Category: terrorism

This fall marks the arrival of the Class of 2024 on college campuses. This is the first cohort in which most members were born after the attacks of 9/11. A strange milestone. To honor the memory of those who died, and to help inform young adults of the events of that day, Keith Hennessey has crafted a study guide, available here. Keith was working on the Hill at that time and acknowledges that the passengers of Flight 93 may have saved his life. I had the good fortune of meeting Keith a few years later when my time at the Council of Economic Advisers overlapped with his time at the National Economic Council.

On a day like this, we should not only remember but attempt to relive the events--not by watching abbreviated video clips or listening to "officials," but by understanding what it was like on that day from the people who were there.

I have occasionally returned to this website, which has a number of first person accounts of what it was like to be in New York six years ago today. The two stories on this page are interesting and worth another reading.

This may be the irreversible beginning of the end. Talk of further isolation of Gaza effectively makes hostages of the 1.5 million residents there. Fuel will go first, then food and water. The story:

But he pledged that the leadership loyal to Mr. Abbas would not abandon Gaza and that it would maintain contact with international agencies and Israel to ensure that food, fuel and other supplies continued to reach the 1.5 million Palestinians there.

“If what happened in Gaza represents chaos and mutiny, the West Bank represents law and order,” Mr. Erekat said. The West Bank, he said, will be ruled by “one authority and one gun.”

Another aide to Mr. Abbas, Nabil Abu Rudeina, said he believed that the United States would support the new government and that America and Israel would agree to lift the embargo imposed on the previous governments led by Hamas, which is defined as a terrorist organization by Israel and much of the West.

Dor Alon, a private Israeli energy company that supplies all of Gaza’s gasoline, said it was stopping deliveries, Israel Radio said, though it would supply fuel for Gaza’s electrical power station.

The Israeli infrastructure minister, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, who oversees fuel supplies, told Army Radio: “We should simply increase the isolation of Gaza. I want to stop everything until we understand what is going on there.”

Other reports said Dor Alon did not deliver the gasoline on Sunday because its trucks found nobody to receive it on the Palestinian side. Gaza is believed to have about a two-week supply of gasoline left.

What is of concern is that the usual relief entities are not in a position to help, again because of the status of Hamas on the international stage. Here's Tony Snow in this morning's press briefing:

Q Have we cut off all funding to Gaza, and has all fuel been cut off?

MR. SNOW: What we have said is that we continue to try to work on providing humanitarian aid for the Palestinian people, but we also have made it clear that we will not be supplying directly to Hamas. I think when -- but, Helen, what I would do is, again, for the specific questions, because Secretary Rice is going to be addressing all these things in detail within the next hour.

Q I know, but my specific question is are we going to starve these people, the Palestinians --

MR. SNOW: Again, it has always been our policy to be providing humanitarian aid directly to the Palestinian people, and it continues to be.

I don't see how humanitarian aid gets through if we are delivering it. Will any Arab country intervene to prevent further disaster?

CNN's Reliable Sources ended its program this morning with the results of a poll suggesting that many Americans believe that the U.S. government was active or complicit in perpetrating the attacks on 9/11.

[Update: here's the excerpt, now that the transcript is available:

KURTZ: I want to put up some pretty eye-opening poll figures from a Scripps Howard survey about 9/11 conspiracies. Thirty-six percent of those surveyed suspect the U.S. promoted or acquiesced in the 9/11 attacks; 16 percent believe explosives, not airplanes, toppled the World Trade Center; 12 percent believe it was a cruise missile that hit the Pentagon.]

One of the slickest productions of the conspiracy theorists is the video "Loose Change" (see the main website here). In its various editions, it has been viewed over a million times. If you choose to view it, then you should also take a look at a viewer guide put together by some others seeking to debunk the conspiracy theories. There are other sites to visit that debunk the conspiracy theories: 911Myths.com and 9-11 Research are two that I have found particularly helpful (the latter also includes a viewer guide to "Loose Change").

Here is the way the last site describes what it is doing:

Young filmmakers Dylan Avery, Korey Rowe and Jason Bermas created the film Loose Change, which challenges the central dogma of the official story of 9/11. Loose Change covers a great deal of material, moving from one point to another in rapid succession. It presents a long list of claims supporting the conclusion that 9/11 was engineered by insiders, but does so with a mixture of strong and flawed arguments.

[...]

Because of its flaws, the film is an easy target for debunkers defending the official story that the attack was the work of Islamic fundamentalists. One example is the the very detailed debunking of the entire video entitled 9-11 Loose Change Second Edition Viewer Guide: And debunking of various 9/11 conspiracy theories. Unfortunately, many people -- perhaps a vast majority of Americans -- are likely to dismiss the film's vitally important conclusions because of the many errors it makes along the way. Not surprisingly, Loose Change is being exploited by apologists for the official story to reinforce the stereotype that has long been used to by the mainstream to media to bludgeon the 9/11 Truth Movement: that all challenges to the official story are the product of irrational "conspiracy theorists."

That last sentence is critical.

Today's big news:

LONDON - British authorities said Thursday they thwarted a terrorist plot to simultaneously blow up 10 aircraft heading to the U.S. using explosives smuggled in hand luggage, averting what police described as "mass murder on an unimaginable scale."

What's so unimaginable about that? Ten airliners stuffed to capacity is about 5000 people. How is that unimaginable? 9/11 was about 3000. Genocides go in the millions. To call that "unimaginable" shows a lack of imagination.

Other early reports are describing the plot as follows:

The plot had been in the works for months, and its goal was horrific. One after another, planes would have exploded in the sky, sending hundreds of men, women and children to their deaths.

Counterterrorism officials said Thursday the plan thwarted in London appears to bear the fingerprints of al-Qaida, and may even have been "the Big One" they have been dreading since Sept. 11, 2001, particularly as the five-year anniversary of the attacks on the United States approaches.

Horrific, certainly. "The Big One," not even close. I'll give three reasons:

1. The death toll wouldn't be much higher than 9/11.
2. Property damage would be much smaller than 9/11. A new commercial airplane goes for about $250 million. So 10 airplanes are $2.5 billion and change. That's not much compared to 4 airplanes, two skyscrapers, and a chunk of the Pentagon, to say nothing of the economic impact of 9/11 associated with the loss of the ability to generate economic activity in New York City after 9/11. (See this report for a discussion.)
3. Most importantly for terrorists, there would be little to no sensational video. To match 9/11, they would need to be on a par with airplanes smashing into buildings, those buildings collapsing, and innocent people jumping from those buildings to their deaths. How are they going to get that with detonations over the Atlantic? Would they risk the mission by waiting until the planes were on approach over the Eastern Seaboard? I doubt it.

So let's be grateful that the plot was thwarted and try our best to get through the added burden imposed on us, but let's not confuse this with "mass murder on an unimaginable scale" or "The Big One."

Catchy intro, stuff I didn't know, good description of the problem, and then ... I'll get there. The heart of today's column is:

In May, Israeli papers were filled with pages about how cool it was that Israel had produced a cutting-edge company that Warren Buffett wanted to buy. It was being discussed everywhere, pushing the Tel Aviv stock exchange to an all-time high.

That is where Israel’s head was on the eve of this war — and it explains something I sensed when I visited Israel shortly after the fighting started. Nobody wanted this war, and nobody was prepared for it. Look closely at pictures of Israeli soldiers from Lebanon. There is no enthusiasm in their faces, and certainly no triumphalism. Their expressions tell the whole story: “I just don’t want to be doing this — another war with the Arabs.”

Israeli soldiers were napping when this war started — that’s why they got ambushed — for the very best reasons: They have so much more to do with their lives, and they live in a society that empowers and enables them to do it. (Unfortunately, the Buffett company is in northern Israel and had to be temporarily closed because of rocket attacks.)

Young Israelis dream of being inventors, and their role models are the Israeli innovators who made it to the Nasdaq. Hezbollah youth dream of being martyrs, and their role models are Islamic militants who made it to the Next World. Israel spent the last six years preparing for Warren Buffett, while Hezbollah spent the last six years preparing for this war.

Okay, I'm with him. The last paragraph, in particular, is very good. But how does he finish the column? With my emphasis added:

Israel wins when Warren Buffett’s company there is fully back in business — not when Nasrallah is out of business. Because that will only happen, not by war, but when Arabs wake up and realize that he is just another fraud, just another Nasser, whose strategy would condemn the flower of Arab youth — who deserve and need so much better — to another decade of making potato chips, not microchips. Nasrallah can win in the long run only if he can condemn the flower of Israel’s youth to the same fate. Don’t let it happen, Israel.

And as it often happens, Friedman ends his column with a conundrum. I'd like to know what observations Friedman has made of Arab societies that would generate the presumption that Arabs will receive this wake-up call and come to this realization, to say nothing of a presumption that it would happen with enough haste to spare citizens of Israel the terrorist attacks from the likes of Hezbollah.