Terrorism in 'Murica (aka The Homeland)

"The warning that the bathrooms would be shut down led to lines 10 people deep at each lavatory. A demand by one attendant that no could read anything either elicited gasps of disbelief and howls of laughter.

Book bombs, it was only a matter of time until someone in the government remembered they used to hide squirt guns and contraband in them in high school.

Removal of fake arms and legs ought to also be on the slate.

Colostomy and urostomy bags, too, because they have the capacity for some volume.

No using of the bathroom because you might be removing your 'plan' filled with something or other. (See Papillon.)

Running discussion and comment carried over from Sunday on the bomber's underwear bomb, efficacy, overreaction, weak leadership and the usual ease with which failed plots turn into wins when the country acts like it has a glass jaw.

At my blog:

http://bit.ly/74SqRz

Thanks for the link, Gorge / DD.

Flew home from Knoxville today. No problems, nothing different, plane on map still there.

ok, i admit that if this kind of story came out under the bush administration, i'd be prone to "what a bunch of keystone kop"-type head-shaking. so fair's fair -- what a bunch of keystone kops. i know the communications problems and information-aggregating is more complicated than it always seems after the fact, but there were sort of an awful lot of red flags here. (and i also know that a lot of those problems are structural and institutional and transcend presidential administrations, and that the republicans are being complete idiot hypocrites in all their phony outrage, but that's just par for the course really. it's always been clear that in any attack under a democratic administration, there will be no rallying-behind-the-president, that's not how they play the game.)

The system clearly didn't work on several levels. The intelligence community didn't recognize this guy as a legit threat, the State Dept. was oblivious to some obvious red flags, the flight list vetting process probably should have prevented him from ever getting on the plane, and the airport screening system failed to detect a bomb. All of this is true, but the lesson here is that no system will ever be foolproof, or even particularly effective. We can pump billions of dollars into the problem and erode civil liberties and cause major headaches and inconveniences, and it still won't stop terrorism from happening. All this hand wringing and finger pointing misses that fundamental truth.

rip cia dudes (not in 'murica but still)

We can pump billions of dollars into the problem and erode civil liberties and cause major headaches and inconveniences, and it still won't stop terrorism from happening. All this hand wringing and finger pointing misses that fundamental truth.

― Super Cub, Thursday, December 31, 2009 9:14 AM (6 hours ago) Bookmark

this is obviously otm. with the depressing corollary that the bigger we build our "security" apparatus, the more dedicated the apparatus becomes to preserving and expanding its own institutional power and resources. terrorism is in a way a bigger gift to the military-industrial megillah than the cold war, because while it doesn't necessarily produce vast investments on the scale of thousands and thousands of warheads, it is also much less likely to evaporate as a persistent threat -- because all you need to keep it going is one guy with a bomb every couple of years. which makes the failures of the system work to its own advantage.

"terrorism is in a way a bigger gift to the military-industrial megillah than the cold war"

otm

according to my airline, security arrangements are back to pre-Dec 25 for UK-US flights

also I'm kinda puzzled why the US government is in the business of providing airline security anyway, as opposed to the airlines themselves.

airlines cant even make bags go from one place to another reliably

i can't imagine how insane security would be if the airlines ran it

If airlines are no longer giving me my free bag of cashews I at least want to know that my bags aren't packing shoe bombs.

I guess I'm thinking like a right-winger but it seems to me that The Market could provide a better airline security situation than the crazy, useless, time-waste we have now.

yeah prob not

problem with market-based security is kind of the same problem we already have. if the incentive is to get more money into the system, then every failure of security just leades to more investment. if it created incentives for anything, it would be for them to send a guy with explosives through every couple of years to almost blow up a plane.

if it created incentives for anything, it would be for them to send a guy with explosives through every couple of years to almost blow up a plane.

would watch this movie btw

I don't trust The Market with security situations. First, providing security is a bedrock reason for government. If it shouldn't do that, it's hard to imagine what it should do. Second, for a host of reasons, market incentives are not consistent with good security measures.

But yeah, I'd watch that movie too.

wait, so you're saying that if you let Business handle airline security, rather than the government, then Business would do whatever it takes to get more money, including tricking people into thinking the risks are worse than they really are?

duh

El Al to thread

so is that what's going on now? b/c Business is already making big green off the nonsense in place now

airlines could get people to fly based on the "fly us & you could be on the new reality show 'To Catch A Terrorist'"

people'll do anything to be on TV

yeah we talked about El Al a few days ago, and it's what's getting me thinking about how they do security so well and how we do it so shittily.

don't trust The Market with security situations. First, providing security is a bedrock reason for government. If it shouldn't do that, it's hard to imagine what it should do. Second, for a host of reasons, market incentives are not consistent with good security measures.

Good idea. Unfortunately, not what rules in the US, which explains much. The market has been left to rule entire swaths of national security, making it entirely into the national security business. What that means is they get their people into positions where they right security policy which does nothing but favor their business interests. This is very noticeable in the outsourcing of security and intelligence work within the agencies of the natsec infrastructure ot private business.

The marquee example is Blackwater, but -- really it's all across the board. The big players like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Science Applications, myriads of defense contractors, have all expanded market rule into homeland security.

I've written about it quite a lot, for various places including blogging. One recent summary, focused on national cybersecurity issues is here:

http://www.dickdestiny.com/blog/2009/12/cybersecurity-schwick-earlier-today-j.html

wait, so you're saying that if you let Business handle airline security, rather than the government, then Business would do whatever it takes to get more money, including tricking people into thinking the risks are worse than they really are?

That's one way of putting it although it doesn't perfectly capture what really happens.

What happens is the natsec businesses oversell their undeveloped and imperfect technologies as perfect answers, get them bought and paid for by the taxpayer, and these only provide security theatre. They don't provide the solution originally promised, but after the fact this becomes immaterial.

Or they provide leased contract workers at premium rates, more than what the government would pay employees indigenously. In fact, they get into the business of poaching civil servants and turning them around, after they've been trained by the government and the taxpayer dime, and lease them back to the same agencies at higher rates.

You'll have noticed this has nothing to do with improving national security.

if it created incentives for anything, it would be for them to send a guy with explosives through every couple of years to almost blow up a plane.

Already been done and being done. There are entire operations devoted to this. The problem is they only approach the problem from an unlimited resources what-can-we-do-as-Americans-with-anything-we-want-on-the-plate approach. This isn't the same as real life, where the terrorists are forced to come up with things like underwear bombs or things cobbled together by people who totally lack resources, both material and human, which is the opposite of the US model.

I am now officially getting drunk in preparation for tomorrow.

Additional security was a joke. I'm white btw.

Now at the gate and desperate for a wee. Pro-tip for ailsa: depending on your gate, you may not be able to go to the toilet for a couple of hours once you clear the additional security.

Got my junk touched though. Start the year as I hope to go on.

The first time I flew through Heathrow (in 1997 I think) the security guy fondled my nuts so thoroughly that I thought he should have bought me dinner first.

two of the cia dudes killed a few days ago were dudettes and one of them was a friend of mine from high school, if what i'm hearing is correct. all i know is she was killed a few days ago by a bomb.

v sorry to hear that

yikes, that's horrible.

have to say that after everything i'm sort of shocked that blackwater (oops, XE) employees are still on CIA payroll. how many fuck ups do these guys have to make? or are there just few or no other options?

background on that attack http://www.slate.com/id/2240446

just got back from nyc, flew in from manchester on 27 and came back through the fucking chaos that was an evacuated newark airport last night.

on the flight there they turned off the map AND the movies, because it was all one system but yeah pretty dumb anyone can use a watch and figure out roughly where they are - or look out window.

newark last night was horrendous, and almost put me off flying to the states ever again. 7 hours stuck in the entrance area with thousands of other people - nobody telling us what was going on for the most part.

the bonus was that when i finally got back through the gates my reserved seat was taken and they put me up in business class. excellent!

I just read about the Newark evac!!!!! FUCKING A, there are not the words to say what that must have been like. It makes my experience on Dec 21 look tame and I thought people were going to riot then.

thanks for the article link, cr?m. i don't know for certain that she died in that bombing, but the lack of info being released and the timing suggests that it's probably the case. she wasn't a soldier, i know that much. her recent facebook updates are tough to read.

yeah laurel what was really strange was how calm everybody was about it. what really sucked was that when it happened and we got hoarded out, i was about twenty mins from my flight taking off!

i've been in lots of travel chaos situations but this one was just something else, on top of which i was suffering from some sort of stomach virus which was great.

i think seeing the little kid poo himself, and then hold it in his hand was as close as i got to just walking the fuck out of there.

Bloody hell, that evac must've been horrible. What strikes me in the (thankfully rare) occasions where I've experienced some delay or whatever at airports is that they have a lot of procedures they can go through but none of them ever involve an effective way of communicating to the public what they should be doing.

tbf ive had similar experiences at jfk sans terror

Latest foiled terror plot (or "plot")

Oregon terror averted

These cases make me very uncomfortable. These guys seem like serious wannabes with no means or contact with larger organizations. They are set-up. Maybe it's best to be rid of wannabes before they find a way to be the real thing (or just get a gun and go on a shooting spree), but this pre-emptive law-enforcement approach freaks me out.

Further reference:

Pre-emptive approach controversial

Washpost headline:

FBI foils its own elaborate bomb plot in Oregon

hmm

A bomb left along the route of a Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade was a sophisticated explosive that had a remote detonator and the ability to cause many casualties, an official familiar with the case said Wednesday.

The bomb, which was defused without incident on Monday, was the most potentially destructive he had ever seen, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to release information about the investigation.

yeah this is fucked. can't wait to see where it goes.

Greenwald on the mammoth boondoggle of "homeland security" projects:

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/08/29/terrorism/index.html

"The number of people worldwide who are killed by Muslim-type terrorists, Al Qaeda wannabes, is maybe a few hundred outside of war zones. It's basically the same number of people who die drowning in the bathtub each year," said John Mueller, an Ohio State University professor who has written extensively about the balance between threat and expenditures in fighting terrorism.

Last year, McClatchy characterized this threat in similar terms: "undoubtedly more American citizens died overseas from traffic accidents or intestinal illnesses than from terrorism." The March, 2011, Harper's Index expressed the point this way: "Number of American civilians who died worldwide in terrorist attacks last year: 8 -- Minimum number who died after being struck by lightning: 29." That's the threat in the name of which a vast domestic Security State is constructed, wars and other attacks are and continue to be launched, and trillions of dollars are transferred to the private security and defense contracting industry at exactly the time that Americans -- even as they face massive wealth inequality -- are told that they must sacrifice basic economic security because of budgetary constraints.

silver had a similar thing on the statistical likelihood of dying in a plane that's been the target of a terrorist attack

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/12/odds-of-airborne-terror.html

A bomb left along the route of a Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade was a sophisticated explosive that had a remote detonator and the ability to cause many casualties, an official familiar with the case said Wednesday.

The bomb, which was defused without incident on Monday, was the most potentially destructive he had ever seen, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to release information about the investigation.

Safe to say 99% of Americans have forgotten or never knew that this ever happened?

So are we gonna talk about this Chelsea bombing or what