Terrors To Come – Part One

FrontPageMagazine.com | September 13, 2001

“WE ARE MORE VULNERABLE TO TERRORISM than most Americans know,” I said. As Colorado stars twinkled overhead on this night during Restoration Weekend, Bill Sammon coaxed me to lay out one possible terrifying scenario after another. This ace Washington Times reporter knew of my think tank past studying ways to anticipate and outthink techno-terrorists.

Scarcely a week later Americans awoke to a nightmare – a handful of terrorists killing at least 10,000 people in New York City’s World Trade Center and in the Pentagon. This new Day of Infamy, deadlier than Pearl Harbor, is filed away forever in our minds by its emergency number date, 9-11, and its apocalyptic images.

What I found strangest about Tuesday’s images of airliners smashing into skyscrapers was not that I have been on the 90th Floor of one of those now-collapsed Trade Center towers.

It was that I have lived as a researcher in this nightmare realm for more than three decades and written dozens of articles and studies about it. But on Tuesday my sparsely-populated dreamscape suddenly became crowded with millions of Americans who never expected to find themselves here. They had believed high-level terrorism was fantasy, the stuff of Hollywood movies, or happened only to others, like those in the Shoah or Israelis.

Welcome to my nightmare. Please think of me as your veteran tour guide in this surreal landscape. But be warned, if you believe the horrors of Tuesday are as bad as high tech terrorism can get, then brace yourself – because, as Al Gore is fond of saying, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

What you witnessed this week could be but the tiniest foretaste of things to come. The good news is that I have suggestions in this and future columns to reduce the dangers of such nightmares turning real.

Even fans of Tom Clancy’s 1996 novel Executive Orders have pondered how a terrorist could crash a skyjacked 747 jetliner into the Capitol, killing the President along with most of a joint session of Congress and the Supreme Court. As Oscar Wilde put it, nature imitates art.

So how did Tuesday’s horrors come to pass? Beyond the perpetrators, chief among whom might be renegade Saudi millionaire Osama bin Laden, whom should we hold responsible for what happened?

Unmentioned by our national media, Bill and Hillary Clinton and their unindicted co-conspirators deserve a large share of blame for Tuesday’s terror. To fund their own socialist enterprises, the Clinton Administration took a meat ax to America’s national defense and intelligence budgets, gutting and weakening both. This is their legacy.

Bill and Hillary’s Leftist loathing for the military, the CIA, and other agencies of America’s national security would have led them to slash and burn here even without concern for budgets. Their arrogance permitted the rationalization that the end of the Cold War meant our security apparatus was no longer necessary. But cutting the muscle and sense that defends us has consequences. The thousands of dead this week in New York City and Washington, D.C. are part of the price paid for their lack of intelligence – and America’s loss of it.

Ten years without a skyjacking has also led to lax security at many American airports. Armed plainclothes sky marshals now rarely go aloft to keep skies friendly, except on the airline that will now define a safer future – El Al.

And, frankly, it has always seemed odd that most of our airliners have doors into their cockpits flimsy enough to be forced. Such doors should always have been bolted steel, bulletproof, and sealed shut from the moment the first passenger is about to board. Cockpits should have isolated bathroom facilities and food for pilots passed through a compartment with locked doors on both sides (or food stored and heated entirely inside the cockpit).

It should, in other words, have been impossible for any passenger to break into the cockpit, seize the controls of an airliner, and turn it into a Kamikaze-guided cruise missile whose warhead is full tanks of jet fuel.

But enough of Wednesday morning quarterbacking. Looking to the future, terrorism analysts recognize that the cost of computer-guided cruise missiles is getting much cheaper. The accuracy of such missiles is increasing dramatically. Before year 2025 it should be easy on the international black market to purchase your own cruise missile for as little as $20,000 in Year 2000 dollars, inexpensive enough to be within the reach of almost anybody.

What would cheap cruise missiles in terrorist hands mean? Would you or your college offspring like a career as a Secret Service agent guarding the President? Consider that soon a terrorist in south New Jersey will be able to target a cruise missile on the exact window and room in a New York City skyscraper where a President will be. Or on a Super Bowl game. Or on a joint session of Congress.

Wonder why Israel is frantically rushing to develop and perfect anti-missile laser weapons? From his own piggy bank Osama bin Laden might soon be able to purchase at least 1,000 cruise missiles. Saddam Hussein could afford 50 times as many or more. Imagine awakening one morning in your Kibbutz outside Jerusalem to the news that 50,000 cruise missiles armed with a variety of deadly warheads have been launched simultaneously against Israel from many different directions.

Our world will never be the same after last Tuesday. One immediate change will be restored intelligence and military budgets and a determination to preemptively attack those terrorists bent on attacking us. Millions of Americans are finding calluses forming on the soft spots where in the past they criticized British toughness against IRA terror or Israeli toughness against those who bomb its suks and cities.

In the ebb and flow of warfare’s history, terrorizing marauders prompted the building of castles. Then the coming of gunpowder and cannons made castles obsolete. But today we retain the medieval reflexes that prompt us to build walls, empower a garrison state, and withdraw into a state of siege.

War, as the libertarian saying goes, is the health of the state. It abolishes opposition and leads people to unify behind their government. It justifies new limits on civil liberties. In the wake of Tuesday’s attacks, get ready for new government powers to monitor citizen communications, search and seize, and hem in Second Amendment rights. Each act of terrorism could become a demand by government to take another bite out of your freedom.

But the threat of terrorism can also be reduced by other means more in harmony with American liberty. Foremost among these is decentralization.

The emergence of gunpowder and cannon meant that it was counterproductive to herd people into once-secure castles. Clustered together, they simply became easier targets.

The same is true of modern cities. Cram 50,000 people into two tall, fragile boxes called the World Trade Center and you create a vulnerable, tempting terrorist target. The same is true when millions of people are herded into a few square miles of land called New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Seattle, Miami, or San Francisco.

We have loved cities because they allow lots of people to live and work close together, sharing fabulous restaurants, theaters, and other cultural advantages. But as a new study published Monday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Health and Human Services finds, people live longer and healthier in suburbs than in cities. These statistics will only be strengthened by this week's tragic urban deaths from terrorism.

The modern metaphor we should look to is not the castle but the Internet. Originally created by the military as Darpanet, it was designed to be a decentralized communications system that could not be shut down by military or terrorist attack on any one central point.

The Internet permits millions of Americans to work from home, even if that home is an isolated farmhouse or suburban split-level. And in the dawning age of terrorism, a crude rule of thumb is that the farther you live from a big city or other centralized target (a military facility, dam, oil field, or the like), the safer from future terrorism you will be.

Would I move out of a big city because it is a likely Ground Zero for terrorist attack, today armed with airliners and tomorrow with mega-weapons? My wife and I did, almost 20 years ago, and have slept more serenely ever since. Do not be surprised if property values in Manhattan and other metropolises begin to decline following Tuesday’s tragedy as people begin to understand what it portends.

But even if you prefer to continue living in the shadow of a big city, you can do things to decentralize your life. Something as simple as having a week or more supply of stored food and water, flashlights and candles, and other basic survival goods will make you less vulnerable to the fear of terrorism and chaos in your city.

As social policy, government planners should be decentralizing systems where possible. Emerging fuel cell technologies, for example, could soon make it practical for millions of families to generate their own electricity at a competitive price – thereby reducing the risk of power grid disruptions and the social breakdowns they can trigger. By dispersing city water supplies, planners could make it harder for terrorists to devastate a city by poisoning its one drinking hole.

Leftists in recent years have mounted a sophisticated propaganda campaign against “sprawl,” the spreading out and decentralizing of city populations. Their immediate political goals have been to impose centralized planning and to make it harder for productive folks to flee tax-gobbling central cities.

But “spawl” turns out to be a prime defense against terrorism. The more spread out and decentralized a society is, the fewer prime targets it offers to attackers, as the British learned during America’s War for Independence. “Sprawl” and individual self-reliance, in other words, may be among our best forms of national defense.

America will never be the same after Tuesday’s terrorist attack. But if it leads us to re-think who we are as individuals and a society, it could make America even better.

-- Anonymous, September 13, 2001

Answers

He's right about the cockpit doors. They are a joke. They're very flimsy and can be easily kicked in. They are there only to keep the "good" passengers from entering the cockpit. They are no real obstacle to someone who is determined to bust in. If the terrorist could be kept out of the cockpit they could still kill other passengers and flight attendants, and try to get the pilots to open up due to that tactic, but the pilots would retain the ability to land as quickly as possible. Once on the ground the terrorists have lost virtually all power to do anything more than kill passengers.

-- Anonymous, September 13, 2001

They put cameras in school buses, why not on planes?

Im sure it would help in more ways than this one.

-- Anonymous, September 13, 2001