Terrorist Attack, When Will It Stop?

Despite the myriad obvious other opportunities, most people in the US, and possibly other parts of the world, seem to focus on airports and planes as the area from which the next terrorist attack will come. Possibly this is due to intense media coverage of the airports during times of heightened alert, such as at Thanksgiving and Christmas, when reports are coming at us frequently as to airport delays, increased security measures, and anything unusual that may make for at least somewhat interesting time-filling content. This leads to so much effort on the part of security forces to secure the airports. Most of these measures though prove to be fruitless in actually capturing a terrorist. It is predictable that these measures would not be effective as once they are in place the terrorist will just move to some other measure. No terrorist has been apprehended by any of the measures put in place to date, at least not any that the media has publicized. There have been w! ell-publicized terrorist attempts of course that failed simply and fortunately because of the seeming ineptitude of the would-be suicide bombers. Ineptitude might not really be appropriate way of characterizing these failed attempts, though. The failed attempts may emphasize just how hard it is to create and activate a bomb of sufficient power to do any real damage to an airliner. The failed attempts definitely emphasize how hard it is to prevent such attempts, at least in the manner in which security agencies are going about it.

Let’s face it. Technology can really only do so much. Full body scans are only as good as the people viewing the resulting images. The current state of the technology is slow and a little cumbersome. Only a sampling of passengers can be scanned. Baggage searches are only partially successful as evidenced by the vast quantities of drugs and other contraband that is smuggled in repeatedly. In general, the ingenuity of the human mind will always give the terrorist the upper hand in coming up with new ways to do damage. Once one target, such as airlines, become too difficult to attack, they will move on to other targets such as - well the list is endless - but a few obvious ones would be building, ships, schools, churches, market places, trains, etc., etc.

The most effective use of tax dollars in preventing terrorism would be pure intelligence. Put the best minds to work on finding out what the terrorists are up to. It takes a lot of planning for any such attempt. Many people become involved wittingly and unwittingly. When conspiring to do anything, the odds against keeping a secret truly secret increase exponentially with each extra individual that becomes involved in the conspiracy. Concentrating resources on one type of target and relying on technology to solve our problems actually becomes a distraction to the useful information that comes from good intelligence work.