Reasoning about Terrorism

Creating a new federal agency (TSA) and "federalizing" the airline security people is a huge mistake.

Putting anything inside the federal government centralizes and fossilizes it. It becomes harder and slower to change, less able to adapt to local variations, less efficient. Where are the small-government conservatives when you need them ?

Transferring much of the police and some of the National Guard into "show the uniform" and "clog up the airports" duty is of little use.

Would any of that have prevented the 9/11 terrorism ? And who's out arresting normal criminals and policing the idiot drivers on our streets ? We lose as many people to automobile accidents every month as we did on 9/11.

Violating the constitution by holding lots of people without charges, representation and trial is very bad.

God help you if the government decides you are dangerous; they'll take your rights away. Where are the less-government conservatives when you need them ?

What kind of example is this setting for the rest of the world ? We're undercutting our own "moral authority" to speak of the virtues of democracy, rule of law, human rights, etc. In a way, the terrorists won: they got us to ruin our own system at home and our credibility abroad.

The only reason I can see for this is that the evidence against these people must not be able to withstand the light of day. I'll bet most of them eventually get deported for minor violations [I was right].

The same holds for the "enemy combatants" captured in Afghanistan and held in Guantanamo or secret prisons. Why can't they have legal representation, at least as a group ? Is the justification for holding them, and the evidence against them, so weak ?

Every debate about the Guantanamo prisoners seems to assume that every single one of them is guilty horrible terrorist, but isn't it possible that some are innocent ? Would you grant at least a 1% error rate ? Even some prisoners who end up on Death Row after a decade of legal proceedings have turned out to be innocent; why not some of those in Guantanamo ? So, how would you feel if you were one of the 1% innocent sitting in Guantanamo ? In prison forever with no representation or legal process.
[As of 11/2008, the govt has released some 2/3 of the people it held in Guantanamo. Many weren't guilty of anything. Many were "guilty" of fighting US soldiers in a war zone.]
[In 4/2011, WikiLeaks released files showing that of 780 prisoners who passed through Guantanamo, about 150 were completely innocent of any offense, and about 220 were low-level gunmen or criminals of one sort or another.]

Even if denying them any rational legal process is Constitutional and legal, it shouldn't be.

Larry Siems's "How America Came To Torture Its Prisoners"
This Modern World on "Real Americans"

Hiding information about nuclear power plants etc from public view is not a solution. This behavior is called "security through obscurity", and it is well known to fail. It lets those in authority hide their incompetence and pretend things are okay. And when the information does leak, maybe through disgruntled insiders or just through trial and error, the system fails badly. Putting the information in the open so everyone can see and evaluate it leads to improvements in security. If the system really is secure, it should be able to stand public scrutiny.

Apparently the new Homeland Security Department is a disaster: see article by Michael Crowley in 3/15/2004 issue of "The New Republic". Disorganized, personnel fleeing it, duplicating lots of other agencies, etc.

The Administration keeps saying "no attack has happened since 9/11 because of all the things we're doing to prevent attacks". But they could have said the same just before 9/11.

From Thomas Friedman column in The New York Times, 26 June 2011:

... radical jihadist Islam. It is fed by money and ideology coming out of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Iran. The attack of 9/11 was basically a joint operation by Saudi and Pakistani nationals. The Marine and American Embassy bombings in Lebanon were believed to have been the work of Iranian agents. Yet we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, because Saudi Arabia had oil, Pakistan had nukes, and Iran was too big. We hoped that this war-by-bank-shot would lead to changes in all three countries. So far, it has not.

Until we break the combination of mosque, money, and power in Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan, which fuel jihadism, all we're doing in Afghanistan is fighting the symptoms. The true engines propelling radical jihadist violence will still be in place. But that break requires, for starters, a new U.S. energy policy. Oh, well.

From "Six Questions for Michael Scheuer on National Security" by Ken Silverstein in 2006:

Q: We're coming up on the five-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Is the country safer or more vulnerable to terrorism?

A: On balance, more vulnerable. We're safer in terms of aircraft travel. We're safer from being attacked by some dumbhead who tries to come into the country through an official checkpoint; we've spent billions on that. But for the most part our victories have been tactical and not strategic. There have been important successes by the intelligence services and Special Forces in capturing and killing Al Qaeda militants, but in the long run that's just a body count, not progress. We can't capture them one by one and bring them to justice. There are too many of them, and more now than before September 11. In official Western rhetoric these are finite organizations, but every time we interfere in Muslim countries they get more support.

In the long run, we're not safer because we're still operating on the assumption that we're hated because of our freedoms, when in fact we're hated because of our actions in the Islamic world. There's our military presence in Islamic countries, the perception that we control the Muslim world's oil production, our support for Israel and for countries that oppress Muslims such as China, Russia, and India, and our own support for Arab tyrannies. The deal we made with Qadaffi in Libya looks like hypocrisy: we'll make peace with a brutal dictator if it gets us oil. President Bush is right when he says all people aspire to freedom but he doesn't recognize that people have different definitions of democracy. Publicly promoting democracy while supporting tyranny may be the most damaging thing we do. From the standpoint of democracy, Saudi Arabia looks much worse than Iran. We use the term "Islamofascism" - but we're supporting it in Saudi Arabia, with Mubarak in Egypt, and even Jordan is a police state. We don't have a strategy because we don't have a clue about what motivates our enemies.

From David J. Rothkopf's "The Black Hole of 9/11" 8/2011:

In fact, the success of Osama bin Laden was in masterminding a low-cost, comparatively low-risk action by a handful of thugs that produced one of the most profound overreactions in military history. Trillions of dollars were expended and hundreds of thousands of lives lost in the emotion-fueled maelstrom unleashed by a shaken and clearly disoriented America. Bin Laden aimed for Wall Street and Washington, seeking to strike a blow against symbols of American power, but in so doing he also hit us where it would hurt the most -- right in our sense of perspective. ...

... ask ourselves, looking back over the past 10 years, what other developments took place that exceed 9/11 in lasting importance ?

10. The response to 9/11.
9. The Arab Spring.
8. The rebalancing of Asia.
7. The Stagnation of the U.S. and Other Developed-World Economies.
6. The Invention of Social Media.
5. The Proliferation of Cell Phones and Hand-Held Computing Devices.
4. The Crash of 2008.
3. The Eurozone Crisis and the Crash of 2011-2012.
2. The Failure to Address Global Warming.
1. The Rise of China and the Other BRICs.

A response to the Rothkopf article:

Politicians are supposed to run a country calmly and with its best interests in mind (and not the best interests of their own and campaign sponsor's wallets). Politicians are not elected to run the country by emotional knee-jerk reactions. We wouldn't need politicians for that, we could toss coins for office at the local pub, if we wanted that sort of government.

So let's look at what it means for a politician "to save American lives":

- every year we have 10x 9/11 on the streets, because we have annually 30000 traffic deaths, of which 15000 are from drunk driving. So in the last decade we had more than a quarter million people die because of automobile traffic, bad infrastructure, bad signage, lax enforcement of DUI laws, etc.

- we have each year tens of thousands that die of preventable heart attacks from bad nutrition, people who suffer from diabetes due to bad nutrition, etc.

- we have easily tens of thousands who die prematurely because they lack health insurance and bear early warning symptoms and show up in emergency rooms when it's too late.

So what do US politicians do? They spend TRILLIONS of dollars to avenge a few thousand that ONCE died on 9/11 while sending a few more thousand US troops to die in a senseless and unrelated war (Iraq), when a few MILLIONS of dollars could have saved ANNUALLY at least as many lives as 9/11 cost.

If one adds up the victims of terrorism of the last DECADE it's less than the number of people who die EACH YEAR from preventable causes. If that doesn't spell political failure, I'm not sure what does, and I'm not even including the violation of democratic, American, etc principles that still happen daily, such as torture, wire-tapping, suspension of habeas corpus law, retroactive immunity for law-breaking telecomm companies, etc.

...

Never mind all the useless security at the airports: My karate teacher of yesteryear is more dangerous naked than any Arab with a box cutter. ...

Duncan Blasts "Useless" Air Marshal Service
Justin Peters' "It is Shockingly, Terrifyingly Easy to Breach Perimeter Security at Most Airports"

Pundits and officials keep saying that citizens stopped the "underwear bomber" by jumping on him in that airplane, or citizens stopped the propane-bomber in Times Square by seeing smoke and calling police, or passengers stopped the terrorists on United 93 in 9/11 by crashing the plane. All of those things are untrue.

On United 93 on 9/11, the passengers never made it into the cockpit. The terrorist at the controls dove the plane into the ground as they pounded on the cockpit door.

In the cases of the "shoe bomber", "underwear bomber", and "Times Square bomber", each bomber got to his target and detonated his bomb, and each bomb fizzled. Then passengers piled on or citizens called police. None of these cases are a "triumph for the American spirit" or an "example of citizen power". In every case, only the fact that the bomb fizzled saved us.

Citizen Corps has the potential to tap a lot of citizen energy and ideas, unless it gets bogged down by local politicos.

Starting efforts to get America's point of view out to Arab mass media.

Attacking terrorists on their home territory: Afghanistan.
But after we missed Osama bin Laden, we should have gotten out. No way we should be nation-building over there.
(USA finally killed bin Laden 5/1/2011 in Pakistan; doesn't seem to be a strong correlation between our ability to kill him there and having 80,000 troops in Afghanistan. Seems that the CIA tracked a courier to get him, using some tips from non-torture interrogations of a non-rendered suspect by a foreign country, a lot of electronic and satellite surveillance, and probably some agents on the ground in Pakistan.

Greg Sargent's "John McCain to Bush apologists: Stop lying about Bin Laden and torture". And an interesting take on it by Noam Chomsky here.)

"Harden" the government and the country by reducing the number of big targets.
- Instead of concentrating government and Defense in Washington DC, disperse them to smaller groupings around the country and use tele-conferencing to communicate.
- Instead of huge skyscrapers, shopping malls and stadiums, have offices and stores near residences, and discourage personal attendance at large sporting events (use networks of smaller stadiums ?).
- Instead of massive central power plants and long transmission lines, move to localized power generation (solar, wind, smaller natural gas turbines). Each neighborhood or office complex could become self-powering.
- Instead of massive movements of oil and natural gas (with vulnerable drilling platforms, tankers, tanks, refineries and pipelines), change to localized generation of hydrogen (wind turbines or solar cells that drive electrolysis of water) and use of hydrogen fuel cells. Each house could become self-fueling.
This will take 50 years to do and be costly, hugely resisted and very disruptive. But it is the only long-term solution. Just as the Internet was built to be fault-tolerant, we must make the country attack-tolerant. Because more attacks will occur. And they will be worse than 9/11.

This reduction of targets and increase in self-reliance will have other benefits: protecting against domestic terrorists, insane people, natural disasters, accidents.

Remove some of the "sicknesses" of the USA that hurt the entire world:
- The USA's demand for oil.
  The USA should increase taxes on gasoline, mandate higher-mileage vehicles, encourage alternative energy, encourage mass transit, increase reclamation and recycling, etc. This would help the USA trade deficit, increase our security, reduce environmental risks, and weaken the power of oil-based dictators (Libya, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, etc) around the world.
- The USA's demand for drugs.
  The USA should legalize fairly harmless drugs (marijuana), focus enforcement on deadly drugs, treat addicts instead of imprisoning them, give away clean needles. This would increase the USA's health (reducing AIDS and hepatitis), save us money, stop the spiraling size of our prison system, increase respect for our justice system, and weaken the power of drug-based warlords (in Columbia, southeast Asia, etc).
  See my Drugs page.
- The USA's economic behavior that leads to unemployment in developing countries.
  Our agricultural protectionism keeps farm products from the rest of the world from competing with our farmers. This leads to unemployment, which provides recruits for terrorism, as well as general instability and poverty and organized crime.
  Great book that includes this point: "McMafia" by Misha Glenny (on Amazon).
- The USA's arrogance.
  The USA should admit that we're not always right, that we've done some bad things, and that other ways of living and government and religion are valid. Some behavior is intolerable to us, but most differences are acceptable. We should stop trying to control every behavior of other countries. Sometimes we should bend to the collective will of other countries even if it hurts our economy a bit. We should lead by example, not by force of arms and money.

Use incentives and penalties to get the private companies to do the right thing.
- Instead of "federalizing" the airline security people, keep them private and fine the airports $5,000 every time a fake weapon gets through the screening, and send 20 fakes through each checkpoint each day. Get ordinary passengers to carry them through; the passenger gets $500 if they sneak the fake through successfully.
  
  The airports will react by improving security, whether that means paying employees more, buying new machines, new procedures, or whatever.
- Instead of "federalizing" airline security, make the airports and airlines fully legally liable for any damage done by their insecurity. If one of their planes kills 3000 people, they're liable. If it bankrupts them, fine: some smarter company will take their place. If their insurance premiums skyrocket, that gives them and their insurance companies a big incentive to work hard to improve security. They'll be far more innovative and hard-working than the federal government ever could be. If air-travel proves to be inherently unsafe, the resulting prices will make train-travel more attractive.

Get some messages out to potential terrorists, and to the whole world in general:
- Biological weapons don't respect national boundaries; something used against the USA will quickly spread right around the world, to the terrorist's home also.
- If you produce these weapons, there's a good chance that your local enemies (neighboring tribes or countries) will produce them also and use them on you. Or that your own weapons will leak or something and hurt your own country.
- [To Islamic terrorists:] Your own people have done more to oppress and kill each other than the USA or Israel have ever done. The Iran/Iraq war, the Taliban killing Hazaras, Sunni versus Shia versus Sufi versus Wahhabi, Saddam Hussein killing Kurds and Shia, warlord versus warlord. You should be fighting that more than external "enemies".
  
  The reason you and your country aren't doing well (in terms of money, health, education, etc) isn't that the USA or Israel or "the infidel" is holding you down. You're holding yourself down, by discarding the talents of half of your population (women), obeying a strict (and often wrong) central authority (mullah, imam, dictator, etc), spending all your time studying the Koran instead of practical subjects, alienating most countries in the rest of the world who might help you, etc.
  
  We (the Western world) believe in separation of church and state. We are trying to push our state principles (peace, trade, and to a lesser extent human rights, justice, and democracy) onto the rest of the world. If you disagree with those, maybe you are right to resist us. But you can stay faithful to your religion while accepting those state principles, can't you ? (Apparently Bangladesh has done something in this direction, by banning fatwa's and keeping state control of the schools, but otherwise not interfering with religion.) We're not pushing our religion(s) on you (although some of our people would like to). And those state principles can make you as prosperous as the USA, eventually.
  
  From Charles Hill in "The Age Of Terror":
  
  ... frustration over the region's humiliating failure to succeed economically and resentment at the absence of political avenues toward progress ... the states of the Arab Middle East seemed poised to join Asian nations as entrants to the "First World". ... Even without substantial oil resources, the Middle East and North Africa should command geopolitical importance by the shape and location of their lands on the globe. ... Why has the Islamic world not been able to parallel the economic and political modernization of ... other non-Western civilizations ?
  
  ... Oil revenues go to the producer-country regime, reinforcing their views of themselves as dispensers of bounty. A rapidly growing population expects a level of benefits from government that can not be sustained over time owing to the governments declining revenues and failure to diversify its economy and range of exports. The possession of oil resources creates an expectation of widespread prosperity while deterring the regimes from taking serious measures to build a healthy, broad-based economy. Were it not for oil, the Middle East would rank lower than Africa in economic development.
  
  What can account for the Middle East's lowly world ranking ? The answer lies in the miserable state of politics and governance in that region. ... variations of a single approach to the political ordering of society. Sultan, military president, king and family, king and constitutional monarchy, etc. ... Power is held by a strongman, surrounded by a praetorian guard. ...
  
  Every regime of the Arab-Islamic world has proved a failure. Not one has proved able to provide its people with realistic hope for a free and prosperous future. The regimes have found no way to respond to their people's frustration other than a combination of internal oppression and propaganda to generate rage against external enemies. Religiously inflamed terrorists take root in such soil. ...
  
  Book "What Went Wrong ? The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East" by Bernard Lewis (on Amazon):
  Fascinating book, about why the Muslim world is "behind" the Western world.
  
  But ultimately the book is a failure. After interesting discussions of the history of the world, and a chapter about the various reasons proposed for the decline of the Muslim world and the rise of the Western world, the author does not find an explanation for this.
  
  Reasons proposed for the decline of the Muslim world, and some rebuttals of those reasons:
  - Mongol invasions destroyed Muslim world.
    [But Muslim world was powerful before and after the invasions.]
  - Western imperialism / colonialism, first by French and British.
    [But other countries also colonized have prospered afterward: India, Singapore, Hong Kong. And the Muslim decline started well before the colonization.]
  - Jewish conspiracy.
    [Mostly a result of anti-Semitism from Russia and Nazi Germany. Hard to believe given the small number of Jews, their long history of being tolerated in Muslim society, and many similarities between Islam and Judaism. Not to mention a lack of evidence of conspiracy.]
  - Islam itself is the problem.
    [But the Muslim world was powerful, under Islam, for many centuries. And many forms of science and industry and new thought flourished in the Muslim world during those times. And in many ways there was more freedom inside the Muslim world than inside the Western (Church-dominated, feudal) world at the time.]
  - Islam has become polluted by Western ideas.
    [But the Muslim world fell behind militarily, politically and commercially long ago.]
  - Islam is stuck on the old 8th-century ideas (and since Islam completely controls life and commerce and government, that is particularly damaging).
  - Key Western features (separation of Church and State; some equality of the sexes) are better.
    [A review of this book says "separation" is the key factor: Islam binds religion, state, commerce, and personal life together rigidly, so everything is frozen, and state and commerce suffer.]
  - Islam holds that it supersedes older religions (Christianity and Judaism) and has nothing to learn from them or their followers, either religiously or politically.
  - Various environmental factors have dragged down the Muslim world (exhaustion of precious metals, tribal inbreeding, goat-herding turning land into desert).
  From Thomas Friedman in "The World Is Flat" (on Amazon):
  
  The founders of al-Qaeda are not religious fundamentalists per se. That is, they are not focused simply on the relationship between themselves and God, and on the values and cultural norms of the religious community. They are a political phenomenon more than a religious one.
  
  ...
  
  ... unlike the Leninists, who wanted to install the reign of the perfect class, the working class, and unlike the Nazis, who wanted to install the reign of the perfect race, the Aryan race, bin Laden and al-Zawahiri wanted to install the reign of the perfect religion.
  
  From Theodore Dalrymple:
  
  ... the problem is that so many Muslims want both stagnation and power: they want a return to the perfection of the seventh century and to dominate the twenty-first, as they believe is the birthright of their doctrine, the last testament of God to man. If they were content to exist in a seventh-century backwater, secure in a quietist philosophy, there would be no problem for them or us; their problem, and ours, is that they want the power that free inquiry confers, without either the free inquiry or the philosophy and institutions that guarantee that free inquiry. They are faced with a dilemma: either they abandon their cherished religion, or they remain forever in the rear of human technical advance. Neither alternative is very appealing, and the tension between their desire for power and success in the modern world on the one hand, and their desire not to abandon their religion on the other, is resolvable for some only by exploding themselves as bombs. People grow angry when faced with an intractable dilemma; they lash out.

The USA should stop supporting dictators and thuggish regimes. Our support for Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Saddam Hussein (in the 80's), and the Shah of Iran (60's and 70's) made us a target for the people they oppress, and undercut any claim we had to the "moral high ground". When people are oppressed viciously, they get desperate and grab the weapon of last resort, terrorism. Similarly, we should push Israel to give the Palestinians a viable state (see my Reasoning about Israel and the Palestinians page).

Ban all overhead-stowed carry-on baggage (still allow under-the-seat carry-on luggage). This ban would mean:

Less material available to passengers in flight (thus improving security),
Less luggage going through the passenger security screening (reducing wait times there, and allowing more attention to passenger's bodies and hand-carry-ons),
Reduced time while each airplane occupies a gate (boarding and deplaning would take less time), thus increasing overall airport throughput,
Fewer airline personnel needed in the gate passageway, taking back luggage that passengers tried to carry on but wouldn't fit in the overhead compartments.

Sent this idea to Patrick Smith's Ask The Pilot and got:

It would certainly speed things up. A lot. But it will never, ever, ever happen.

For one, there isn't enough underfloor space on many planes to hold both checked and unchecked luggage.

"[Al-Qaeda's] hopes for fundamentally harming the United States now rest less on what it can do itself than on what it can trick, tempt, or goad us into doing."

"Much tougher visa rules, especially for foreign students, have probably kept future Mohammend Attas out of flight schools. But they also may be keeping out future Andrew Groves and Sergey Brins. (Grove, born in Hungary, cofounded Intel; Brin, born in Russia, cofounded Google.)"

"About $5 billion per year goes toward screening passengers at airports. The widely held view among security experts is that this airport spending is largely for show. ... 'The inspection process is mostly security theater, to make people feel safe about flying', says John Mueller ..."

"In the modern brand of terrorist warfare, what an enemy can do directly is limited. The most dangerous thing it can do is to provoke you into hurting yourself. ... three kinds of American reaction - the war in Iraq, the economic consequences of willy-nilly spending on security, and the erosion of America's moral authority - are responsible for such strength as al-Qaeda now maintains."

"Documents captured after 9/11 showed that bin Laden hoped to provoke the United States into an invasion and occupation that would entail all the complications that have arisen in Iraq. His only error was to think that the place where Americans would get stuck would be Afghanistan. ... Bin Laden also hoped that such an entrapment would drain the United States financially. ..."

"'The economy as a whole took six months or so to recover from the effects of 9/11', Richard Clarke told me. 'The federal budget never recovered. The federal budget is in a permanent mess, to a large degree because of 9/11.'"

"[Al-Qaeda's] approach boiled down to 'superpower baiting' ... the self-damaging potential of an uncontrolled American reaction is so vast. ... How can the United States escape this trap ? Very simply: by declaring that the 'global war on terror' is over, and that we have won. ... A standing state of war ... cheapens the concept of war, ... predisposes us toward overreactions, ... encourages a state of fear, ... and predisposes the United States to think about using its assets in a strictly warlike way - and to give short shrift to the vast range of other possibilities."

"... shift from the early, panicky days in which everything was threatened and any investment in 'security' was justified, to a more practical and triage-minded approach."

"... money dabbed out for a security fence here and a screening machine there would be far better spent on robust emergency-response systems."