Irrelevant, but irritating

fundingfather
Tue, 15 Aug 2006 16:04:14 +0000

Dadguy wrote this on the other thread but probably intended it for this one:

Some imagination is an absolute necessary in fighitng terrorists. Certainly in figuring out how they could come after us.

If they know that a 80-year old lady wouldn’t be searched, how hard would it be to slip something you need into the lady’s carry-ons?

Now if you advocate giving everybody at least as much of a search as they’re getting now PLUS doing a more extensive search of certain people, that’s fine.

If you advocate “playing percentages” and searching certain people but giving other people minimal or no screening, our advesaries will exploit that. I can guarantee it. That I have a problem with.



Actually, it would be quite difficult to put something into an elderly lady’s carry-on. Have you ever tried to slip a bottle of chemicals onto an elderly lady’s carry-on? I’m not saying it would be impossible, but certainly not something that an elaborate plan which is the hallmark of an al Qaeda attack would count on. Think of it, attacks involve a team of people. For it to be successful each team member would have to be able to slip something into an elderly person’s bag. That’s just one plane - to get the kind of scale that al Qaeda wants they would have to assume that they could replicate this highly unlikely scenario across multiple planes. The odds of succesfully carrying this off are incredibly low; if we can reduce them to this this level, I think we would have achieved our goal of dramatically reducing the overall odds of an attack.