Thursday, August 10, 2006
Unimaginable idiocy about terrorism
"The plot was "intended to be mass murder on an unimaginable scale."
- Metropolitan Police Deputy Commissioner Paul Stephenson
Are we really as blinkered as this? The terrorists intended to bring down 9 - 12 airliners, up from 4 on 9/11. Is three times the scale of attack "unimaginable"? Actually, the 9/11 plot was originally intended to be that large but was scaled back.
More than a thousand airliners at once might be unimaginable... although I'm not at all certain that's impossible; it's very unlikely (because it's hard to keep a secret with over 1,000 operatives, but not impossible - it wouldn't be beyond Al Queda's spending limits, necessarily, and they certainly have had more than a thousand active members at a time.)
Not to mention nuclear weapons and dirty bombs, which are becoming easier and more economical to build all the time. Red mercury, and all that.
If our imagination is really this shabby, we are going to be attacked successfully as soon as the bad guys think up a slightly new trick. As the New York Times points out, this was a recycled twelve-year old plan that was well known to authorities. Hardly "unimaginable".
The fundamental finding of the 9/11 commission was that there was a failure of imagination. Admittedly, this may have been a far too casual comment by Mr. Stephenson, but it seems that our imaginations are still dangerously inactive.
- Metropolitan Police Deputy Commissioner Paul Stephenson
Are we really as blinkered as this? The terrorists intended to bring down 9 - 12 airliners, up from 4 on 9/11. Is three times the scale of attack "unimaginable"? Actually, the 9/11 plot was originally intended to be that large but was scaled back.
More than a thousand airliners at once might be unimaginable... although I'm not at all certain that's impossible; it's very unlikely (because it's hard to keep a secret with over 1,000 operatives, but not impossible - it wouldn't be beyond Al Queda's spending limits, necessarily, and they certainly have had more than a thousand active members at a time.)
Not to mention nuclear weapons and dirty bombs, which are becoming easier and more economical to build all the time. Red mercury, and all that.
If our imagination is really this shabby, we are going to be attacked successfully as soon as the bad guys think up a slightly new trick. As the New York Times points out, this was a recycled twelve-year old plan that was well known to authorities. Hardly "unimaginable".
The fundamental finding of the 9/11 commission was that there was a failure of imagination. Admittedly, this may have been a far too casual comment by Mr. Stephenson, but it seems that our imaginations are still dangerously inactive.
