Honolulu Weekly

Twenty-three suspects were taken into custody on Aug. 10 in London, all of them involved in a thwarted plot to blow up 10 planes. It is believed that at least 50 individuals were involved in the planned attack. Most suspects were British citizens, several with ties to Pakistan. Three of the targeted airliners were bound for the United States. Pakistani authorities also made arrests in coordination with Britain, though the number of arrests was not disclosed.

The color-coded Dept. of Homeland Security threat level for flights from the United Kingdom to the U.S. was raised temporarily, and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) immediately clamped down on what air travelers can and cannot bring aboard commercial flights. Gone were lip gloss, liquid antacid, shampoo and beverages-including bottled water.

The delay from this increased surveillance resulted in massive lines at security checkpoints and trash bags of discarded items. The ripple effect of the planned attacks was felt across the globe as flights were canceled or delayed.

But are the increased security measures and the resulting hassles worth the trouble? Are our lives as threatened by terrorism as many of us believe them to be? Should we really live in daily fear, or should our fears be tempered?

Barefoot in line

Mark Sheehan, a Maui real estate broker, had a hard time getting back to the states after his British Airways flight was cancelled.

Sheehan, who was visiting Copenhagen, had his return connecting flight from London to Montreal cancelled. Though he was able to rebook the Montreal flight, he e-mailed this reporter with his frustrating situation while he was en route to the airport in Copenhagen.

‘Checking last night I found that my Copenhagen-to-London flight is cancelled, so I’m headed to the airport in hopes of getting an earlier British Air flight or some other carrier,’ Sheehan wrote. ‘Not much fear here but frustration. Also pissed to watch the Bush politics of making a non-event into a Code Red with all the hassles that go with that.’

Between the first Homeland Security terror alert on Feb. 12, 2002, and the last presidential election on Nov. 2, 2004, the color-coded threat level has yo-yoed between yellow and orange six times. Sometimes it seems that just as soon as Americans begin to relax a little and shift their attentions away from the prospect of being blown to bits at any given moment, the fearsome stranglehold of terrorism is upon them again.

Maui resident Karen Jeffery feels the Dept. of Homeland Security threat advisory system is further scaring an already paranoid population. ‘It just breeds more terror and fear instead of dealing with the core issues, which is learning to understand other people and live in the world with them in a way that’s peaceful,’ she says.

Despite tighter airport security, most folks in Hawai’i seem to be taking the new measures in stride. According to an online poll conducted by the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 76.92 percent of those polled said they will not change the frequency in which they fly, 18.88 percent said they will fly less, 4.2 percent said they will fly more (we assume this may be the thrill-seeking contingent) and nobody said they would stop flying.

Bill Gulledge, TSA acting assistant federal security director for screening at Honolulu International Airport, says passengers have reacted favorably to the increased airport security. ‘We’ve had very few complaints or problems,’ he says. ‘I think most everyone understands the situation.’

A soft-spoken Gulledge says that the first couple of days after the London incident there were a number of people that weren’t aware of the prohibition on the liquid and gels. ‘We collected quite a bit of prohibited items the first and the second day, but then it tapered off.’

According to a Honolulu Advertiser report, over 1,500 pounds of banned items were taken from passengers after the arrests of the would-be terrorist attackers were made public.

Gulledge acknowledges that things like removing shoes can be an inconvenience. ‘That’s just the way it is in this day and age with terrorism,’ he says sympathetically.

But how likely a target is Hawai’i of terrorist attack? After all, the Islands are one of the favored stomping grounds of the U.S. armed forces as much as they are a popular tourist destination.

Major Charles Anthony, public affairs officer for the Hawai’i Dept. of Defense, explains that the state of Hawai’i bases its Homeland Advisory Level on information received from civilian and military intelligence agencies. Hawai’i Civil Defense then makes its recommendation to the governor who then either agrees, disagrees or slightly modifies the advisory.

‘It’s based on intelligence reports that we have of activity in Hawai’i or in the Pacific Rim. It’s based on intelligence worldwide. It’s based on intelligence from a lot of different sources,’ Anthony says.

Maj. Anthony declines to speculate on the odds of an attack. ‘If you asked a public affairs officer in New York City on Sept. 10, 2001, what were the odds of New York City being attacked, what would he or she answer to a question like that? ‘I don’t know.’ It’s really hard to put any kind of a figure in terms of a terrorist attack.’

Anthony says that preparation is an essential key to prevention. ‘The more prepared you are for a terrorist strike, the less likely terrorists are to strike you.’ He bases this statement on past modus operandi of terrorist organizations like al Qaeda, as well as psychological studies conducted on terrorists.

According to terrorism expert John Mueller of Ohio State University, groups like al Qaeda might not be able to pull off an attack within the U.S. In a recent article published in Foreign Affairs, he says, ‘[I]f it is so easy to pull off an attack and if terrorists are so demonically competent, why have they not done it? Why have they not been sniping at people in shopping centers, collapsing tunnels, poisoning the food supply, cutting electrical lines, derailing trains, blowing up oil pipelines, causing massive traffic jams or exploiting the countless other vulnerabilities that, according to security experts, could so easily be exploited?’

Mueller adds, ‘One reasonable explanation is that almost no terrorists exist in the United States and few have the means or the inclination to strike from abroad. But this explanation is rarely offered.’

At war with a noun

After news of the foiled attack reached President George W. Bush, he gave a brief speech on the tarmac of the airport in Green Bay, Wis., where he was to attend a Republican fundraiser.

Calling the attempts proof that the nation is still at war with ‘Islamic fascists,’ he went on to say, ‘This country is safer than it was prior to 9/11. We’ve taken a lot of measures to protect the American people. But obviously we still aren’t completely safe, because there are people that still plot and people who want to harm us for what we believe in.’

The Bush administration has been consistently accused of stoking the embers of fear in the American psyche to gain political points by convincing the public that only the current regime can keep them safe from the ambiguous, shadowy threat of terrorists.

The basis of this accusation is evident in such statements as those made by U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales during an Aug. 10 press conference after the foiled terrorism plot: ‘As we have stated many times before, we are a nation at war. Today’s actions are a stark reminder that the threat is real and that we have a deadly enemy who still wakes every morning thinking of new ways to kill innocent men, women and children, and dreams every night about wreaking destruction on freedom-loving countries.’

In an Aug. 15 press conference at the National Counterterrorism Center just outside Washington, Bush further pumped up the War on Terror, adamantly declaring that America is not safe from terrorists. Bush said, ‘The enemy has got an advantage when it comes to attacking our homeland: They’ve got to be right one time and we’ve got to be right 100 percent of the time to protect the American people.’

However, the terrorist boogeyman–at least the Islamic fascist kind–has yet to rear its head here in the states. Mueller, the author of the ‘A False Sense of Insecurity?’ article that originally ran in a Cato Institute publication, says in his recent Foreign Affairs article, ‘There are over 300 million legal entries by foreigners each year, and illegal crossings number between 1,000 and 4,000 a day–to say nothing of the generous quantities of forbidden substances that the government has been unable to intercept or even detect despite decades of a strenuous and well-funded ‘war on drugs.”

He adds, ‘If al Qaeda operatives are as determined and inventive as assumed, they should be here by now. If they are not yet here, they must not be trying very hard or must be far less dedicated, diabolical and competent than the common image would suggest.’

Since 9/11, which just saw its five-year anniversary–and an event that many terrorism experts feel is an anomaly–the U.S. Aviation and Transportation Security Act (ATSA) was signed into law, and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) were created to ’strengthen the security of the nation’s transportation systems.’ Or, as it is says on the TSA’s website, ‘We protect the nation’s transportation systems so you and your families can travel safely. We screen you at airports, we inspect rail cars, we patrol subways with our law enforcement partners and we keep the terrorists from doing harm.’

What they don’t say is that the nation’s top modes of transportation–automobiles and motorcycles–are the most unsafe of all. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, in 2005, the number of traffic fatalities in the U.S. hit a 15-year high of 43,443 deaths–4,553 were motorcycle accidents, while 16,885 of the fatalities were alcohol-related. Compare that to the ‘18,944 people around the world who died in acts of terrorism,’ from Sept. 12, 2001 to Dec. 31, 2005, according to a report in the most recent issue of Foreign Policy magazine. Of those that were killed within the U.S.–eight. All were victims of the Beltway snipers.

Or think about it this way: According to a 2004 article in American Scientist by Michael Sivak and Michael J. Flannagan, ‘For flying to become as risky as driving, disastrous airline incidents on the scale of those of Sept. 11 would have had to occur 120 times over the 10-year period, or about once a month.’

Getting serious

Maj. Anthony explains the pre-9/11 mindset: ‘Before 9/11, there were a lot of people in government from all political stripes who didn’t take things seriously,’ he says. ‘We had an exercise [in Honolulu] in February of 2001. This was held pre-Asian Development Bank Conference. We did not anticipate a lot of disruptions, but this was coming on the heels of riots that had happened in places like Washington, D.C. and Seattle and Italy where the World Trade Organization issues were being discussed. We were planning for the worst-case scenario. We said, ‘Let’s turn this into an opportunity for an exercise for if Hawai’i was attacked by terrorists.’ In fact, we used al Qaeda as the terrorist organization that would strike Hawai’i. The scenario was different types of bombing going off in public places. When we proposed this, there were a lot of other people in a lot of other agencies that said, ‘Oh, c’mon, al Qaeda bombing civilian targets? Get real.’ Obviously things changed a lot eight months later.’

Yes, things have indeed changed. However, the fact of the matter is that it is impossible to be completely safe. With items like hand cream, gel lipstick, mascara, contact lens solution and liquid-filled baby pacifiers being confiscated at security checkpoints at our nation’s airports, one has to wonder if fear-driven irrationality has caused us to reach a point of too much security.

Writer and security expert Bruce Schneier says yes. Author of the highly acclaimed Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly about Security in an Uncertain World, Schneier attacks the random passenger profiling and surveillance systems that match your name and personal profile against a database of more than 30,000 names before you can board a U.S. flight. The most dramatic example of the system’s failure was the repeated flagging of Sen. Ted Kennedy, whose name appeared on the no-fly list in 2004.

‘The program has been a complete failure, resulting in exactly zero terrorists caught,’ says Schneier in an article from Wired titled, ‘Airline security a waste of cash.’ ‘And even worse, thousands (or more) have been denied the ability to fly, even though they’ve done nothing wrong.’

He should know. Schneier was a member of the government’s Secure Flight Working Group on Privacy and Security. The group compared the TSA program against the government’s ‘terrorist watch list’ and in Schneier’s words ‘found a complete mess: poorly defined goals, incoherent design criteria, no clear system architecture, inadequate testing.’

In Nov. 2005, Australian Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone decried airport security policies, saying, ‘a lot of what we do is to make people feel better as opposed to actually achieve an outcome.’

Schneier echoes Vanstone’s sentiment. ‘Exactly two things have made airline travel safer since 9/11: reinforcing the cockpit door, and passengers who now know that they may have to fight back. Everything else–all that extra screening, those massive passenger profiling systems–is security theater.’

Another Pearl Harbor?

Though the Hawaiian Islands are home to the U.S.’s most strategically located military presence in the Pacific, consensus among residents of the Aloha State is that chances of Hawai’i being a terrorist target are very slim; most feel if there was to be a terrorist attack, it would probably be on a major military installation like Pearl Harbor.

Not coincidentally, a large Weapons of Mass Destruction exercise with an improvised nuclear device was recently completed at Honolulu Harbor. Following on the heels of the North Korean missile test, the Aug. 14-16 exercise hoped to determine and improve the response scenario if a nuclear weapon was detonated in the harbor.

Coordinating with the Defense Threat Reduction Agency in Washington, D.C., 15 agencies from federal, state and county governments as well as entities in the private sector–close to a 1,000 participants in all were involved.

According to Maj. Anthony, immediate casualties from a half-megaton nuclear bomb detonating in the harbor would be about 100 confirmed dead, with the numbers of fatalities mounting as days progressed.

‘There’s a lot of talk about things related to improvised nuclear devices or dirty bombs,’ he says. ‘It would be used to sow fear and panic.’

Once again, how likely is it that a terrorist will use a dirty bomb? After all, no one has so far. Mueller points out in ‘A False Sense of Insecurity?’ that simple low-tech explosives are favored by terrorists. ‘If, as some purported experts repeatedly claim, chemical and biological attacks are so easy and attractive to terrorists, it is impressive that none have so far been used in Israel (where four times as many people die from automobile accidents as from terrorism [based on 2004 figures]).’

Of course, the dirty bomb is one of 15 scenarios that were thought of in terms of the most likely things terrorists would do during the Honolulu test. The exercise was multi-fold. The assessment of potential damage and fatalities from natural disaster scenarios such as tsunamis and hurricanes was taken into account, along with response procedures in the case of such events. With an average of 12 hurricanes per year in the Pacific, the probabilities of a hurricane strike are significantly higher than that of a terrorist attack.

‘We think ‘OK. What are the possibilities?’ and start planning for those,’ Anthony says. ‘I’m sure there will be a lot of lessons learned.’

Sources for the odds of dying come from the article ‘What odds are you comfortable with?’ ([www.anotherperspective.org/advoc530.html]), the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and the National Safety Council.