It seems that every time that there’s an act of terrorism a lot of the media stress the sophistication and coordination required to carry it out. With the exception of 9/11 I just don’t understand this opinion.
CBC was just stressing this about the recent attack in the Istanbul nightclub (eg “how did he know the layout of the club so well blah blah blah?”). I heard similar things about the 2005 London underground attack and others as well.
I don’t believe that this sort of thing would be that difficult to coordinate. I discussed this with a co-worker a couple of weeks ago and he agreed, saying that it’s no more complex than organizing a group of friends to meet at a bar.
IMO the most difficult part would be getting the weapons but as far as coordinating the activities themselves, most people coordinate activities of equivalent or greater complexity all the time.
The next wave of attacks in America will do little to smash MSM endless peddling of “Lone Wolf” paradigm (even though some of the attacks will be perpetrated by multiple attackers)
Ref donpeyote: There certainly are “lone wolf” attackers and also “lone wolf” wannabe attackers.
They might be the most numerous threat but they’re not the most hazardous threat on a per-attack basis. Since they’re solos and almost by definition, amateurs. What they definitely are, though, is the hardest for the authorities to pre-empt. Which is always a good thing for the media to trumpet if they’re trying to raise the paranoia level. Which, IMO is more popular in the loony rightwing media than the MSM.
Ref the OP: I agree in general that the media, including the alt media, seem to marvel at the planning and coordination needed to do pretty much nothing.
I’ve sort of come to the conclusion that they mostly spout cliché’s. Look at whatever happened, consult the roster of canned stories and canned clichés, then adjust the dates & places to here and now and fire the story off into the ether.
That’s much quicker than stopping to actually think.
I was actually contemplating this issue today, in a much more benign context.
The local newspaper ran (on page 1!) the usual early January story about people crowding the gyms and fitness palaces after New Year’s. I was left to wonder if they have a story in the files that they update and run every year at this time.
I guess it’s no different with sportscasters. Once you’ve said, " You can’t win if you don’t score any points", and you still have half an hour of game to fill with blather, you know you’ll be straining to stay relevant.
Terrorism is a tactic adopted precisely because it can require very little in the way of resources, material, intelligence, etc. Even the 9/11 attacks didn’t require much sophistication or co-ordination; the only weapons used were box-cutters, and the only co-ordination called for in the execution of the plan was the ability to book several flights departing from different cities at more or less the same time. Advance planning and some funding was required, in that the perpetrators needed to include a few people who had acquired at least a basic capacity to fly a plane, so they had to enroll in flight school and pay the fees, but that’s not exactly the equivalent of planning the Normandy landings, is it?
It all comes down to human resources. They had to find 11 people who were willing to commit suicide for the cause, who could get into the US, some of which had to learn to fly and be sure that none of them would get cold feet and go to the authorities or was an informant. Not exactly easy, especially when you have the combined resources of the western nations intelligence services trying to infiltrate recruitment areas.
There’s also the fact that people willing to commit suicide for the cause don’t seem to be generally people who have extensive military or specialist training. So I’d say the sophistication was in the network that managed to find the “right” 11 people with the needed combination of zeal and competence, train them and get them into the country at the right time.
Actual pilots can correct me if I’m in error … but even I have the basic capacity to fly a lil’ Cessna 172 … given an bunch of open space I can even execute a simple 360º turn without losing too much altitude …
Now a great big jumbo jet with two massive jet engines hitting a fairly narrow tower while screaming along at 250 mph … that’s a kittle of different fish … the hijackers did have the advantage of Saudi citizenship which made it easy to get into the USA and attend commercial jet training school … but still … if it was that easy, it would be happening more often …
I get that to acquire the basic capacity to fly the plane they did need to attend a commercial jet training school. That takes both considerable time and considerable money, but it doesn’t require any unusual aptitude for co-ordination or planning. Thousands of people enroll in commercial flight training every year.
Interestingly, the vast majority of actual terrorist arrests - mainly of “Islamic terrorists” come from the FBI egging on the weak-willed and weak-minded, even to the point of supplying weapons and suggesting targets.
Real crazies are something different. The fellow who attacked the Canadian Parliament a while ago was suffering from a mental illness - his planning appears to have been non-existent, but he still managed to get closer to the actual legislative chambers than anyone else has done before. (Other than the nut with a bomb in the 1960’s). The San Bernardino attack appears to have been a guy going postal - otherwise, of all the newsworthy targets to attack, why pick the obscure office where you used to work? Claiming motivation by ISIS seems to be an attention-getting mechanism to stick it to mainstream society, like Satanist claims or tattoos would be to parents (or back in the 1960’s, long hair).
But to get to the OP’s point… remember some of the guys in Paris blew themselves up outside that soccer stadium when they could not get past security and into the crowd. Obviously their planning and scouting efforts were minimal. If they’d had one of the machine-guns used in the restaurant at the same time, or the rock concert, they would have made it through the gates.
Similarly, not long after the first London tube bombing - the guy in a second attempt, his vest fizzled because the explosive was mixed incorrectly. Two guys then drove to the airport in Glasgow(?) where their vehicle tried to ram the airport terminal, but hung up on the concrete barriers (planning, again) and then burned instead of exploding (bad mixing again…) The shoe bomber couldn’t light his fuse because his feet sweated and soaked the fuse.
So perhaps the fact is that there are successful and bad attempts, and we hear the successes as “good planning” when it simply means “keep it simple”. Walk into a crowded establishment, start shooting - simple. Rely on a whole series of steps to work -more likely to fail.
People tend to downplay the extent of the 9/11 pilot training - dunno why, maybe they find it reassuring on some level? They were fully licensed commercial pilots, not beginners, and had bought time in commercial simulators which is actually useful for learning purposes otherwise there wouldn’t be an industry supplying simulators to actual jet pilots.
Which isn’t to say they were fully qualified to fly a 757, just that they had gotten sufficient training to do what they needed to do to for their planned attack.
I think many people want to believe that some of the recent attacks at night clubs and the like take a lot of planning and sophistication because the alternative - that such attacks are relatively easy for one person to pull off - is too terrifying for them to contemplate.
On the same topic but different note, I wonder what would have happened if the pilot hijacker on UA 175 failed to bank in time and missed the South Tower…Apparently, the reason people were able to escape from the second tower and not the first was because the airliner failed to penetrate through all the stairways unlike AA 11.
Would he have come back up and tried to smash into the tower again?
That is actually a really interesting point. I was military for 32 years so I tend to think along these lines in a paranoid-ish fashion - all that to say that those soft target attacks are extremely easy to pull off. And it is actually quite scary; with social media (and I’m not some Luddite blaming technology btw) a lot more people will probably be inspired to try this.
MD2000’s point about the crazies is worth noting as well. I’m personally convinced that had Marc Lepine (the man that killed 14 “feminists” at the University of Montreal in 1989) been born 20 years later, he might be doing either a lone-wolf attack or going to Syria to join ISIS.
Assume that you’re the leader of a would-be terrorist cell. Here are some of your concerns.
Finding people who are competent at basic work/social skills (being on time, etc.).
Finding true believers.
Trying to make sure that nobody is a law enforcement plant or informer.
Trying to pick people who won’t chicken out at the last minute and not show up to do their part.
In addition to all that, the mere fact that you’re planning something illegal adds probably a full magnitude of difficulty to the task. One issue is a little-known problem called “Burn Syndrome.” This is a psychological phenomenon that leads a person to believe that a police officer or even just a bystander on the street/bus/whatever can tell what you are planning to do merely by looking at you. Burn Syndrome is probably what led to the capture of Ahmed Ressam in December 1999, thus foiling his plan to bomb LAX–a Customs Agent became suspicious because of his behavior.
The only reason hundreds of soft targets aren’t attacked every single day in the USA is we simply don’t have that many crazy/disaffected would-be attackers. Nor could we afford to secure our entire society against such a cohort if it did exist.
Instead we’d have to adopt a certain fatalism about living with the flux of attacks and implement a fierce effort to detect and prevent. Which would necessarily include an awful lot of arresting, imprisoning, or killing people not for what they’ve done, but for what (the authorities think) they intend to do.
Which would require a major revision of constitutional and common-law concepts of law and justice. The hideously 1984-ish PATRIOT Act is but the first baby step down that surprisingly short road to disaster.
Agreed. I’m lumping crazies like the Colorado movie theater wacko in there with the Islamic Times Square propane bomber and the generic cultural/ethnic grievance Boston Marathon brothers.
Why somebody does this stuff is (mostly) independent of whether they do this stuff.
That’s the thing. It’s not that the attacks are particularly sophisticated. It’s managing the coordination while avoiding extensive security and intelligence apparatus.
Every time I go to comment on stuff like this, I end up deleting my whole post. I don’t want any visits from people asking “Why exactly did you make a post called ‘how to be an effective turrrrorist (sic) in the Us’”?*
*Anecdote: In the BBTF (baseball think factory) forums once, we were opining on how many people it would take to assault…errr…that place where the President lives…the site bigwig stepped in and told us to knock it the fuck off cause he’d already been visited by the FBI once for such opining.