Posted by John Crewdson at 12:34 pm CDT
Since Sept. 11 it has become the hymn sung by those charged with protecting the U.S. and Europe against terrorism: the defenders have to get it right every time, while the terrorists only have to get it right once.
Those abysmal odds have given rise to a corollary: it is not a question of whether the terrorists will succeed again, but where and when.If investigators in London and Washington are correct, the defenders got it right three weeks ago, breaking up a British-based plot to blow up a number of trans-Atlantic jetliners. Anywhere from five to 15 planes reportedly were going to be targeted.
Ironically, the most important lesson learned from that breakup may be that it is impossible to defend the softest parts of our system and society from those who are prepared to die while taking innocents to their death.
In the nearly five years since Sept. 11, 2001, any number of enhancements have been added to the air transport system that were intended to make such attacks impossible.
Cockpit doors have been “hardened.” The number of sky marshals, it is said, has been dramatically increased. Watch lists and profiles have been drawn up to pinpoint suspicious passengers.
Carry-on baggage is tested for PETN, one of the components of plastic explosive. As any air-traveler can attest, body searches and removing one’s shoes are now the rule rather than the exception.
And yet, until three weeks ago, nobody apparently thought about the plastic bottles of water, juice, soda, vitamin-laced energy drinks and God knows what else–rumored to sometimes include alcoholic spirits–that nearly every airline passenger carried on board.
It was just such bottles, perhaps fitted with false bottoms, that investigators think the London plotters were planning to use to smuggle liquids on board those trans-Atlantic flights where they would then be combined into something called hexamethylene triperoxide diamine, a powerful but relatively unstable explosive.
The abortive plot, as described by sources within the FBI and Scotland Yard, was on the sophisticated side. Components from the flash cubes in disposable cameras, perhaps powered by the battery in a portable music player or a cell phone, were to be used to ignite the explosives, ripping a hole in the airplane’s thin metal fuselage that would cause rapid decompression and implode the plane.
Plastic bottles, and indeed liquids, gels and aerosols of any kind–with very limited exceptions for things like baby formula and medicine–are now banned from carry-on baggage.
But how is it that nobody saw plastic bottles as a potential threat until now?
Not everyone is capable of brewing peroxide-based explosives in an airplane lavatory, or constructing a detonator from spare electronic parts. Indeed, it is not clear that the London plotters would have been able to pull that off.
But how much damage might have been caused to an airplane cruising over the Atlantic–or, worse, beginning its final approach to New York, Washington or Los Angeles–by two or three passengers igniting plastic bottles filled with gasoline, kerosene, or even napalm, which can be made by mixing gasoline with a couple of other things you can buy at the grocery store?
That airplane passengers have, until now, been permitted to saunter on board clutching bottles filled with whatever says something about the foresight and imagination of those entrusted with transportation security.
But it says something even more important: there doesn’t seem to be any way the defenders can pre-empt an obvious venue for a terrorist attack before it happens. They can close off those venues after the fact, as they have in this case. But that, as they say, is fighting the last war. Will it ever become possible to fight the next one before it happens?
