I try to present facts and logic and solutions rather than just opinions.

Please send any reasoned disagreements to me.

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The central lesson from the 9/11 terrorism is that the USA federal government is massively incompetent.

Before 9/11:

• The government tested airline security every year, and every year it failed (50-80% of the fake weapons got through). The government did nothing about it.



• The government apparently failed to enforce the visa rules: they didn't track down and deport people who overstayed or misused visas.



• The government had lots of fun alienating a lot of our allies, shooting down the Kyoto treaty, the World Court, etc. Now we suddenly need help from those people. And we're still trying to demand it on exactly our terms.



• Attacks via commercial airplane had been speculated about, such as in a Tom Clancy book where a jetliner was crashed into the Capitol building. But apparently even the Pentagon building had no air-defenses.

After 9/11:

• 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 in 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. 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, 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. They weren't guilty.]
  
  Even if denying them any rational legal process is Constitutional and legal, it shouldn't be.



• 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.

The government seems to be making the same mistakes they made in losing the wars against drugs and AIDS: when you start losing, do the same old stupid things, but harder. Longer prison terms, harsher rhetoric, more macho stuff, louder patriotism, more god-talk. As if any of that worked in the past.

Some good things they're doing:

• 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.

From Hendrik Hertzberg in The New Yorker 10/3/2005:

... Graham Allison's "Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe" is the indispensable text on the subject of nuclear terrorism. "Americans are no safer from a nuclear terrorist attack today than we were on September 10, 2001", he writes. "A central reason for that can be summed up in one word: Iraq." The invasion and occupation have diverted essential resources from the fight against Al Qaeda; allowed the Taliban to regroup in Afghanistan; fostered neglect of the Iranian nuclear threat; undermined alliances critical to preventing terrorism; devastated America's standing with the public in every country in Europe and destroyed it in the Muslim world; monopolized the time and attention of the President and his security team (for simple human reasons, an extraordinarily important factor); and, thanks to the cry-wolf falsity of the claims about Iraqi weapons systems, "discredited the larger case for a serious campaign to prevent nuclear terrorism." ...

My recommendations for anti-terrorism:

• "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).
  
  
  
  • 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 other 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. ...




• 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 (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).

From Stephen Flynn interview on NPR 2/2007:

We need to focus on "resilience" as well as "prevention". For example, there are no salvage vessels stationed on the west coast of the USA which could clear a sunken tanker blocking a major port such as LA-LongBeach. A shutdown of that port would make the west coast run out of fuel in a week, and cause huge economic impacts for months or more. If the cause was terrorism, other ports may shut down until they're sure they have defenses, making the crisis worse. Another example: the nightclub fire (in Rhode Island) that injured more than a hundred people overloaded burn units and emergency rooms all through New England; we don't have the capacity to handle thousands of injured, much less hundreds of thousands. We need to stop business-as-usual behavior. For example, we are rebuilding New Orleans in it's same vulnerable place; why ? It's just a matter of time before another flood caused by a hurricane or terrorism. Similarly, thousands of homes near Sacramento CA are threatened by decaying levees.

From James Fallows article in The Atlantic magazine 9/2006:

"[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."

From Patrick Smith's "Ask The Pilot":

Airline security: The fundamental problem is the Transportation Security Administration's relentless fixation with the in-flight takeover scheme last perpetrated on Sept 11 2001; that is, the fallacy that physical weapons, rather than the element of surprise, were ultimately responsible for the hijackers' successes on that day. In truth, the hijackers' possession of box cutters was irrelevant -- a deadly weapon can be fashioned from virtually anything, including many objects and materials found on planes -- and for any number of reasons, none of which have anything to do with the confiscation of pointy objects at the concourse checkpoint, the 9/11 blueprint is all but off the table to a would-be saboteur. Yet we continue to devote our money and resources toward the preposterous and ultimately unattainable goal of keeping any and all weapons out of the hands of passengers. In doing so, we are forced to treat every last flier, regardless of age, race or gender, as a possible terrorist or criminal, resulting in an apparatus so massive and cumbersome that it cannot adequately enforce the very policies it claims are so important. Civil liberties are subverted, billions of dollars are wasted, and millions of people are hassled and inconvenienced, all with little or no effect on actual safety. It is a national embarrassment. What we need is a TSA willing to concede that the real nuts and bolts of keeping terrorists away from planes take place well out of view. We need to immediately rescind most of the rules restricting sharp objects and liquids, with a return to basic screening for firearms and bombs. With respect to the latter, the emphasis should be put squarely on improved anti-explosives screening of all luggage and cargo. And although the attacks of 2001 took place on U.S. soil, the greater threats are at airports abroad. American carriers now operate throughout Asia, South America, Africa and beyond, where they remain potentially high-profile targets for extremist groups or rogue terrorists. Here we are confiscating scissors from somebody's grandmother in Indianapolis when most of our security in foreign countries is outsourced to local authorities. How about relocating some of our domestic manpower overseas to help prevent a bombing or shoot-down?

Send airline security suggestions to FAA

Send suggestions to Citizen Corps

Personal defense in case of terrorist attack:

• Chemical or biological attack may be signaled by oily droplets on surfaces, unusual clouds or vapors with strange colors or odors, small animals dying first, widespread nausea among people.
• If nuclear, chemical or biological attack, evacuate the area. Get upwind.
• Chemical weapons often are heavier than air: climb to higher stories or altitudes.
• If you don't have a gas mask, breathe through a cloth soaked in water and baking soda.
• From 12/2001 issue of Scientific American, about gas masks:
  "... you need to know whether the mask really works (surplus units are untested), how to put it on (the fit must be airtight), when to put it on (by the time you recognize the symptoms, it is probably too late) and when to take it off (the masks are too uncomfortable to keep on indefinitely). None of the experts interviewed for this article bothers to own a mask."
• From 1/2002 issue of Scientific American, about gas masks:
  "[Breathing through a mask] demands 3 times the lung power of normal breathing ... the typical shelf life [of a filter] is only 3 to 4 years ... a good filter alone costs $30. Anything advertised as military surplus is too old. A current, approved mask sells for $150 to $250. ... Manufacturers generally don't make gas masks for children, and regulators wouldn't approve them. ... breathing through a mask is too strenuous for children and [it's harder to get a good seal on their faces.]"
• If dust or droplets get on your skin, wash off quickly. Use warm soapy water, or water-and-bleach. If no water available, scrub with powder such as flour or talcum powder.
• Evacuate before the government tells you to. By the time they make the decision, broadcast it, and then everyone clogs the roads, it will be too late.

The "avian flu virus" scare may be a good thing: it will get us ready for a bio-attack. I'm completely convinced one is coming.





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