# No terrorism in Athens... why ? Consequences ?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-terrorism-in-athens-why-consequences/262172
**Category:** Great Debates
**Created:** [August 30, 2004, 3:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-terrorism-in-athens-why-consequences/262172 "2004-08-30T03:28:31Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Rashak\_Mani](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rashak_Mani)
#### Post date: [August 30, 2004, 3:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-terrorism-in-athens-why-consequences/262172/1 "2004-08-30T03:28:31Z")
So it wasn’t a replay of 1972… was it good security ? Unwillingness of terrorists of becoming even more world pariahs and suffering the anger of arabs ? They didn’t need to do anything since so much was made about possible terror attacks ? Or in fact they respected the olympic truce ?
The lack of even a credible terror threat during the games means anyting ? Consequences of having had a peaceful Olympic game ?
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### Author:  [@XT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/XT)
#### Post date: [August 30, 2004, 3:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-terrorism-in-athens-why-consequences/262172/2 "2004-08-30T03:30:48Z")
Good question. All I can say is, damned if I know. I suppose the Greeks security was better than pre-Olympic predictions.
Either that or perhaps the terrorists were distracted elsewhere, or planning something worse. I doubt they choose not to attack in the spirit of the games, or because Greece is immune or something.
Consequence? No one was hurt or killed. Good enough for me.
-XT
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### Author:  [@RedFury](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RedFury)
#### Post date: [August 30, 2004, 3:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-terrorism-in-athens-why-consequences/262172/3 "2004-08-30T03:37:29Z")
Think the fact that The Games where held in Athens and not in say, London, Rome or New York have anything thing to with it? I do. Add the fact that no high-ranking American political figure from this Adm was able to set foot in Greece and there’s really no reason to make them a target. What possible benefit could they have gotten from doing so?
Other than that, I’m not sure what “consequences” you think might be derived from said fact.
Stay the hell away from Bush’s US? Not exactly news, is it?
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### Author:  [@Declan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Declan)
#### Post date: [August 30, 2004, 3:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-terrorism-in-athens-why-consequences/262172/4 "2004-08-30T03:41:11Z")
> [@Rashak Mani](#):
>
> So it wasn’t a replay of 1972… was it good security ? Unwillingness of terrorists of becoming even more world pariahs and suffering the anger of arabs ? They didn’t need to do anything since so much was made about possible terror attacks ? Or in fact they respected the olympic truce ?
>
> The lack of even a credible terror threat during the games means anyting ? Consequences of having had a peaceful Olympic game ?
Are the olympics actually over ?
Declan
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### Author:  [@The\_Flying\_Dutchman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Flying_Dutchman)
#### Post date: [August 30, 2004, 3:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-terrorism-in-athens-why-consequences/262172/5 "2004-08-30T03:42:11Z")
Hmm. Could it be that al Qaeda is losing the war?
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### Author:  [@jayjay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jayjay)
#### Post date: [August 30, 2004, 3:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-terrorism-in-athens-why-consequences/262172/6 "2004-08-30T03:58:33Z")
> [@Declan](#):
>
> Are the olympics actually over ?
>
> Declan
Yes, after the longest goodbye the world has ever seen…
(If the Chinese music in the “Salute to Beijing” segment of the closing ceremonies is any indicator of the shape of things to come in 2008, I’m going to be watching the games with the mute on)
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### Author:  [@RedFury](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RedFury)
#### Post date: [August 30, 2004, 4:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-terrorism-in-athens-why-consequences/262172/7 "2004-08-30T04:07:50Z")
> [@grienspace](#):
>
> Hmm. Could it be that al Qaeda is losing the war?
Ya think? I don’t. And neither does the bulk of the intelligence community:
> [@](#):
>
> President Bush’s May 2003 announcement aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln that “major combat operations” had ended in Iraq has been replayed endlessly. What is less well remembered is just what the president claimed the United States had accomplished. “The battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on September the 11th, 2001,” he declared. The defeat of Saddam Hussein, he told the American people, was “a crucial advance in the campaign against terror.” **In fact, the consensus now emerging among a wide range of intelligence and counterterrorism professionals is that the opposite is true: The invasion of Iraq not only failed to help the war on terrorism, but it represented a substantial setback.**
>
> \
>
> In more than a dozen interviews, experts both within and outside the U.S. government laid out a stark analysis of how the war has hampered the campaign against Al Qaeda. Not only, they point out, did the war divert resources and attention away from Afghanistan, seriously damaging the prospects of capturing Al Qaeda leaders, but it has also opened a new front for terrorists in Iraq and created a new justification for attacking Westerners around the world. Perhaps most important, it has dramatically speeded up the process by which Al Qaeda the organization has morphed into a broad-based ideological movement – a shift, in effect, from bin Laden to bin Ladenism. **“If Osama believed in Christmas, this is what he’d want under his Christmas tree,” one senior intelligence official told me.** (bolding mine)
[The Wrong War](http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2004/07/07_401.html)
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### Author:  [@Mehitabel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mehitabel)
#### Post date: [August 30, 2004, 4:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-terrorism-in-athens-why-consequences/262172/8 "2004-08-30T04:14:58Z")
uhm…_Mother Jones?_ I respect the mag, don’t get me wrong, I love some of their stuff, but methinks they have an agenda that they take no pains to hide.
I think if Islamofacists had wanted to make a point, they wouldn’t have cared if it was in Greece or Georgia. Our Georgia.
I was delighted that nothing happened in Athens, except for two or three injuries sustained by those brave protestors who kept our Secretary of State away from their closing ceremonies. :rolleyes:
Congrats to the Greeks and all the other security forces for a great Games!
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### Author:  [@SmackFu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SmackFu)
#### Post date: [August 30, 2004, 4:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-terrorism-in-athens-why-consequences/262172/9 "2004-08-30T04:35:12Z")
I think al Qaeda can only be successful if the time and place of the potential attack aren’t known ahead of time. They have to come out of nowhere for their plans to work out and not get caught through random chance. Only 9/11 was on a target that could have been foreseen. The US Embassy in Tanzania has a nice ring to it but who even knew it existed before they blew it up? None of their attacks have been on meaningful dates that would merit special caution.
The Olympics just don’t fit their MO. Add in the questionable rationale, and I’m not overly surprised nothing happened.
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### Author:  [@RedFury](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RedFury)
#### Post date: [August 30, 2004, 4:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-terrorism-in-athens-why-consequences/262172/10 "2004-08-30T04:44:51Z")
> [@Mehitabel](#):
>
> uhm…_Mother Jones?_ I respect the mag, don’t get me wrong, I love some of their stuff, but methinks they have an agenda that they take no pains to hide.
Bit of a knee-jerk there I’m afraid – for it’s a copy of an article published by syndicated writer and highly-respected terrorism expert, CNN’s own Peter Bergen.
Here’s some additional background on Peter:
> [@](#):
>
> Peter Bergen is the author of the New York Times best-seller Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden. He is CNN’s terrorism analyst and has written for such publications as the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, and The New Republic. A fellow at the New America Foundation, Bergen is also an adjunct professor at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University
So, you see, unless you can offer countering evidence, I have no reason to doubt Mr Bergen’s profesionalism, nor the conclusions reached in his article or the sincerity of his sources.
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### Author:  [@RedFury](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RedFury)
#### Post date: [August 30, 2004, 5:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-terrorism-in-athens-why-consequences/262172/11 "2004-08-30T05:03:35Z")
> [@](#):
>
> **…the prestigious International Institute for Strategic Studies released its annual survey that found, among other things, that far from dealing a blow to al-Qaeda and making the U.S. and its allies safer, the Iraq invasion has in fact substantially strengthened bin Laden’s network and increased the danger of attacks in the West. And the London-based IISS is not some Bush-bashing antiwar think tank; it hosted the president’s keynote address during his embattled visit to the British late last year.** (bolding mine)
>
> The IISS reported that al-Qaeda’s recruitment and fundraising efforts had been given a major boost by the U.S. invasion of Iraq. It estimated that bin Laden’s network today commands some 18,000 men, of which about 1,000 are currently inside Iraq. After almost three years of President Bush’s war on terror, the IISS offered the following assessment of the movement’s prospects: “Although half of al-Qaeda’s 30 senior leaders and perhaps 2,000 rank-and-file members have been killed or captured, a rump leadership is still intact and more than 18,000 potential terrorists are still at large, with recruitment accelerating on account of Iraq.”
[Time](http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,642825,00.html)
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### Author:  [@Marley23](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Marley23)
#### Post date: [August 30, 2004, 5:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-terrorism-in-athens-why-consequences/262172/12 "2004-08-30T05:32:52Z")
Unless there were some Olympic-related plots broken up (and if that happened, we haven’t heard about it), this is all pure speculation. I doubt it’s the Olympic truce thing, though. 😉
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### Author:  [@Avenger](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Avenger)
#### Post date: [August 30, 2004, 7:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-terrorism-in-athens-why-consequences/262172/13 "2004-08-30T07:25:06Z")
The most obvious explanation is that a smart terrorist chooses a time and place that allows his operation the most chances of success. An event that has been identified before as a ‘potential terrorist threat’ and surrounded with massive levels of security is not that time and place. Ditto why no terrorist atacks at the World Cup, the Superbowl and all the other events that have been highlighted well in advance as under threat from a terrorist attack.
If you take the view that the aim of the terrorist is to ‘cause terror’ and to disrupt the lives of his enemy, then they actually have no real need to attack these events, the fact that the hugely expensive security operations already exist show that they are already succeeding.
With regard to the WTC, that was a high profile target, but the method of attacking it relied on points of weakness which made it a viable operation.
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### Author:  [@RickJay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RickJay)
#### Post date: [August 30, 2004, 12:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-terrorism-in-athens-why-consequences/262172/14 "2004-08-30T12:41:08Z")
It strikes me as being obvious that the primary reason was that al-Qaida is not terribly interested in Greece as a target. While terrorists may be murderous bastards, they are not random murderous bastards, and Greece is not at the top of anyone’s hit list.
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### Author:  [@tomndebb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tomndebb)
#### Post date: [August 30, 2004, 12:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-terrorism-in-athens-why-consequences/262172/15 "2004-08-30T12:47:46Z")
al Qaida is also known for reconnoitering an attack site for up to several years prior to launching an attack, gathering extremely detailed information about the target. Given that there were people as recently as eight weeks ago betting that the Greeks would not complete their physical infrastructure, not to mention establishing their security setup, Athens was simply not a good al Qaida style target.
(This may not be the reason no attack was launched, but I suspect it contributed to their decisions.)
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### Author:  [@Rashak\_Mani](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rashak_Mani)
#### Post date: [August 30, 2004, 8:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-terrorism-in-athens-why-consequences/262172/16 "2004-08-30T20:36:59Z")
Well I doubt anyone will say terrorists were nice enough by leaving Athens alone… more likely it was too high profile and high security for AQ.
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### Author:  [@Boo\_Boo\_Foo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Boo_Boo_Foo)
#### Post date: [August 31, 2004, 1:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-terrorism-in-athens-why-consequences/262172/17 "2004-08-31T01:12:43Z")
Yep. NATO threw it’s entire arsenal at Greece. As lockdowns go, Greece was tighter than a frog’s arsehole.
That being said, intelligence and espionage are funny ball games. I daresay the often is that case that “potential matters” are nipped in the bud without the general public ever knowing about it, so that the people doing the “catching” have the opportunity to NOT show their hands, as it were.
I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that some nasty stuff might have been foiled but we never heard about it for those reasons.
Certainly, however, Beijing will be a safe place to visit. The Chinese have ZERO tolerance for anything which might threaten their status quo. I can’t see too many “potential terrorists” getting any free passes into, or out of, China over the next 4 years.
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### Author:  [@Otara](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Otara)
#### Post date: [August 31, 2004, 1:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-terrorism-in-athens-why-consequences/262172/18 "2004-08-31T01:44:27Z")
Maybe there just were never as many terrorists around as some people say there are?
To me it seems more a case of sporadic attempts/success than the ongoing hugely resourced campaign that questions such as ‘why didnt they hit X’ suggest.
Otara
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### Author:  [@rngadam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/rngadam)
#### Post date: [August 31, 2004, 2:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-terrorism-in-athens-why-consequences/262172/19 "2004-08-31T02:25:32Z")
> [@Boo Boo Foo](#):
>
> Certainly, however, Beijing will be a safe place to visit. The Chinese have ZERO tolerance for anything which might threaten their status quo. I can’t see too many “potential terrorists” getting any free passes into, or out of, China over the next 4 years.
Bull because the potential “terrorists” (“one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter”) don’t need to get into/out of China… They might already be there.
China is made up of at least [56 ethnic groups](http://www.c-c-c.org/chineseculture/minority/minority.html), including some that are [Muslims](http://chinese-school.netfirms.com/Islam-China.html), pissed off at being [repressed](http://www.geocities.com/WestHollywood/Park/6443/China/eturkestan.html) by the Chineses. Plus [Tibet](http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/040830/481/bej10308301019). Plus some people who might like revenge for Tiananmen square. Plus a bunch of religious fanatics tired of the antics of the atheistic government (Falung Gong). Plus possible CIA covert ops to stir some shit up ;).
Not all terrorists are Middle Eastern looking you know… And not all Chineses are Han Chineses. I wouldn’t bet on the 2008 games on being safe.
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### Author:  [@grand\_poobah\_bear](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/grand_poobah_bear)
#### Post date: [August 31, 2004, 12:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/no-terrorism-in-athens-why-consequences/262172/20 "2004-08-31T12:40:59Z")
> [@](#):
>
> grienspace Hmm. Could it be that al Qaeda is losing the war?
I dont think so. I think they are busy setting up in Iraq now that the one asshole that kept them out is gone.
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