Has the USA Learned Any of These Things Since the Christmas Bomber Attempt?
Question by dolphin314etc: Has the USA Learned Any of These Things Since the Christmas Bomber Attempt?
Here are some things that perhaps we could have learned from the Christmas Bomber’s attempt to kill 300 people with explosives in his underpants. Which, if any, of these things do you think we may learn.
#1. To use a Google style system on a national security intra-net grid, which allows every word in a psot to be indexed, and then allows all posts in the system to be cross-correlated based on incoming questions, like for example, just inputting somebodys name, or just the word “nigerian”, or just the word “visa”
#2. That systems which have the capacity to get slack, become much more likely to get slack at major holidays like Christmas Eve, and that Al Qaida is so smart that they have figured that out, and are fully able to plan their attacks for our most vulnerable moments.
#3 That we need to start tracking potential America haters long before they do anything wrong. We need to have a list of potential enemies of the USA based on behavioral factors. This list would not be an accusation, or an indictment. It would just be sort of like a radar reflector tag, so if one of these people shows up at any security related event (like a flight), at least we know a bit about that person’s background.
#4 With shoe bomber and the underpants bomber both failing for lack of a proper detonator, it’s likely that Al Qaida now knows that most high explosives do require a blasting cap to set them off. Electronic blasting caps can be radio controlled. Al Qaida does know that, they don’t have to rely on Lonely Answers Club to learn it.
#5 The next aircraft bomber is probably going to carry the bomb tucked in to their intestines. Properly shaped and placed 3 oz of semtex would be very hard to see on a full body scanner. Al Qaida has such a scanner, so they could make sure the HE was invisible. Radio controlled detonators can be made of lightweight plastics and installed with the HE. 3 oz of semtex would blow a 747 out of the sky. Suicide bombers are there to die, so having the bomb inside their intestines is not a problem for them. For us it could be if we haven’t done any behavioral profiling and we have no idea who our enemies are likely to be (like the guys at the CIA camp had zero clue about who was their friend and who was their enemy).
#6 John Brennan has not tendered his resignation, or if he has Barack Obama has not accepted it. Both men are talking about general diffuse systems failures. Obama now says that all leads should be run down by some person who will be held accountable for doing so. Running down leads combined with an intranet Google style database of indexed notes would be a powerful way to find needles in haystacks. Somebody is putting queries in to a system that is designed to correlate previously unconnected data based on incoming queries. So dots get connected. The machine does it. It does the “analysis”. Lead chaser just puts in the well-written queries. By the way Admiral Poindexter was fired from DARPA and the CIA for suggesting just this sort of data mining in real-time approach. Maybe the government owes his an apology.
You may feel that we won’t learn any of these things. Or maybe just one or two. If nothing on my list seems worthy to you, let me know your list. If you like some of my things, let me know what you like.
Thank you so much.
Answers to Lou and to Pooh Bear
To Lou: It’s true that 95% of the terrorists in the past 10 years have been Moslems. Any rational logical person would note the relatively high correlation between Moslem and Terrorist as compared to say Buddhist and Terrorist. Given such a correlation anyone not drunk on Political Correctness Kool-Aid would factor that is to perimeter defense processes. We are Totally Drunk on Political Correctness, and we love it more than life itself. This could be fixed with more intelligent ethical awareness and an ethics of responsibility (rather than metphysical purity to a cloudy ideal).
To Pooh Bear:
Things go slack on holidays — that’s a fact jack.
on the detonator you refuted yourself, thanks.
3 oz semtex would blow a 747 to smithereens. You are clueless.
No the high explosive in the underpants was not detonated, only mixed. The mixing caused the fire. You’re not a frogman, I can tell.
Rolling heads — finally we agree on one point – OK
Best answer:
Answer by Rodney King
They are failing on purpose. A trained monkey would do better.
Add your own answer in the comments!
the problem is worse than that kid….
the problem is that most liberals (including the president) do NOT understand that we are AT war with MUSLIM hating extremists and not just some hater, and are in “la la land” which it makes it easy to see them as stupid and puts ALL of us in danger!
Obama since takin office in january has DISMANTLED many of the barriers Bush put in place to stop Alqaeda, so if you want to fix the problem then we need to put all those things Bush had during his 8 years after 9/11 of NO one getting through back!
this is NOT a war because they were poor (Osama is a millionaire, the underwear bomber the other day is a Nigerian rich kid, the CIA base bomber in afghanistan was a doctor, etc etc etc..) this is a was due to extreme MUSLIM ideolgy, and liberals NOT getting this show their inferior IQ…lol…
1: How would such a system have caught the underwear bomber? He wasn’t making posts on the internet, much less on systems within the US! Besides which, I can simply defeat your system simply by not even using the internet at all, but instead using radio communications with encrypted signals – which I’m pretty sure Al Quiada is quite capable of doing already.
#2: Slack? What are you talking about here? We’re under attack by terrorists, not Bob.
#3: This is just so wrong on so many levels… Have you ever read “1984″? No, it’s not supposed to be a model for the future!
Also, THE TERRORIST WASN’T IN THE US AT THE TIME WHEN HE BOARDED THE PLANE. So even if the US had this wonderful constitution-destroying, mind-reading, thought-storing database in place for its citizens, that still leaves 5.7 billion people living outside the US’ borders!
#4: An electronic detonator would not get through current airport security measures. Of course, it’s already been show how easy it would be to bypass airport security altogether and sneak whatever you want onto a plane.
#5: I’m not so sure 3oz. of any sort of explosive shoved inside a terrorist will be enough to take out a plane. Yeah, sure, if you strapped the explosive to the inside of the aircraft cabin directly, and used a shaped charge so the force was directed outwards, you MIGHT have a chance of blowing a large enough hole in the hull that would cause the aircraft to break up. However, something small, inside a squishy bag of water (i.e. the terrorist’s body) isn’t going to do much of anything.
Note that even if you DID manage to blow a hole in the hull, it’s not always going to result in catastrophic failures like you see in the movies. The main cabin would lose pressure, sure, but not in such a way that you’d have people getting sucked out their chairs and hurtled into the great blue yonder. The oxygen masks would drop down and there’d be a great bit of commotion to be sure, but I doubt anyone sitting even across from the explosion would suffer anything more than some minor injuries as well as being covered in terrorist. The cockpit, pilots, wings, and engines would be unaffected. The plane would be redirected to the nearest airport. It would undoubtedly be an unpleasant experience, but not a fatal one.
Remember that one Hawaiian flight where a whole section of the aircraft’s roof literally broke off? We’re easily talking about a 10 foot section of the fuselage just breaking off and going away. Even despite that, the plane landed safely. There were some injuries, and I think a stewardess who happened to be standing at the time got blown out of the plane, but the plane still landed intact.
The Locherbie-Scotland flight that was taken out by a bomb on board about 20 years ago, was the size of a suitcase that had been placed in the hold. Yes, it really would take something that size to do enough damage to bring down a plane. That’s not something you’re going to get through security.
BTW, the underwear explosive DID go off, but all it managed to do was blow the guy’s pants to shreds, and cause burns on his lower body. that’s hardly the sort of explosion that would take out an airplane.
#6: I definitely agree someone’s head should roll for this debacle. There was ample information – not to mention that this was the exact same tactic the shoe bomber used – and yet the excuses we’re still getting are “We can’t connect the dots.” What’s there to connect? If you’ve got the guy’s father saying “hey, I think my son’s a terrorist” how hard is it to do some checking into that? The system failed and in a horrible manner. We’re just lucky nothing serious happened. This time.
Hopefully this latest incident, along with a sane and level-headed approach, will result in a security system that actually works, and does more than harass little old ladies in their wheelchairs.