I attend college football games. Everyone goes through security. Outside security we pack up in masses of humanity outside the gates waiting to get through the inevitably slow security.
It would be far more effective to do something at the gates dude to the density of humanity there where there is no security ... than in the stadium where people are actually more spread out.
If someone did want to do something at such a sporting event, nothing is stopping them from doing it at the gates where there is a reliable and unsecured mass of humanity, and I don't think anyone is bothering with that ...
I used to wheel my grandfather into games on a wheelchair... they didn't check anything, just waved you through. A wheel chair sized bomb would be easy to bring in, but you don't even have to bring it in.
We have secure ID schemes that I believe most if not all of the 9/11 attackers would have qualified to get ...
In the US we don't have mass terrorist events that any of this would prevent.
Why do we keep subjecting non-terrorists to these systems?
> It would be far more effective to do something at the gates dude to the density of humanity
Maybe it is about shifting the blame. If something happens outside, it's the police failure but if something happens inside it is venue management failure.
Anyway, I completely agree that we have given up way too much in the name of security. If it's not the terrorist, then it is "think of the children" scare and we are about to get our personal devices scanning our personal files and report us to the authorities. For now it is CSAM material but I don't see any reason why the same devices wouldn't be scanning for other stuff once the system is in place.
I totally expect our devices to start checking on us for "betrayal" patterns once the conflict with China intensifies, for example. Once you become a "human resource" and nothing more in the eyes of the political structures, you will need to be managed and in 2020s the tools for it are plenty and powerful.
Funny how HN is so willing to agree with the absurdity of security theater at airports, yet so resistant to calling out the pandemic theater we're living every day.
I live in a pretty liberal area, so I assume we are taking stronger measures than your average area, and I have to say that nothing surrounding any covid precautions even approaches what it takes to get on a flight. Wear a mask indoors? Get the jab that most people wanted anyway? I'm just not seeing this Orwellian oppression that some people seem to be suffering under right now.
NYC is the most strict, but they are also the most densely populated. Beyond that, I just don't feel like I've given up any rights.
Can't say the same about a shoeless, invasive patdown where a stranger runs their hand down your butt crack after having waited in line for an hour and gone through a nude scanner.
your comment sounds like what someone who doesnt fly might have said after 9/11. its not hard to think of some examples that apply to the covid security theatre. for example, there are fundamental freedoms, like the freedom of movement, that turn out not to be so fundamental after all. safety first.
I live in Moscow, Russia, and there was a brief time when I was stripped of rights to enter a restaurant, cafe, gym, theater, concert or sports venue. There was talking about requirement of vaccination to use public transit and even a taxi.
Fortunately, those restrictions were cancelled after 3 weeks, because you know, voting day is coming and we don't need angry citizens to vote against ruling party. But the infrastructure is there and it may be used again any time now.
It's not the same. Covid is clearly causing a significant increase in mortality. Even if you don't believe the covid-reporting numbers, you can simply look at excess deaths.
It's very difficult to falsify death stats on a mass-scale especially in a country like the US.
the threats are legitimate and every death counts but it also makes sense to prioritize and focus our limited attention to areas where it has the most impact.
Terrorism kills something like 28k/year whereas Covid has killed 5 million.
The majority of the ~5 million that covid killed would have been dead of old age, heart disease, etc. in 5-10 years anyway. Covid just shaved off a few years of life expectancy; the same people would have shown up in CDC death counts as heart disease or natural causes statistics a few years later. With the 28k killed by terrorism, not so much. You have a lot more young and healthy dying with decades of life expectancy remaining.
Same with comparing covid deaths to WWI deaths. On the one hand you have thousands of healthy 18-year-olds dying, and on the other you have thousands of elderly, obese, and sickly people dying. Not quite a fair comparison.
> No, they cratered the middle class while making the rich richer.
Isn’t this economic policy, not lockdown policy? Any government could decide to pay laborers 100% of their salary to stay out of work. They could decide “essential workers” would be paid on top of their salary as compensation for the risk and danger. They could deice that corporate profit during a shutdown would go to support laborers. Lockdowns only hurt the middle class and help the rich because the government chooses to force the middle class to stay home while not forcing the rich to stop profiteering off it.
The lockdowns didn't work because people pushed back against them causing the measures to be half-assed as a way to appease those people.
This happens all the time in politics and it's infuriating.
You can't judge the effectiveness of a plan if the plan is modified as a shitty compromise or just plain ignored. But people do judge them, which makes those compromises an effective form of sabotage.
The last state lockdown orders expired in June 2020. Most lasted on the order of a few weeks.
The economy is not destroyed. Assets are appreciating, GDP is growing faster than it has in a decade and employers are desperate to find workers. The unemployment rate is near 5%.
If there is a weak spot in the economy, it is that rising case numbers of the Delta variant are causing people to voluntarily limit their in-person activities. When you ask business leaders what can help the economy, they say “more people getting vaccinated” because it’s the fastest way to reduce new COVID cases.
In my neighborhood several small businesses are still intact. The businesses that relied primarily on commuters are gone, but the staples catering to the people who live here are still intact. My favorite local bar, coffee shop, drycleaner, and bookstores are still going. I'm a bit sad about my pho place closing down, but they're a small chain, and they have another one a bit further away from me that I can still go to.
Talk to your local lockdown provider if you are not happy with the results.
Done properly, of course a lockdown would be effective. Why? Because of the Germ theory. The viruses exist and they don't teleport.
If anything, I would have much preferred if we had a month of global lockdown instead of years of slow burn battle. We wouldn't have had to convince people for vaccination too. It worked for Wuhan.
I am all in for spreading the population sparsely under the sun for a month(I'll take the Greece beaches or the French Riviera). We can make the immunes ones prepare the food and bring the beer.
Well that's a large swing in the other direction, but I enjoy the hyperbole. You do realize lockdowns are the far other direction though? Do you see my point why lockdowns were bad?
Allowing and encouraging people to go outside is the happy medium.
The idea is to separate people from each other for long enough for the virus to die off. Could be done in many ways. Accommodating people in small separate groups for a month under the sun has it's practicality issues but if someone can pull it off the results would be exactly the same.
do you know what would happen if everybody on earth gave themselves 6 feet of space from each other for 14 days? the same thing that would happen if you teleported the virus to the moon. why didnt anyone think of that!
Both have theater aspects and let me propose something: that's good.
When you approach airport security (theater) you wonder what their capabilities are _today_. Are they sniffing the air at large with their GCMS? Is there going to be a dog today? Its intimidating to think of it as a theoretical attacker because of its large and multifaceted apparatus, which is part of its deterrent power.
Masks are somewhat similar, they have a vanishingly small chance of actually intercepting a virus particle/droplet that was going to infect you on a case by case basis BUT they make people approach you differently. They say "stand back".
No actually required :-). I didn't say masks were not effective, I said part of their effectiveness is the making-conscious of transmission vectors. E.g. when you wear a mask and see others do it you are more likely to wash your hands or stand back.
When you wear a mask (as I do) in addition to blocking some particles you signal to others "lets play the not kill eachother game by limiting virus vectors!"
When you approaching airport or train station security theater, you slowing down due to limited throughput. And then bang! - a terrorist blows up in the crowd right in front of security gate.
> Funny how HN is so willing to agree with the absurdity of security theater at airports, yet so resistant to calling out the pandemic theater we're living every day.
There absolutely are red-team exercises against airport security. Sometimes the TSA has fared very poorly[0]. In the face of decreased air travel during this pandemic their "catch rate" has gotten better[1].
Except now I’m supposed to show a digital vaccine record many places I go. Not many open source options exist for reading them either, so I’m just supposed to trust that the data (name, birth date, maybe location) isn’t being sent to some marketing analytics company somewhere.
Edit: Since some HN commenters want to play disingenuous games and insert words into my mouth, I’ll clarify my specific problem is with these apps having zero standards. If my state makes its own app or devises a law to prosecute this kind of use of private data, I would have less of a problem with it as a temporary measure.
when I got my first vaccine, they gave me a paper card, and they put stickers on it to record which vaccines I got, and I put it in my wallet where it's been ever since. I haven't (yet, I guess) had to show a "digital vaccine record", I just show my paper card and they stare at it for a bit and then wave me through.
if you did not get that option, that sucks, and it sounds a bit inconvenient, but, uh, yeah, over 600,000 people in the US have died so far, i don't think that's a "scare", that sounds like a valid concern to me.
also your data is almost assuredly at 20 different marketing analytics firms already, regardless of how secure or open-source the digital vaccine record is.
You don’t know where my data is. And regardless, that doesn’t mean I’m supposed to be okay with another vector that I cannot opt out of for potentially selling my data.
> Except now I’m supposed to show a digital vaccine record many places I go. Not many open source options exist for reading them either, so I’m just supposed to trust that the data (name, birth date, maybe location) isn’t being sent to some marketing analytics company somewhere.
If you think vaccine passports are bad just wait until you hear about all phones...
Sorry bud, I can turn off my phone. I can leave my phone at home. My phone carrier doesn’t sell my location, they just give it to the police if I commit a murder.
I don’t really see what this has to do with vaccine passports (Louisana has a nice app for it, digital drivers license, proof of vaccination checked against a state database) but phone carriers do sell real-time location data to third parties. They were fined a pittance for it: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/02/fcc-issues-wrist...
> when discussing homeless people being told to move somewhere cheaper.
What an absolutely insane whataboutism. This has nothing to do with what we're discussing and you look like a joke. You're asserting that vaccine passports infringe upon your freedoms. Just don't go to those bars. Jesus.
What rights? Businesses have the right to refuse service. Governments have always required vaccine verification. This is just whining. There are no rights implications here.
Also calling me a nazi isn't really appropriate, I don't think.
> If you're okay with forcing people to show their medical history to drink,
This is the obvious troll. You're not forced to show anything _to drink_. You're forced to comply with a business's requirements as per their rights, to be allowed to drink _in their establishment_.
Also please go back to reddit if you cannot resist the urge to call names.
I'm fully vaccinated, but that was a choice I made. It was a risk assessment. "How likely am I to get covid and have a bad go of it?" vs "How likely am I to have a bad reaction from the vaccine?" That's a risk assessment that varies from person to person based on where they live, what medical conditions they might have, their age, and other things.
The mRNA vaccines are especially worrisome to some because they are relatively new and aren't fully approved in the US (where I live).
I have a co-morbidity and by the time I was eligible to get vaccinated it looked obvious to me that I'd be better off getting it based on how well they were performing and how low the risk appeared. Things could have turned out wildly different with vaccines that turned out to be both mostly ineffective and potentially dangerous, causing me to assess things differently.
I encourage my friends who aren't vaccinated to get jabbed, but I have no wish to have the government force them to get a medical procedure they specifically don't want.
The reason is to help protect and care for your fellow human beings.
"It's your body" only counts if what you're doing with it isn't putting unconsenting others at risk. Forgoing the vaccine without a solid medical reason is putting others at risk.
By your logic, you should be able to punch anyone in the face at any time, because your fist is part of your body, and "it's your body".
> "It's your body" only counts if what you're doing with it isn't putting unconsenting others at risk.
Not according to pro-abortion stances.
If you want to get the vaccine, it should protect you. If you can't there are therapeutics. You don't need to force others to inject mRNA shots into them.
Your analogy was awful. Such a false equivalency, there's nothing even remotely the same about that example.
The point of vaccines is to help protect society at large, not so much you specifically. Failing to take reasonable steps that help keep your friends and neighbors safe is simply reprehensible.
I don't understand "natural immunity" as a reason. I think I don't know what it actually means.
As far as I know, natural immunity is conferred if and only if you've recovered from the virus. And one of the goals of the vaccine is to avoid getting it in the first place. But to get natural immunity, you have to be infected first. It seems a bit like burning down your house to prevent arson from a stranger. Have I misunderstood "natural immunity"?
Likewise, yelling at people to get the vaccine makes no sense.
If you don't want to catch the virus, get the vaccine. Don't worry about others.
They will get the virus and then get natural immunity. People will have adverse reactions to both covid and the vaccine. Let them weigh the risk to which one.
> They will get the virus and then get natural immunity
Only if they, y'know, survive, and only after being a nuisance to the healthcare system that the rest of rely on
You've got a point that verifiable natural immunity as of _now_ should probably be acceptable in lieu of vaccination (though efficacy against variants is worth considering) for mandates.
Offering 'natural immunity' as an option to the currently un-vaccinated un-infected population is just crazy. People will assume the risk, get sick, got to hospital, and die. Just ignoring those 'others' isn't an option for public-health since the downside costs of the risk they assume are borne by everyone in the form of healthcare burden. 'They' still expect to be a priority when they get sick...
You're talking about "aren't thinking" but most of your posts just involve nebulous throw away phrases like "People have immunity"... clearly you know that phrase doesn't mean anything right?
In the meantime we can all see for ourselves actual impact, real things, in areas where vaccination rates are low. These aren't nebulous concepts like your phrases, they're real.
Can you just go to r/nursing and read the 100x stories of nurses saying "I'm actually not an ICU nurse but my floor has been converted to an ICU floor" or "We have 4 nurses for 30 covid patients and I want to scream"?
Maybe go to your local hospital and ask then among their own nursing social circles? They're the people who would have first-hand understanding of how full the ICUs are.
I'm not saying I believe everything I read on Reddit, but I know r/nursing is a longtime subreddit of mostly medical people and has a history of being as such for a long time. If I wanted to know what the actual medical field is dealing with day to day, I think a community with a history of being where healthcare people talk about what they're dealing with day to day is a pretty good bet.
> The curve is flattened, the goal posts have been moved out of the stadium.
How are you quantifying that? The original intent of flattening the curve was to avoid overwhelming the healthcare system and here we are... overwhelming the healthcare system(s) again. A quick check of capacity of ICU beds in the SE USA shows that on average, hospitals are running 92% capacity(1). Obviously you want right-sized ICU capacity, but I doubt 92% is a comfortable margin.
I got vaccinated to protect myself, not fan of natural immunity through suffocating. 2 days pain in the shoulder, 1 day of a mild fever and affectionate feelings towards Bill Gates is a great bargain.
I wouldn't know why those who already have immunity would get the vaccine. There are studies showing that a shot post Covid-19 greatly increases the immune response agains variants, so there could be reasons.
In Europe getting the decease and beating it is considered good enough for immunity. Talk to your local authorities if you are not happy with your local practices.
You can always chase people who sneeze on the streets(hang around a hospital maybe?), get your covid, test positive, quarantine yourself for 2 weeks and hope for the best as an immuniser or a natural booster.
The vaccines on the other hand are much more practical and safer. They seem to lose some efficacy over time against getting covid but the results against getting seriously ill are very promising. Which probably means, if you get Covid-19 naturally later on, it would be a natural booster with much lower risk compared to a non-vaxxed person.
You've already posted 22 times in this discussion, including COVID denial and downplaying, hyperbole about "freedom loss", labeling someone a Nazi, sea-lioning for hospital stats, and spreading vaccine FUD. What are you trying to accomplish? Have you ever stepped back from the keyboard for a brief moment, reflected on why everything you post is grayed out, and come to a conclusion that doesn't involve groupthink and a massive conspiratorial campaign against "the truth"?
There's a name for it: Security Theater [1]. "Security theater is the practice of taking security measures that are intended to provide the feeling of improved security while doing little or nothing to achieve it."
Some have likened it to a jobs program that both increases the surveillance capability of the government as well as provides political creds for the representatives in those districts where airports exist, similar to the Military Industrial Complex.
I guess another reason for the security theater is to keep the powerful safe. If a bunch of random fans get hurt going to a concert or sporting event, it's nbd, but if someone "important" gets hurt it's a much bigger deal. Maybe a pessimistic view.
"If someone did want to do something at such a sporting event, nothing is stopping them from doing it at the gates" - this has already happened in Russia (Volgograd, 2013). A suicide bomber blowed himself up in front of a security gate at the main train station. Between 37 and 50 injured, 16 dead as the result.
> If someone did want to do something at such a sporting event, nothing is stopping them from doing it at the gates where there is a reliable and unsecured mass of humanity
Theres a mass of people, but few cameras. Much worse cost/benefit ratio in terms of whatever craziness terrorists would supposedly consider benefit.
(feel free to spend the rest of your day thinking up silly wordplay involving "bang for the buck", I wish you were alone in this if you do)
It worked in Paris a few years ago. Two suicide bombers were stopped at security and detonated their suicide vests - no other people were killed besides the terrorists.
I have my doubts that the cost of hiring that much security makes them much of anything. I didn't see anyone bringing picnics to the game ... at all even before the events.
No longer high on the list of priorities for politicians, so insufficient benefit for risking being seen as the politician that wants to make life easier (regardless that this is not true) for terrorists.
I have global entry & precheck (ironically, global entry is often slower than just using their app when you arrive). It's nice, for sure, but it's not pre-9/11 security. It's close, I guess, for just the traveller. But I miss the days when family could come to the gate. Maybe airports are too busy for that anyway, now, but I can dream.
> But I miss the days when family could come to the gate. Maybe airports are too busy for that anyway, now, but I can dream.
I kinda miss it too, and it's a bit of a shock seeing it happen in old movies now, but I already struggle to find seating at the gate. Even if the security concerns went away entirely in a magical world, I'd bet this restriction would stay.
Most of the time (100% for me so far) you just have to have pre-check for whomever is buying the tickets. As long as they're all on the same reservation ID, the pre-check will get applied to the entire group. That's how I got my first taste of pre-check, when my sister-in-law bought tickets for our entire family. I ended up buying it for myself, and now my wife & kids get the stamp as well when we're traveling together.
They'll tell you it's not guaranteed (and it's technically not even guaranteed that you'll get PreCheck even if you've got PreCheck yourself) but I've also had a 100% success rate with buying tickets and having PreCheck applied to all of them.
Too much money in alcohol to ban it.
Due to the behaviour of people on planes now, some airline have temporarily stopped serving it but passengers could still get it at a bar at the airport or buy a bottle of alcohol at a duty free store and drink themselves stupid before boarding the plane.
I dont think they can easily ban that.
edit:// OP clarified this was meant for sports games.
I think what he's mentioning has nothing to do with 9/11 though, right? He's talking about football hooligans. I only know that there are such scenes in soccer here in Europe and it can get pretty rough when they clash.
Tell me about it. I got to lay on top of the families suitcases in the back of the station wagon on road trips. It’s so much easier to sleep like that.
Which is exactly why my everyone in my car wears their seat belts. But that doesn't change the fact that it was easier to sleep when laying down in the back of the station wagon.
Re: attacking outside security, radical Islamist terrorists did exactly that in the departures hall of Brussels Airport, 2016.
They killed 17 people in a pair of suicide bombings there and injured many more, which were followed up by a similar attack on the Metro. There were enough cameras and coverage that the terrorists achieved their objective (publicity).
> nothing is stopping them from doing it at the gates where there is a reliable and unsecured mass of humanity,
Doing it at the gates is not going to be seen live by millions. Having it seen by the masses in real time and without warning is far more effective than having it merely reported.
I think we are doing these mostly useless things in order to signal that as a society we're somewhat careful in order to reassure people. I feel our best security defense is that most people are not terrorists?
Compared to lives lost $100 is not expensive at all.
But sure, let's forget about morals for a second (lives lost and all that) and be very cold and cynical about the pricing. Still - reputational damage, political outcry, people suing the company/government for "failing to do even basic security checks like belts and shoes" - $100 million is nothing.
This is why I believe the TSA wasn’t made to protect citizens it was only made to prevent airplanes from being used as projectiles against the government/military.
just like the police doesn't exist to serve and protect the public. but to protect private property. it's all doublespeak as george orwell would've called it.
> We have secure ID schemes that I believe most if not all of the 9/11 attackers would have qualified to get ...
Secure ID is designed so people on various no fly lists won’t be allowed to fly should they acquire a fake ID. How well this works in practice remains to be seen, but it’s the theory at least.
I'll agree that most stadium security seems to be mostly theatre, but people are definitely not more spread out once inside the stadium. At least not at any large stadium I've ever been in which at least a dozen entrances with people going in over the course of several hours.
I like those checks though. It won't stop a guy trying to do a mass killing. It will stop a guy prone to getting drunk and casually carrying a gun who might be fine cheating the system if they're not checking, but not if they are checking.
But in the college football game example, there's no discouragement right at the gates, no security, and they don't even bother with hitting an unsecured target at the same venue.
The goal of terrorism is to scare people into restricting their own freedoms. It has worked amazingly well so far.
To any motivated anti-society organization or person, this is huge leverage. A few deaths leading to a noticeably more authoritarian state? What's not to love?
It doesn't even matter if the authorities do their job and punish those responsible, the people will still choose to restrict their own freedoms and makes their lives worse for more "security".
To quibble: terrorism is using dramatic violence to achieve political ends. It just so happens that the victimized society often wants to increase security.
The US had at least 3 major responses to 9/11:
1) seek revenge (invade Afghanistan, kill Bin Laden),
2) armor up (Dept. of Homeland Security), and
3) unify under nationalism (flags everywhere).
It's pretty easy to imagine a timeline where some or none of those happened.
In the case of 9/11 the most likely motive was retaliation. If you could ask the terrorists, they would tell you that America terrorized them first (I'm not saying that's accurate).
We actually know their motivations because Bin Laden didn't hide his agenda. He wrote a fair bit on the topic. He wanted to force a change in US foreign policy to stop supporting Israel specifically and to leave the middle east in general. He saw himself as an Islamic anti-imperialist. It was actually pretty straight forward.
step 1: have big terrorist attack on American civilians
step 2: American civilians ask "why me?", his words not mine btw.
step 3: civilians find out what US gov has been doing in the middle east and call for change.
In hindsight its an incredibly naïve plan. And I think it ironically shows a lack of knowing your enemy on his part. Americans don't take well to being attacked or intimidated. If you want them to leave you alone the worst thing you can do is provoke them to action.
There's nothing hypothetical about it. I'm actually baffled at the fact that people here infer random motivations when Usama bin Laden gave interviews as far back as the early 90s and held multiple speeches after 9/11.
The stated goal of the attacks was to show Americans that their continuous war and support for secular dictators in the Muslim world would come with high cost, and to force the American government to retreat from the Middle East.
This of course backfired spectacularly. Revenge is certainly a primary motivation, too, but I really don't think there is much room on the interpretation for the initial motivation because Al Qaeda was always very open and clear about it.
It's funny, but in a way, he accomplished his goal of getting us out of the middle east. Our weariness with our involvement in the middle east has caused a big push for energy independence.
We fracked our way back to being the worlds largest oil producer. That, and our transition to a greener economy is bad news for middle eastern oil producers. We're much more willing to leave the entire region to their own miserable devices.
Biden is getting a lot of flack for pulling out of Afghanistan, and yes, he completely dropped the ball on the organization of the withdrawal, but if it means that not one more drop of american blood is shed, it's worth it.
Anand Gopal’s article in the New Yorker this month shows how the Afghan Army (including the media darling Sami Sadat) was wasting civilians in Helmand using the vaunted Black Hawks we gave them and calling it progress.
At the time of the 9/11 attacks, the US did not have bases in in Afghanistan, Iraq or Libya. Bin Laden was complaining about US presence in Saudi Arabia and Israel. So even with recent withdrawals, the US presence is only back at the level at the tine of the attacks. I don't see how this can in any way be construed as successful?
The purpose of the 9/11 attacks was to get the American public to demand the US withdraws support to Israel and Saudi Arabia. This has clearly failed.
It wasn’t much involved in any of those (and indeed had already abandoned the Kurds after the conflict which motivated the formation of al-Qaeda) when al-Qaeda actually got organized. It got reinvolved with them largely enabled by the political fallout from 9/11.
> The withdrawal from Afghanistan is a culmination of that.
Again, that's mostly a reversion to the status quo ante.
Yes, but that took 20 years. Before, they got a war and permanent drone terror plus a massive amount of ground troops. I doubt 9/11 has anything to do with them retreating now; in fact, it's probably helping that the scars heal.
>The stated goal of the attacks was to show Americans that their continuous war and support for secular dictators in the Muslim world would come with high cost, and to force the American government to retreat from the Middle East. This of course backfired spectacularly.
No, this was not his goal, and no it did not fail. His stated goal was to recreate the mujahedeen success against the Soviet Union, where they used low cost guerrilla fighting to draw out a costly and unpopular war until it bankrupted the Soviets and then they retreated from Afghanistan. It is debatable how much effect the cost of the Afghan war had on the collapse of the Soviet Union, but the key is that Bin Laden believed it.
His goal was to drive out the Americans eventually. There is no evidence or reason to believe he thought that 9/11 would directly lead to American withdrawal from the Greater Middle East.
>”We—with Allah's help—call on every Muslim who believes in Allah and wishes to be rewarded to comply with Allah's order to kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever and whenever they find it. We also call on Muslim ulema, leaders, youths, and soldiers to launch the raid on Satan's U.S. troops and the devil's supporters allying with them, and to displace those who are behind them so that they may learn a lesson.” Osama Bin Laden’s 1998 Fatwa [1]
Even in 2004, we knew that Al Qaeda propaganda fueled by US invasions of Muslim countries was strengthening, not weakening, Al Qaeda.
“Any assessment that the global terror movement has been rolled back or that even one component, Al Qaeda, is on the run is optimistic and most certainly incorrect. Bin Laden's doctrines are now playing themselves out all over the world. Destroying Al Qaeda will not resolve the problem.” 2004 M.J. Gohel, head of the Asia-Pacific Foundation, a London think tank [2]
And in his own words, what Bin Laden wanted out of the Afghan war, in 2004. Russia lasted 10 years before they were “forced to withdraw in defeat”. The US made almost made it to 20.
>”Even though we are in the fourth year after the events of September 11th, Bush is still engaged in distortion, deception and hiding from you the real causes. And thus, the reasons are still there for a repeat of what occurred”
>”All that we have mentioned has made it easy for us to provoke and bait this administration. All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaida, in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits for their private companies.”
>”This is in addition to our having experience in using guerrilla warfare and the war of attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers, as we, alongside the mujahidin, bled Russia for 10 years, until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat.” Bin Laden Interview in 2004 [3]
The part of our response that disappointed me the most was the way people ostracized any other way of thinking during that time period.
Suggestions that we shouldn't overreact because it plays right into their hands and that we shouldn't give up rights to the government out of simple fear that we'd just regret later didn't just go unheeded, they were vehemently attacked. It was worse polarization by far then we're seeing now, and it wasn't a more-or-less 50/50 split and didn't follow party lines.
Not as much and not as rabid. Combination of the Gringrich bullshit "culture issues" of the 90s and the initially patriotic and then nationalistic response to 9/11.
This actually isn’t the goal of terrorism. I’ve studied terrorism and the definition is essentially non-state actors using violence for political means.
Now we can go in to various conspiracies from “Bush planned 9.11 as a false flag” to “Bush ignored intelligence reports so he could launch the war on terror,” but those are mostly just unproven conspiracies unrelated to what al-Qaeda wanted.
This is either war or war crimes depending on what exactly happened.
There seems to be a trend of calling every terrifying event “terrorism.” People sometimes colloquially refer to even non-political mass shootings as terrorism.
I believe it’s important to separate different types of mass violence. For example a gang-related mass shooting might be de-escalated by a mediator engaging the belligerents, whereas a war crime should be sent to international criminal court and a terrorist should be dealt with in a manner to minimize the earned media attention.
Rather than convenient conspiracy strawmen, how about "The military industrial surveillance complex was a main beneficiary of 9.11, and is symbiotic with the groups it purports to defend us against."
I was talking in the context of 9/11, not all the yellowcake stuff. IIRC the 9/11 commission report shows some evidence that intelligence was aware of a possible attack, but the administration didn’t act. Some people took this to mean the intel was deliberately ignored, which is the part that seems conspiratorial.
Saudi Arabia's decades long record of cultivating extremist outfits, and "influence operations" is, thought, not a conspiracy theory, but a fact.
When I first seen 9/11 on TV as an 11 year old, I instantly thought that Ryadh will be turned into a crater within a few hours.
I dropped my jaw out of suprise, when I heard US going to declare war on Iraq — Saudis' biggest enemy. It made zero sense. I kept on watching the satellite TV at my neighbour's house, and was hoping that it was my knowledge of English failing me. It didn't.
>I dropped my jaw out of suprise, when I heard US going to declare war on Iraq — Saudis' biggest enemy.
You're being more than a little disingenuous ignoring the fact that we invaded Afghanistan specifically to go after the extremist group that was responsible for 9/11 about 2yr prior to invading Iraq, which was done for different reasons and "harboring terrorists" took a back seat to WMDs on that list of reasons.
The attack in Afghanistan was initially to attack Al Quada directly. It turned into a war against the Taliban when they refused to give him up. That went on for a year or so, but the drum beat of war against Iraq started on 9/12.
There is a memo from Rumsfeld around then. [1]
The fact that all the terrorists were Saudi, that Bin Laden was Saudi, that Iraq was an enemy of the Saud regime, that Iraq was a "buffer" between the rest of the Middle East and Iran, all of that was ignored.
The war in Iraq was the US worst foreign affairs decision in the last 50 years.
All of the "WMD" and then "bringing democracy" was retconning the original desire to finish the first Iraq war, which had nothing to do with 9/11.
That doesn't change his main point. Saudi Arabia was one of the primary financiers of the taliban and Al Qaida, but instead of going after the Saudis some of the only non military flights to be allowed to fly just after 9/11 were private jets that flew Saudi Royal family members out of the country.
>The goal of terrorism is to scare people into restricting their own freedoms. It has worked amazingly well so far.
I don't think that makes sense.
If say terrorist actions resulted in the opposite, say a nation providing less security / fewer restrictions:
We would then logic it out and say the goal of terrorism is to restrict fewer freedoms and thus allow the terrorists more freedom to do whatever it is they wanted.... including more terrorism.
But that's obviously also not the point of terrorism.
Terrorists are pushing their own political agenda via violence, that's it, the result isn't necessarily some intent / scheme. If they don't get what they ultimately want, I don't think they give a damn about security or etc.
> The goal of terrorism is to scare people into restricting their own freedoms. It has worked amazingly well so far.
No it isn't. Not any more than it is the goal of burglars to get people to invest in home security. The goal of terrorism is to use attacks on civilians to achieve political goals, like getting Northern Ireland out of the UK or get the US out of the Middle East.
Why would terrorists care how much the enemy restricts their own freedom? Just because something hurt your enemy does not mean it helps you get closer to your goal.
> Just because something hurt your enemy does not mean it helps you get closer to your goal.
I think that's a good general observation, but a key assumption of terrorism is that hurting your enemy /will/ pressure them to do what you want.
Terrorism is all about out unconventional ways of bringing pain to your enemy, rather than just defeating their military in combat. So I think terrorism can definitely be intended to sow fear, paranoia, overreaction, internal division, etc within the enemy civil society.
Not as the end goal, but as part of the strategy of inflicting paint to pressure them to capitulate.
Osama bin Laden did not care about our freedoms, he wanted the U.S. out of the Middle East and believed based on Somalia that dramatically attacking us would lead to that result. This is well documented.
We have to be careful to not assign whatever motivation or outcome we don’t like as “the goal of terrorism.” You can justify anything that way, and people do. “If you do the thing I don’t like, the terrorists win” can cut both ways.
Terrorists have specific goals they are trying to achieve with violence, usually ideological or political or both. Bin Laden thought his ideology would have room to grow if he could scare the U.S. into leaving. He was wrong about that. The fact that we still have to take shoes off at the airport (annoying as it is) does not mean he won.
"Terrorism" in the broad sense of the act does not have a goal. Because it is a means to an end, not an end itself.
Terrorists do what they do for many reasons. Some are political, some are due to sectarianism. Sometimes its because they are crazy and have irrational motivations.
Rarely is it the goal of the terrorist to force a society into tyranny.
Timothy McVeigh was seeking revenge.
Bin Laden was trying to force the US to change its foreign policy.
No that's still an agenda. Nobody becomes a terrorist just because. There is always a motivation and goal. You say retaliation makes it an end to itself but I give as a counter Timothy McVeigh. He was seeking revenge and sending a message. Terrorism is a tactic used to achieve a specific goal.
No that's an oversimplification. I can ride a bike because I want to ride a bike. But terrorism by definition describes a type of tactic used to reach a stated goal. It is not simply killing people. That's called murder. And murder can be an end to itself. There have certainly been murderers who had a compulsion to just kill.
Terrorism is killing a lot of innocent civilians in order to incite terror in a population to bend to your demands. They have an agenda and feel they are justified.
I attend college football games. Everyone goes through security. Outside security we pack up in masses of humanity outside the gates waiting to get through the inevitably slow security.
It would be far more effective to do something at the gates dude to the density of humanity there where there is no security ... than in the stadium where people are actually more spread out.
If someone did want to do something at such a sporting event, nothing is stopping them from doing it at the gates where there is a reliable and unsecured mass of humanity, and I don't think anyone is bothering with that ...
I used to wheel my grandfather into games on a wheelchair... they didn't check anything, just waved you through. A wheel chair sized bomb would be easy to bring in, but you don't even have to bring it in.
We have secure ID schemes that I believe most if not all of the 9/11 attackers would have qualified to get ...
In the US we don't have mass terrorist events that any of this would prevent.
Why do we keep subjecting non-terrorists to these systems?
What are we doing this for?