Was use of an airliner as a bomb really inconceivable?

Hi, Steve.

Sorry, but it's not just hindsight. We have an "intelligence" community paid big bucks to figure out what the bad guys might do and take appropriate countermeasures. If there had never been any mention or discussion of this possibility before, then I'd agree with Dr. Rice's assessment. But not only had it been discussed, it had been tried! That takes it out of the realm of "oops, missed that one" and moves it into the realm of "what the hell do we pay you for?"

-- Dave K, Speakeasy Moderator
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....of your incredible insight and foresight, and was unaware that you had seen the picture on the puzzle box.
With your insight and knowledge of 'what went wrong', why didn't you do some campaigning with the US Congress to amend or modify some laws that controlled and restricted the activities of that same Intelligence community, and thereby would have allowed them to properly function.

Or haven't you gotten to those pieces of that puzzle yet ?

Read closely my response. I was not speaking of the intelligence community but of the general populous which includes you and me. I asked if we would be happier or still mad at GWB but for another reason. I stay away from the spats here as I mostly am cynical of news reporting and political rhetoric which is lobbed back and forth. I don't get caught up in it at all and don't share my voice here much. Sorry you completely missed my point.

One big security loophole that made those hijackings possible was the fact that it was legal to bring boxcutters onboard airplanes prior to 9/11. If the "prohibited items" list had been stricter, it might have prevented them from getting those weapons on board, and I really doubt most people would have complained too loudly about it.

And of course if the intelligence services, the FBI and the INS had been talking to each other, perhaps Atta and the rest would have been rounded up long before 9/11.

Well, I'm not convinced that if it had been illegal to bring boxcutters onboard, those highjackings would have never taken place, Josh. Ever seen one of those kitchen knives with a ceramic blade (very good, very sharp, and very expensive)? BTW, metal detectors don't detect ceramics. If those boxcutters had not been allowed, I'm sure that the highjackers would have obtained and used something else, like those knives.
Since the words "20-20 hindsight" have come up many times with this subject, here's a thought: We know that there cells out there in the U.S., and intel "chatter" seems to indicate that they are winding up for another attack in the U.S. Care to predict what they will attack? Dave K., feel free to play along. It's not so easy to call it before the fact, but both political sides in the U.S. seem to think that it is, and try to "blame" either Bush or Clinton.

J, the fact that neither you nor I can make prediction based on "chatter" is meaningless. We're not the ones listening to it or privvy to what's being said, and it's not our job to interpret or act on that "chatter."

Maybe the hijackers would have found another way, but the fact is that the regulations in place on 9/11 made it easy for them.

BTW my wife confiscated a steak knife from a passenger just two weeks ago, on a flight from San Jose, Costa Rica to Newark. The plane hadn't left the ground yet and returned to the terminal for rescreening. That's probably the biggest worry now, that hijackers will take advantage of lax security at airports outside the US and target flights that cross US airspace but aren't scheduled to land here.

Hi Josh,

I find it strange that you are screened to enter the airport, but then can eat at bars/restaurants within the terminal. On our recent vacation, we didn't even need to show ID again at the gate in any of the airports (had one transfer) let alone have to pass through any detector. There was one set of passengers detained at the gate of another flight for a ticketing issue. Other than that I didn't see anyone in any of the airports randomly searched before boarding the plane on this trip. Last summer when I flew to AZ we all had to remove our shoes -- this time only those with certain types of shoes were singled out. And about every 5-10 passengers was randomly selected to be rescreened before boarding. I was also careful to pack my tweezers in my suitcase. My hubby put his shaving bag in our carryon and neglected to remove the nail clippers that have a pretty substantial file. We sailed right through

Evie

I remember hearing stories like that -- you get through security and the newsstand is selling razor blades and whatnot.

We ate at a restaurant in Dallas on Saturday (little trip to visit the MIL), and the utensils were all plastic.

They won't give metal utensils to any table that contains a MIL.




Dan

... but there was a Brookstones in one of the airports we traveled through. I wonder how many of their gadgets (even removing the obvious ones) could be turned to weapons?

There seems to be so much available after the check point that could easily be fashioned to a weapon

Evie

....that he could hijack a plane with a piece of loose-leaf paper. "Just hold it up to the stewardess's neck and threaten paper cuts." A determined hijacker will find a way. You could even use a perfectly harmless briefcase. If you tell the crew that it has a bomb in it, you've got your weapon unless they are willing and able to call your bluff.

.

Hi, Clay.

They claimed it was because of the 1?" nail file that was part of the clipper -- and most clippers have those.

-- Dave K, Speakeasy Moderator
click here to email semods4@yahoo.com

The opinions expressed above are my own,
and do not necessarily reflect those of CNET!

You just happened across an uninformed TSA employee. Read the list I posted from the TSA. I think you'll be surprised at some of the permitted items. Could you make a useful weapon from a knitting needle? They're permitted...

Trust me, Josh, they make non-metallic knives which are sold as weapons, not steak knives.
Have you considered that they are smart enough to do something that they haven't done before? Of course, if they do, I feel sure that cries of "Bush should have pervented it" will ring out in short order.

So maybe what's in order is a little more focus on preventing another attack and a little less on worrying about who's going to get blamed if one happens.

True, Josh, but another thought hit me. Suppose someone thought of a possibility and cracked off a memo saying "Say boss, I just had an idea, we might want to watch out for them trying to do "thus and so'." If I were the party having such a thought, I might have serious hesitation about writing that memo. Let's face it, later it might be used as a political campaign weapon in a "let's blame X" ploy and I might find myself "in the hot seat".

If you're thinking of distant political repercussions instead of concentrating on your analysis responsibilities, you should have been fired long before.

Dan

I guess that's why they make "burn bags". (grin)
Seriously, though, I noticed that you used the word "analysis". Interesting word, show 12 analysts an item of intel, and you may get 12 different answers as to what it may mean. The operative words are "may mean", but in this recent climate, some people think that analysts are always supposed to come up with "the truth". Unfortunately, in many cases it's not a hard black or white thing.

But they are supposed to reveal what they've come up with, not keep it to themselves out of worry about possible political fallout if they're wrong (which wouldn't be nearly as bad as the political fallout if they were right but didn't tell anyone).

No one is expecting the intel agencies to come up with absolute certainties. But they should be addressing possibilities and probabilities. The two great failures in this regard were in not assigning sufficient possibility to the threat of attack on US soil and in assigning too great a probability on the risk to the US by non existent Iraqi WMDs.

They imagined demons that did not exist and missed the real threats that did exist.

Dan

...it looks more like the Bush Administration was preparing to defend us against an ICBM attack by the long-defunct Soviet Union. Surely they weren't worrying about the North Koreans, or Bush wouldn't have been so stupid as to tell an interviewer how much he "loathes" Kim Jung Il. Or maybe he would have. Who knows.

Hi Josh,

But that's the problem about the various separate yet redundant agencies. They were prohibited by law and/or bureaucracy (but as I understand it much more so by law) from cooperating with each other in this manner. This wasn't something Bush could have done except with XO I suppose, and one can just imagine the outcry pre-9/11 to that! The Patriot Act and Homeland Security Dept. remedied much of that, but even though both had pretty much unanimous bipartisan support immediately post 9-11, the comparisons to Hitler and demonizing of Ashcroft and Bush over the Patriot Act sprang up not all that shortly thereafter.

Evie

Hi, Evie.

The comparisons to Hitler etc. are entirely the fault of Bushcroft. During the debate, their supporters promised (it's in the Congressional Record that the extraordinary, perhaps even unConstitutional powers in the Patriot Act would only be used in anti-terrorist investigations. Instead, they've been used in the War on Drugs and criminal investigations more than against terrorists. And "national security" is used as a pretext to stifle dissent by moving protesters of Administration policy to "free speech zones" located miles from the President, but more importantly, miles from where they could possibly be noticed by the public or the news media.

-- Dave K, Speakeasy Moderator
click here to email semods4@yahoo.com

The opinions expressed above are my own,
and do not necessarily reflect those of CNET!