At least here in Los Angeles the police are taking the threat seriously. Al Qaeda **hates ** Lindsey Lohan.
If I were a terrorist and wanted to achieve maximum impact with the smallest expenditure of people and resources, I’d bomb a college football game.
- 60,000 to 100,000 people, all packed in like infidel sardines
- laughably inadequate security
- nationally televised, often in real or near-real time
Seriously, what would happen if a couple of briefcase bombs went off at a Michigan-Ohio State game, killing a few hundred people - half of them by trampling in the ensuing panic?
Oh come on guys, it wouldn’t take anything more than a few emails to coordinate. Firearms and explosives are easily enough available to bad guys in the US that they could equip themselves, and even children have text-messaging cell phones now.
The only problem is identifying reliable guys who will keep their mouths shut. What seems to be plaguing terrorism in general is that it seems to be somewhat of an image thing, the angry Muslim young man’s version of being a rock star. They really want to be successful but half the time they end up mouthing off and ruining the whole thing. I guess that’s what comes from suicide attacks, you do not exactly have the benefit of an experienced pool of applicants.
The bolded is a highlight of the single most important logistical concern for coordinating a terrorist attack. Recruitment is usually where people get caught. You took the hardest part of the operation and gave it a blithe nod. That is the part that makes what you say nearly undoable. The best way to accomplish something like that would be to outline plans and put them up anonymously on the internet, telling people to act alone.
What I’m surprised about is that no terrorist cells browse internet message boards looking for ideas. I’ve heard that Al Qaeda reads William Lind.
We did a post apocalyptic sort of wargame thing about 15 years ago, my side were the bad guys and we crippled the country by taking out the power transmission system. There are a lot of wires all over the country, and substations and suchlike places [ i was iin charge of transport so I dont know the exact bits of infrastructure that we targeted, i just had to get 200 2 person teams onsite and ontime.]
I should think something like a countrywide electrical blackout would be pretty damned terrifying, and if you can add in hitting some of the satellite uplink areas, and other comm facilities all at the same time, you could really paralyze the country and scare the shit out of it…
There can even be “soft” military targets on military bases in the United States.
Many military bases just require a photo I.D. (if you’re a civilian passenger travelling with a military or military retired person.)
The guards at the main gates and side gates are often civilian security guards (from a civilian security guard contractor), who’ll look closely at the ID’s, and wave you through onto the installation.
There’s usually an emergency barrier system that can be activated from the guard gates to stop vehicles from entering or leaving, but unless the gate guards are tipped-off somehow, no alarm will be raised.
Once on the installation a terrorist could cause all sorts of havoc. Any parking lot on the installation would be perfect for a car bomb.
A suicide bomber could walk in to almost any area on the installation to accomplish their mission.
They could walk into the Base Hospital, the Commissary, even into an airplane hangar or fuel storage area to set off their explosives.
And a mass attack of this type could take place on many military installations at once.
And of course, there could always be attacks on military installations from outside, say on the perimeters. A shoulder launched missile might very easily make it to sensitive areas, such as where aircraft or vehicles are parked.
I wonder if any terrorists have taken this information into account.
Part of the problem with this, is that there are many places in your communications workflow that would be red flagged. The more people who are being coordinated the more people who are likely to get flagged and observed, and can expose other areas of your operation.
The real front lines in this battle are all in the management of information, and how each side uses its information. To understand how this works you’d have to understand how the NSA watches information, and how different private organizations parse that information as well. You’d have to create a workflow that kills information channels after X number of uses lest it be discovered and tracked back to you, with an open line to watch your every move.
All depends, we were all meeting in person, not online or over the phone - it was theoretically a terrorist ‘cell’ located in central new jersey and had lived there before being activated some number of years. This was really before home computers and cell phones became so prevalent, and for security reasons we met in person as we had trained all together in an ‘american’ town in central europe somewhere.
Nowdays I wouldn’t want to try it, however if we did it would also somehow involve computer viruses, and perhaps would also include some sort of health threat as well [perhaps a chemical contamination like PCBs released into some watershed or another to hit a major population center.
Remember that September 11th involved a network of over 20 men who didn’t know each other prior to the attack, who actually trained in the US for a year beforehand. Needless to say, that operation did not turn out to be “undoable”, even in spite of the risk, complexity, and expense. Now imagine that degree of secrecy and coordination applied to a lower-tech but more widespread attack. Difficult? Nah, not so much.
Attacking something like an airport is going to guaruntee a worldwide effect, aircraft will be diverted, and the knock on effects of aircraft being in the wrong place will spread far and wide.
Even if you do not manage to kill large numbers, you will delay passengers from around the world.
This is likely to lead to huge publicity, which is an important terrorist aim.
The Irish terrorists found that smallish bombs killing a few people whilst effective at killing, did not achieve the publicity and hence more widespread objective of creating fear.
Few US citizens will have all that much awareness of the weekly incidents that took place in the British Isles for this reason, those bombs generated some publicity here, but not internationally, and it didn’t undermine the will of the British all that much either.
A couple of Starbucks will only affect a relatively few people in the locality, not nice at all, but it will not make a great statement either, particularly when you consider that multiple gun killings routinely occur in the US anyway.
I’d submit to you that the US gun murder rate is appallingly high and if we in Europe were to have anything like as much, we would be wringing our hands at it.
A few bombs in the US isn’t all that much of a stretch, the average US citizen is almost already inured to such violence.
So really to have the kind of wide ranging effect, you’d pretty much have to make all US citizens feel they were at some significant risk if personal harm whenever they stepped outdoors, and at much more risk than many city dwellers already suffer - this would require a huge effort and would have to take place over a goodly period of time, and it’s almost certain that no terrorist group has the personel, money, orgaisation and intelligence or most other resources to be able to carry this off.
For a start, such a concerted campaign only works when the terrorists can hide unidentifiably among a population which itself cannot be singled out, and they would also need a signiifcant support within that population.
Since a long running daily campaign is out of the question, its then down to ‘spectaculars’ but by their nature, you only get one go at a particular target with a particular method, most of which have already been tried.
Airports, despite all their security measures, are still more vulnerable and able to produce the requisite publicity, there are a few other possibles, but counter intelligence is very advanced and its very difficult to reproduce one succesful attack at another location some time later, which is why the multiple attack seems to have been favoured.
I expect it is an awful lot harder than it first appears to operate a long running low level terror campaign.
Look at those car snipers a few years ago, they had modified their car and made a careful recconnaisance of their places of attack, and you would have thought that catching them would be almost impossible, but yet they were caught, and they were not part of a network which can be subject to monitoring and being compromised, making it harder to catch them.
The 9/11 attacks were ‘difficult’. For every person directly involved in the actual attack there were also information nodes that communicated with the people that were not involved directly in the attacks. He was also talking about coordinating 50 people. Finding 50 willing participants is a serious job. If you look here, you are likely to be reported. If you look overseas, it’s hard to get all 50 of them to the US. I’m working on a non-profit, totally legal and we are recruiting from the pool of people who are into what we are doing, yet getting 50 people coordinated to do anything is rather difficult. Coordinating 50 people to do ANYTHING is a difficult endeavour, create a spread of distance, and coordinate them independently you’ve increased the complexity of the operation. That’s why this sort of thing does not happen more often where there are not pools of willing recruits, such as Arab countries.
I definitely hear what you’re saying, but in the US we do have a highly nuanced sensitivity where violence is concerned. Blacks can kill blacks all day long in poor neighborhoods and nobody raises an eyebrow, but let one of them kill a white child and it’s front-page news. That xenophobic racism factor would be multiplied by a hundredfold if it were a dark-skinned Islamic radical.
I guess what it comes down to is that every suburbanite in every backwater town in middle America already thinks that the war in Iraq is the only thing stopping anybody from bombing 123 Elm Street in Cleveland. Mission accomplished, you couldn’t possibly terrify them any more than they already are.
Seconded. They’ve gotten what they wanted, which is why you don’t see anything but third rate idiots like the London car bombers. They have no reason to kill lots of people in America; the mission has been accomplished. The “professional” ( for lack of a better word ) terrorists are either staying home laughing at us, or attacking targets elsewhere. I doubt you will see the serious terrorists do anything until we stop dancing like puppets and do something they don’t want us to do. Leave Iraq, try to make peace with Iran, put a non-Christian-fundie-hawk in as President, or like that.
Also, I don’t see any reason to believe that the goal of these people is to kill the maximum number of people. Sure, at least some of them would like to kill all of us, but they don’t have anywhere near the power and they know it. And, they are political/religious minded. So, they go for targets of symbolic significance; the 9-11 attacks weren’t even targeted or timed for maximum casualties, just maximum symbolism.
I don’t think that many people believe that anymore. I’m happy for you that you cannot imagine a more paranoid state, but I certainly can.
I have always wondered why the 911 terrorists didn’t target the four largest gasoline refineries in the US, instead of office buildings. The catastrophic impact on the US economy would have been much deeper and longer lasting, perhaps even crippling our ability to mount a meaningful War on Terror. I believe they were rather short sighted in that respect.
What comes to my mind is that first, they think like political/religious fanatics, not military people. They were thinking in terms of symbolism not infrastructure attacks. And second, even if it occurred to them, they want a nice, massive military “War on Terror”. It can’t possibly win against them, will likely help them, and will drain our resources.
I agree, and it may be their weakness.
But hitting our energy infrastructure would drain our resources much more effectively than a land war in Asia, which we would probably try to mount anyway. Both sides are idiots.
Absolutely. Assuming the fourth plane was headed for the White House, the targets
were visual and meaningful representatives of the political, economic and military heart of America.
Why does it have to be a suicide bomb? Security is non-existent at places like Starbucks; just leave a backpack bomb in a busy Manhattan branch, and you’ll get quite a few people at very little risk to yourself. Repeat as many times as you can. You get even 10 people (or 10 small, independent teams) doing this in 10 cities across America, you’ll achieve widespread terror. Sure, each team, if they keep doing this, will get caught. But not before hitting quite a few targets (the number depends on how careful each team is). Granted, if they look Arab, it’ll be harder to move freely after the first wave of bombs-- unless they do this in places like New York where there are just too many people of every color.
Also, the offshore coordinating person/group would make it so that the teams don’t know the members of the other teams, so they can keep going even if some teams get caught.
Yes, it takes some level of competent planning, but this type of operation should be tons easier than 9/11. Are they really concerned that this isn’t ‘big’ enough to satisfy the fans back home? If planned right, the full scope of this operation could kill even more people than 9/11, after all, while causing far more terror than 9/11 ever did.
I guess I’m thinking to my own fears… Despite my being in Philly [2 hours away] at the time, 9/11 didn’t make me afraid at all. Many attacks on common public areas throughout the country would.
Which won’t be for very long. As soon as it became clear that a campaign like this was underway (and it would only take two or three attacks) public sensitivity to unattended luggage would shoot through the roof.