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July 11, 2005

Not so massive as all that

Dean Cardno objects to my use of the word "massive" to describe the 7/7 operations, on the grounds that

it creates and sustains a wholly-undeserved reputation for operational excellence among what is, at heart, a gang of thugs.
...
This was only a slightly better attack than the ones the IRA ran throughout the 'seventies — and the improvement is only in the decision to detonate multiple devices more-or-less simultaneously; that is within the ken of anyone who can set an alarm-clock. Strategically, I think that is an error; a series of bombings — one every couple of months — would probably do more to wear down British resolve, if that was the intent.

Couldn't agree more — sloppy word choice on my part. What I meant by "massive" (and which is not conveyed by "massive" at all) is that placing the bombs on the trains and bus — not a difficult physical task by any means — was just the final act of the sort of fairly complex operation that we tend to hope, in 2005, will be detected before it hits paydirt. The complexity in this case was not in the technical details, as it was with the 9/11 attacks, but simply in its stealth. That's assuming it was Islamic terrorists, of course. If not, then the stealth isn't really that surprising at all.

As I said in my post, and which has become clearer since, the thing that amazed me most about July 7 was that the vaunted British intelligence hadn't picked up anything about this before it happened. This was somewhat true with 9/11 as well (though we have yet to see any analogous data processing errors with the 7/7 attacks), but in a hindsight, palm-to-the-forehead kind of way — it was less surprising, since we were not then so attuned to the imminent threat Bin Laden and his followers posed. On Thursday morning I thought that the London bombers might have been caught by now, given the Madrid experience and my assumption that MI5 would know the bastards when they saw them on CC images. (Speculation is now that the perpetrator(s) may have been all but unknown. This in itself is rather frightening, but even the single-perp theory, though seemingly far-fetched, is perfectly in keeping with what we currently know about the attacks, which is essentially nothing.)

So 7/7 was not massive like 9/11 was massive, obviously, but it was impressive in its ability to fly under a radar net whose mesh had been fine tuned to catch exactly this sort of operation. But this is just semantics: Dean's larger point — that the media gives terrorists far too much credit — is bang-on.

One of the classic examples of this concerns the relationship between terrorists and the Canada/US border. On March 22, a CanWest story made the rounds about lax border security: according to the head of the customs officers' union, upwards of 1,500 cars a year simply disregard the crossing and carry on their merry way, wholly unmolested. His call for the establishment of a border patrol service ("preferably as part of the customs system") had to be taken with a grain of salt ("make sure you put that part about the customs service in," I can see him telling the reporter), but it made a great deal of sense nonetheless. Apart from catching the scofflaws, it would act as a powerful deterrent against attempts to breach Fortress Canada.

The Union wasn't using the t-word, but obviously the threat of terrorism will drive any hole-plugging initiative. And hey, I'm all about preventing terrorism, but I also believe that you can't get a job done properly when you have no idea why you're doing it. In a National Post article on the same date, on the topic of Canadian citizens possibly losing their US-VISIT exemption, NDP public security critic Joe Comartin repeated a ubiquitous fallacy:

It's a false sense of security [the Americans are] giving themselves, and it's a phenomenal waste of time. If you're a serious terrorist, you're not going to go through a border crossing.

I'm not? I mean, they're not? Terrorists aren't? No one told Ahmed Ressam. No one told Mohammed Atta, Marwan al Shehhi and Ziad Jarrah, who macheted their way through the dense underbrush of Newark Airport to gain access to US soil and its airplane cockpits. In fact, I'm not aware of a single act of foreign-born terrorism committed on US soil that wasn'tundertaken by someone who entered the country through official channels.

This may change, certainly. If there's a trend, it's towards the surreptitious. But look at Ressam. This guy either desperately wanted to get caught or he was irretrievably stupid. This is a man who while plotting to blow up LAX somehow managed to answer the age-old question: "What's the slowest way to get from Vancouver to Seattle?" (Answer: take a ferry to Victoria and then another to Port Angeles, WA, in the process subjecting yourself to far more rigorous border police than you would encounter at the Peace Arch.) Ressam explains in his testimony that he was afraid potholes and such might, er, compromise his luggage, hence his plan to transport the explosives by train to Los Angeles from Seattle. (I hate to Monday morning quarterback this thing, but how about this and then this?)

Even still, it is widely held that terrorists are a devious, intelligent lot. Terrorist masterminds are perhaps quite intelligent, but the young men they send on suicide missions are, demonstrably, morons. (This should hardly be surprising, given the inherent nature of suicide missions.) Thus, though 9/11 was an impressive logistical feat, the catalogue of warning signs Atta and Co. set off that morning and in the weeks beforehand suggests that an immeasurable quantity of luck was in play. They did everything possible to get nailed, and didn't. In somnambulist pre-9/11 America, this was not so surprising; in jittery post-9/11 post-3/11 Britain, it is. We will eventually see what warning signs, if any, the 7/7 "mastermind(s)" broadcasted. In any case, it will do us no more good to overestimate our enemy in the future than it has done to underestimate it in the past.

Posted by Chris Selley at July 11, 2005 11:12 PM