like the attack on Pearl Harbor the attack on New York and the Pentagon are only a small part of a much larger conflict. Just as it would have been a mistake to ignore Pearl Harbor, it would have been a mistake to ignore 9/11. In fact, it was the ineffective response to previous attacks by al Qaida and actions by the US perceived as weak in other recent military confrontations that made the 9/11 attack more attractive to al Qaida. Confusing willful human action - terrorist attacks - with random chance accidents is morally confused thinking. Build me a case why bank robbery should be ignored until it reaches the body count of traffic accidents and I'll be glad to take a look at it.
Face it. There are only two reasons you care about this event.
You're playing junior psychologist there, probably without a license, and getting it wrong. But lets turn part of it around. Suppose the 19 hijackers from 9/11 had instead driven around in a couple of vans and committed the murders, the 10 / day that you suggest. Do you think that there would be no uproar after a few days? Especially if it was known that it was al Qaida terrorists on a murder spree? There would be an enormous manhunt after only a few days. I can't even imagine what it would be like if they got even so far as a month on a daily murder spree like that. An attack like that would still be pretty certain to draw an armed response. If they managed to kill 3,000 again, I would be unsurprised if it was the same one.
The death toll from automobile accidents could be cut enormously right now by cutting the speed limit to no higher than 30 kph everywhere. Do you want to take up that fight? After all, saving lives from accidents is more important than stopping mass murder based on the number of lives saved, right?
As to the question about nail clippers, pens, and fluids, I assume it is based on a risk assessment of what likely damage could be inflicted by various items. I won't argue that they haven't made some odd choices, some bad choices, and occasional bouts of bad local behavior.
9/11 wasn't a tragedy, it was an atrocity. It was willful mass murder, not just some unfortunate, sad thing.
The overall burden of the counter-terrorism measures for most people have been rather limited. There is some imposition on privacy, but less than there was in WW2.
The issue in this case is "where can you have them," not "why not have them."
A fake grenade can still be used to make a threat since a grenade is a bomb, and nobody on an aircraft in flight really wants to find out if your bomb can explode. Experience has shown that real or fake bombs on airplanes are a bad thing. Leave the fake bombs at home, or ship them by package delivery service. As a consolation you can bring the bunny slippers.
A hand grenade is in essence a bomb. There have been plenty of hijackings committed in the past that relied on the threat of a hijacker to detonate a bomb. You don't know if the bomb is real or fake until it explodes, or doesn't. (And if it doesn't, are you sure it isn't simply a misfire that might yet explode?) The general stand taken when there is a threat of a bomb is to take actions so that the bomb doesn't explode as threatened. That means complying with the hijacker.
You go mourn your few thousand. Those of us who try to not let logic override our sense will fight the bigger threats to society,... Please stay the fuck out of our way.
So, you are one of those people then? Lets test that.
More people died that day 12 years ago in car crashes than have died in all terrorist attacks within the USA *ever*.
In the US in 2001 there were 42,196 traffic deaths. Averaging that out it comes to 116 deaths per day. 9/11 killed nearly 3,000 people, so you didn't get that right.
The TSA has killed more people than the terrorists did by making flying less pleasant so people take the far less-safe option of driving
It appears that it wasn't the TSA that did it, but people's reaction to the attacks. The law authorizing the TSA to even exist wasn't signed until November 2001 and the excess deaths started earlier. So, it looks like you didn't get that right either.
We show that the public’s response to terrorist threats can have unintended consequences that rival the attacks themselves in severity. Driving fatalities increased significantly after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, events that prompted many travelers to substitute road transportation for safer air transportation. After controlling for time trends, weather, road conditions, and other factors, we find that travelers’ response to 9/11 resulted in 344 driving deaths per month in late 2001. Moreover, while the effect of 9/11 weakened over time, a total of about 2,170 driving deaths may be attributable to the attacks.
--------
How many people have died as a *direct* result of the US's response to those terrorist attacks, huh?
US and coalition forces have been responsible for only a minor percentage of civilian deaths in these conflicts. Most of the civilian deaths are a result of terrorist attacks or various forms of internecine warfare, such as the tribal and faction based warfare in Iraq. So, I don't think you've got a good understanding of that either.
Now, let's look at the damage to the US economy from the 2008 sub-prime mortgage collapse.
A big part of the sub-prime scandal was a political problem. A string of US presidents and other US politicians tried to use the regulatory power of government to force public and private lenders to make more loans to various poor and minority groups to try to increase home ownership under the theory it would benefit society. Unfortunately that meant forcing the lenders to make loans to people that couldn't pay back the loans, but the lenders didn't have much choice. The government regulators made it clear there would be consequences to the lenders if they didn't make the loans. That resulted in a lot of bad loans which were ultimately going to damage the lenders. Spreading risk is traditional way of managing risk in business. Unfortunately there were enough bad loans they were a big problem. The problem got worse when the loans were bundled and sold as securities. Add to that the craze for house flipping and real estate speculation and even more fuel was added to the fire. It was a huge problem. Although you don't directly state a view, since you are focusing on the bankers so heavily it seems likely to me that you probably don't have this right.
The terrorists are all dead, and we spent a fuckton more money to go hunt down everybody connected to them.
Actually no, they aren't all dead. Al Qaida and its affiliates were badly damaged, but they keep trying to rebuild and will be around for a long time to come. The more general problem of Islamic extremism won't be going away soon. The unrest the in the Middle East continues to add fuel to the f
You should continue your research to determine what the trend was before and after they starting taking more serious security measures. A raw count isn't going to do that. I think it is likely that you will find some inflection points as various nations took more effective airport security measures, usually as a result of an incident, or a string of incidents.
I'm not interested in a "climate of fear." I'm interested in keeping the incidents of terrorism & hijackings under reasonable control which is a rational goal. Fear adds nothing to that. Intelligence and effective security measures do.
I think you may have missed the point of some of what I wrote: the problem is relatively limited in some nations because it is kept under control*, not because there is some natural low level that makes it uniformly rare. It is certainly something that is subject to change. You could ask the Iraqis on that point. They are currently regretting that the US left and have extended some feelers about bringing some US forces back. Terrorism was largely under control in the last years of US presence, but the rate and death toll has shot up again over the last year or so. Iraqi pride didn't allow them to reach a position allowing any US military presence. When the US left it look some capabilities that the Iraqis sorely miss now, and which it will likely take them some years to develop. Even then they may not be as good as the US was at some of it. The Iraqi military tried to tell their government, but politicians pursue their own goals.
*For which there are many influencing factors beyond just good intelligence and police work, including the nature of the society.
Because terrorists are so rare that they are not even worth worrying about, and never were.
Never? Ever? Hope isn't a strategy, and denial is a poor shield.
I also think you picked a rather ironic day to make that statement, the anniversary of an attack that killed 3,000 people and did $100,000,000,000 damage to the US economy.
You only think that terrorism is rare because so few large scale plots succeed in Western countries where the problem is largely under control. There are plenty of arrests and convictions that help keep it under control and make it appear that terrorists are rare. If you want to see what a country looks like where it isn't under control, think back a few years to Iraq. People on Slashdot and other places complained bitterly about the deaths of 100,000+ Iraqis. Well guess what? A major portion of them were killed by terrorists. Proportionately that would be something like 120,000 people a year killed in the US.
Most people pay no attention to it and try to pretend it isn't there. But it is there, a slow, steady stream of events that could mean successful attacks and mass casualties if not watched and interdicted by law enforcement.
Contrary to the myopic view of some people, the point isn't to spread fear, or to get people to live in fear, but rather to take reasonable precautions. Keeping hand grenades off planes is a reasonable precaution. There is no good reason to have facsimile hand grenades on a plane. Keeping facsimile grenades off planes helps cut down on both confusion and the possibility of using one as a threat, as if it was a real grenade, a proposition few will want to test. After all, a grenade is a bomb, isn't it?
Now if you want to go down the "but other things kill way more many people than terrorists do" route, there are a few questions I'm going to ask you to answer since few of those other things have to do with willful human action resulting in mass murder. Few societies tolerate that.
So in summary, your view will be popular, but at best misguided or a demonstration of the power of denial. In fact I think the evidence indicates your answer is simply wrong.
Now if you excuse me, I have a few thousand people to remember, and I hope there won't be more.
Yeah how about trying "We were ordered to do it by the US government and we can't give you details because a) national security and b) gag order". Seems to work for the government, why can't it work for Google?
Because the government will be able to declare in court that they didn't do it, and Google won't have proof that they did?
they could eventually control (delaying, giving partial or even fake information) what they NSA gets,
Only if they want to go to jail, which I doubt. That goes especially for the "fake" information, that would be especially difficult to explain to a prosecutor and judge.
Why, then, have we spied on you? The answer is quite apparent from the Campbell report -- in the discussion of the only two cases in which European companies have allegedly been targets of American secret intelligence collection. Of Thomson-CSF, the report says: "The company was alleged to have bribed members of the Brazilian government selection panel." Of Airbus, it says that we found that "Airbus agents were offering bribes to a Saudi official." These facts are inevitably left out of European press reports.
That's right, my continental friends, we have spied on you because you bribe. Your companies' products are often more costly, less technically advanced or both, than your American competitors'. As a result you bribe a lot. So complicit are your governments that in several European countries bribes still are tax-deductible.
When we have caught you at it, you might be interested, we haven't said a word to the U.S. companies in the competition. Instead we go to the government you're bribing and tell its officials that we don't take kindly to such corruption. They often respond by giving the most meritorious bid (sometimes American, sometimes not) all or part of the contract. This upsets you, and sometimes creates recriminations between your bribers and the other country's bribees, and this occasionally becomes a public scandal.
What was the competitive advantage for US based companies in fighting to keep South Korea free from North Korea's invasion?
What was the competitive advantage for US based companies in fighting to keep South Vietnam free from North Vietnam's invasion?
What was the competitive advantage for US based companies in helping Taiwan remain free from the Communist Chinese government?
What was the competitive advantage for US based companies in helping Western Europe remain free from the Communist Block?
What was the competitive advantage for US based companies in freeing Kuwait from Iraqi occupation in 1991?
What was the competitive advantage for US based companies in overthrowing Saddam's Iraq, bringing a democratic government to Iraq, and then leaving? (Before you say "oil," you should check and see what countries companies actually got the oil contracts. You might be surprised.)
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a little rushed for time, but here are a few thoughts.
First, if you want to accept the "more people get killed by accidents" argument, then the US should not have entered WW2 after Pearl Harbor. There were something like 40,000 people killed on the highways that year, and only 3,000 at Pearl Harbor. The instrumentality wasn't that different - planes flying to kill people. Like the attack on Pearl Harbor the attack on New York and the Pentagon are only a small part of a much larger conflict. Just as it would have been a mistake to ignore Pearl Harbor, it would have been a mistake to ignore 9/11. In fact, it was the ineffective response to previous attacks by al Qaida and actions by the US perceived as weak in other recent military confrontations that made the 9/11 attack more attractive to al Qaida. Confusing willful human action - terrorist attacks - with random chance accidents is morally confused thinking. Build me a case why bank robbery should be ignored until it reaches the body count of traffic accidents and I'll be glad to take a look at it.
Face it. There are only two reasons you care about this event.
You're playing junior psychologist there, probably without a license, and getting it wrong. But lets turn part of it around. Suppose the 19 hijackers from 9/11 had instead driven around in a couple of vans and committed the murders, the 10 / day that you suggest. Do you think that there would be no uproar after a few days? Especially if it was known that it was al Qaida terrorists on a murder spree? There would be an enormous manhunt after only a few days. I can't even imagine what it would be like if they got even so far as a month on a daily murder spree like that. An attack like that would still be pretty certain to draw an armed response. If they managed to kill 3,000 again, I would be unsurprised if it was the same one.
The death toll from automobile accidents could be cut enormously right now by cutting the speed limit to no higher than 30 kph everywhere. Do you want to take up that fight? After all, saving lives from accidents is more important than stopping mass murder based on the number of lives saved, right?
As to the question about nail clippers, pens, and fluids, I assume it is based on a risk assessment of what likely damage could be inflicted by various items. I won't argue that they haven't made some odd choices, some bad choices, and occasional bouts of bad local behavior.
9/11 wasn't a tragedy, it was an atrocity. It was willful mass murder, not just some unfortunate, sad thing.
The overall burden of the counter-terrorism measures for most people have been rather limited. There is some imposition on privacy, but less than there was in WW2.
The issue in this case is "where can you have them," not "why not have them."
A fake grenade can still be used to make a threat since a grenade is a bomb, and nobody on an aircraft in flight really wants to find out if your bomb can explode. Experience has shown that real or fake bombs on airplanes are a bad thing. Leave the fake bombs at home, or ship them by package delivery service. As a consolation you can bring the bunny slippers.
A hand grenade is in essence a bomb. There have been plenty of hijackings committed in the past that relied on the threat of a hijacker to detonate a bomb. You don't know if the bomb is real or fake until it explodes, or doesn't. (And if it doesn't, are you sure it isn't simply a misfire that might yet explode?) The general stand taken when there is a threat of a bomb is to take actions so that the bomb doesn't explode as threatened. That means complying with the hijacker.
Simple enough? Contemplate this for a while.
You go mourn your few thousand. Those of us who try to not let logic override our sense will fight the bigger threats to society,... Please stay the fuck out of our way.
So, you are one of those people then? Lets test that.
More people died that day 12 years ago in car crashes than have died in all terrorist attacks within the USA *ever*.
In the US in 2001 there were 42,196 traffic deaths. Averaging that out it comes to 116 deaths per day. 9/11 killed nearly 3,000 people, so you didn't get that right.
The TSA has killed more people than the terrorists did by making flying less pleasant so people take the far less-safe option of driving
It appears that it wasn't the TSA that did it, but people's reaction to the attacks. The law authorizing the TSA to even exist wasn't signed until November 2001 and the excess deaths started earlier. So, it looks like you didn't get that right either.
Driving Fatalities After 9/11: A Hidden Cost of Terrorism*
We show that the public’s response to terrorist threats can have unintended consequences that rival the attacks themselves in severity. Driving fatalities increased significantly after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, events that prompted many travelers to substitute road transportation for safer air transportation. After controlling for time trends, weather, road conditions, and other factors, we find that travelers’ response to 9/11 resulted in 344 driving deaths per month in late 2001. Moreover, while the effect of 9/11 weakened over time, a total of about 2,170 driving deaths may be attributable to the attacks.
--------
How many people have died as a *direct* result of the US's response to those terrorist attacks, huh?
US and coalition forces have been responsible for only a minor percentage of civilian deaths in these conflicts. Most of the civilian deaths are a result of terrorist attacks or various forms of internecine warfare, such as the tribal and faction based warfare in Iraq. So, I don't think you've got a good understanding of that either.
Now, let's look at the damage to the US economy from the 2008 sub-prime mortgage collapse.
A big part of the sub-prime scandal was a political problem. A string of US presidents and other US politicians tried to use the regulatory power of government to force public and private lenders to make more loans to various poor and minority groups to try to increase home ownership under the theory it would benefit society. Unfortunately that meant forcing the lenders to make loans to people that couldn't pay back the loans, but the lenders didn't have much choice. The government regulators made it clear there would be consequences to the lenders if they didn't make the loans. That resulted in a lot of bad loans which were ultimately going to damage the lenders. Spreading risk is traditional way of managing risk in business. Unfortunately there were enough bad loans they were a big problem. The problem got worse when the loans were bundled and sold as securities. Add to that the craze for house flipping and real estate speculation and even more fuel was added to the fire. It was a huge problem. Although you don't directly state a view, since you are focusing on the bankers so heavily it seems likely to me that you probably don't have this right.
The terrorists are all dead, and we spent a fuckton more money to go hunt down everybody connected to them.
Actually no, they aren't all dead. Al Qaida and its affiliates were badly damaged, but they keep trying to rebuild and will be around for a long time to come. The more general problem of Islamic extremism won't be going away soon. The unrest the in the Middle East continues to add fuel to the f
You should continue your research to determine what the trend was before and after they starting taking more serious security measures. A raw count isn't going to do that. I think it is likely that you will find some inflection points as various nations took more effective airport security measures, usually as a result of an incident, or a string of incidents.
I'm not interested in a "climate of fear." I'm interested in keeping the incidents of terrorism & hijackings under reasonable control which is a rational goal. Fear adds nothing to that. Intelligence and effective security measures do.
I think you may have missed the point of some of what I wrote: the problem is relatively limited in some nations because it is kept under control*, not because there is some natural low level that makes it uniformly rare. It is certainly something that is subject to change. You could ask the Iraqis on that point. They are currently regretting that the US left and have extended some feelers about bringing some US forces back. Terrorism was largely under control in the last years of US presence, but the rate and death toll has shot up again over the last year or so. Iraqi pride didn't allow them to reach a position allowing any US military presence. When the US left it look some capabilities that the Iraqis sorely miss now, and which it will likely take them some years to develop. Even then they may not be as good as the US was at some of it. The Iraqi military tried to tell their government, but politicians pursue their own goals.
*For which there are many influencing factors beyond just good intelligence and police work, including the nature of the society.
I agree that sounds stupid. But we live in an era of stupidity, don't we?
Student suspended for shaping Pop-Tart into gun
And yet government keeps growing....
I hope your next flight goes better. Cheers.
Because terrorists are so rare that they are not even worth worrying about, and never were.
Never? Ever? Hope isn't a strategy, and denial is a poor shield.
I also think you picked a rather ironic day to make that statement, the anniversary of an attack that killed 3,000 people and did $100,000,000,000 damage to the US economy.
You only think that terrorism is rare because so few large scale plots succeed in Western countries where the problem is largely under control. There are plenty of arrests and convictions that help keep it under control and make it appear that terrorists are rare. If you want to see what a country looks like where it isn't under control, think back a few years to Iraq. People on Slashdot and other places complained bitterly about the deaths of 100,000+ Iraqis. Well guess what? A major portion of them were killed by terrorists. Proportionately that would be something like 120,000 people a year killed in the US.
Most people pay no attention to it and try to pretend it isn't there. But it is there, a slow, steady stream of events that could mean successful attacks and mass casualties if not watched and interdicted by law enforcement.
Cellphone led FBI to Times Square car bomb suspect arrest
FBI arrests four California men in alleged terror plot
You must certainly know that I could post a much longer list of successful attacks killing many people if I chose to.
Contrary to the myopic view of some people, the point isn't to spread fear, or to get people to live in fear, but rather to take reasonable precautions. Keeping hand grenades off planes is a reasonable precaution. There is no good reason to have facsimile hand grenades on a plane. Keeping facsimile grenades off planes helps cut down on both confusion and the possibility of using one as a threat, as if it was a real grenade, a proposition few will want to test. After all, a grenade is a bomb, isn't it?
Now if you want to go down the "but other things kill way more many people than terrorists do" route, there are a few questions I'm going to ask you to answer since few of those other things have to do with willful human action resulting in mass murder. Few societies tolerate that.
So in summary, your view will be popular, but at best misguided or a demonstration of the power of denial. In fact I think the evidence indicates your answer is simply wrong.
Now if you excuse me, I have a few thousand people to remember, and I hope there won't be more.
CNN 09 11 2001 Live Unedited CNN News Coverage Of WTC Attacks
I'm afraid your lovely theory is ruined by the history of hijacking.
El Al Flight 426 hijacking
Richard Floyd McCoy, Jr. - Aircraft Hijacking
Hijacked Iraq Jet Crashes, Killing 62 : Two Hurl Grenades, Force Airliner Down in Saudi Arabia
There are more.
Simple.... all those grenades....0 of them in the hands of terrorists. That should tell you this is a stupid issue.
Because no terrorist would want to bring a grenade on a plane?
If the existing security is finding the grenades they don't need additional security.
Is that a clever way of telling us that your wife is "da bomb"?
Just out of curiosity, are you arguing with the "no grenades" policy?
A majority, but not all.
Of course, once in the air, circumstances may arise where the only way to tell is to see if it will go off. Not many people want to do that.
Hijacking using bombs, or a threat of a bomb (what's a fake?), was a popular pastime in the 1960s-70s.
TSA finds average of 4 guns each day at airports, with number continuing to rise since 2007
If it is all just "security theater," the "patrons" seem a bit over-armed.
Right; I mean, it's not like Mossad has a reputation for being disreputable or anything...
Compared to who?
Oh, then there's that whole extraordinary rendition/Gitmo stuff.
Which probably accounts for well under 1,000 people total, ever, and next to no US citizens, if any.
I have my doubts about that, especially for a federal court.
The court. That's all it takes.
Yeah how about trying "We were ordered to do it by the US government and we can't give you details because a) national security and b) gag order". Seems to work for the government, why can't it work for Google?
Because the government will be able to declare in court that they didn't do it, and Google won't have proof that they did?
they could eventually control (delaying, giving partial or even fake information) what they NSA gets,
Only if they want to go to jail, which I doubt. That goes especially for the "fake" information, that would be especially difficult to explain to a prosecutor and judge.
Things are of a different flavor than suggested by that excerpt. The Campbell report is addressed specifically in Woolsey's piece.
Why We Spy on Our Allies
Why, then, have we spied on you? The answer is quite apparent from the Campbell report -- in the discussion of the only two cases in which European companies have allegedly been targets of American secret intelligence collection. Of Thomson-CSF, the report says: "The company was alleged to have bribed members of the Brazilian government selection panel." Of Airbus, it says that we found that "Airbus agents were offering bribes to a Saudi official." These facts are inevitably left out of European press reports.
That's right, my continental friends, we have spied on you because you bribe. Your companies' products are often more costly, less technically advanced or both, than your American competitors'. As a result you bribe a lot. So complicit are your governments that in several European countries bribes still are tax-deductible.
When we have caught you at it, you might be interested, we haven't said a word to the U.S. companies in the competition. Instead we go to the government you're bribing and tell its officials that we don't take kindly to such corruption. They often respond by giving the most meritorious bid (sometimes American, sometimes not) all or part of the contract. This upsets you, and sometimes creates recriminations between your bribers and the other country's bribees, and this occasionally becomes a public scandal.
Every gov knows what Russia, the UK and US do with their "Consulate" floors
Oh come now A., the club is bigger than that! The majority of countries get in on the spy game at some level.
The Germans: The German Prism: Berlin Wants to Spy
Very involved in the current crisis: Assad did not order Syria chemical weapons attack, says German press
The Finns and Swedes can't be left out: Supo wants expanded net surveillance powers
Nor the French: France 'runs vast electronic spying operation using NSA-style methods'
The club is bigger still: Think US snooping is bad? Try Italy, India orCanada
Thousands of Russian spies in US: ex-CIA agent
Gordievsky: Russia has as many spies in Britain now as the USSR ever did
Chinese Spies Targeting U.K., MI5 Warns
But of course! Chinese use honeytraps to spy on French companies, intelligence report claims
Germany accuses China of industrial espionage
Germany targets Russian, Chinese spies
Spies in Sweden mostly from China, Russia, Iran
Number of Foreign Spies on the Rise in Finland
Austrian capital ‘filled with Iranian spies’
Foreign spies targeting Polish shale - Natural Gas Europe
Spain arrests three suspected of spying for Iran
Russia warns Ireland it will retaliate in spy row
FBI releases papers on Russian Irish spies in US - ‘Ghost Stories’
Sometimes the trails can get very complicated.
For some reason this video comes to mind: Its a Small World
I.e. no problem, so long as we aren't spying on him.
Don't worry, they can spy back.
The German Prism: Berlin Wants to Spy Too
What was the competitive advantage for US based companies in fighting to keep South Korea free from North Korea's invasion?
What was the competitive advantage for US based companies in fighting to keep South Vietnam free from North Vietnam's invasion?
What was the competitive advantage for US based companies in helping Taiwan remain free from the Communist Chinese government?
What was the competitive advantage for US based companies in helping Western Europe remain free from the Communist Block?
What was the competitive advantage for US based companies in freeing Kuwait from Iraqi occupation in 1991?
What was the competitive advantage for US based companies in overthrowing Saddam's Iraq, bringing a democratic government to Iraq, and then leaving? (Before you say "oil," you should check and see what countries companies actually got the oil contracts. You might be surprised.)
I think you "know" some things that aren't so.
A little more data for you.
Airbus' Presentation on Boeing 787 - Bad CI Ethics?
Boeing Called A Target Of French Spy Effort
You might read those, then read the link above labeled, "Why We Spy on Our Allies."
US spies, how should others respond then? By rolling over?
I think you have things a little confused.
Boeing Called A Target Of French Spy Effort