Asks 'How Would You Attack America?'
One of the more interesting blogs, Freakonomics, has found a new online home at the New York Times, and set off a comment-packed firestorm with this post musing on what would be the best, most efficient, and the highest-impact ways that terrorists could strike inside the United States.
More than 500 comments followed the question, and there is plenty of interesting, scary, fascinating and aggravating thoughts to be absorbed, if you've got the time to soak through them all.
We know you don't have that sort of time, so we went digging for the gold.
One commenter described how she began thinking like a terrorist on a recent flight. She had visited duty free and walked on board an airliner with a sealed bag, the contents of which were not checked. Inside the bag she had a bottle of booze, a scarf or piece of material and a cigarette lighter. How easy then, she asked herself, would it be for me to create a Molotov cocktail right there on the plane? While she clearly had no intention of doing so, just coming up with this scenario reinforced in her mind how completely vulnerable she was to terrorism at almost every turn in her daily life.
Which is the conclusion most people would reach once they chewed through even half of the 500 comments on the Freakonomics blog.
You can be hit anywhere, anytime, in a hundred different ways. So why live in fear of what may never happen anyway?
Author Tom Clancy, who wrote about terrorists crashing a hijacked airliner into the White House in Debt Of Honour, a pre-9/11 novel, would be impressed by the creativity on show in the comments in response to the Freakonomics question.
Security agencies, meanwhile, are probably shuddering in horror, or quickly scribbling down the scenarios that they had never before considered.
Here's a selection of the terror attack scenarios NYTimes readers concocted :
- Releasing bags full of extremely deadly poisons or toxins on a number of crowded underground train systems across the country, on the same day, at the same time. Have gunmen waiting on the stairs of the subway platforms to cut down the screaming, running hordes.
- 20 terrorists load up on shot guns and machine guns and hit 20 different malls, same day, same time, and commence blowing people away.
- Another commenter ups the ante by suggesting the 'Mass Mall Attack' scenario could be adopted to schools, or even day care centres, to maximise the horror and terror.
- Deploy a few dozen terrorists to take low-paying, easy-to-get jobs on American farms, and then poison vegetables, cattle, fruit trucks as they leave the farms.
- Dump gallons of cyanide into the 300 mile long channel that carries fresh water into Los Angeles, resulting in, at the minimum, a closure of the channel and millions left without access to clean water.
- Spread terrorists around the country to attack to simultaneously attack rail cars carrying toxic chemicals and gases, blowing them up as they pass through towns and villages. Dittos for chemical trucks.
- Select a certain make or model of a widely sold American car, send terrorists out onto two lane highways (with no road dividers) in cars laden with gasoline. Terrorists would then plunge their fuel bomb car into the chosen cars, presumably killing dozens, but throwing every owner of the targeted car models into panic, and fearful of driving their vehicles.
- Detonate car bombs on all the major bridges and tunnels of New York City, shutting down the roads and causing economic chaos.
- ferment civil unrest via blackouts, water shortages, widespread food poisonings, dambreaks, disinformation campaigns aimed at the stock market.
- Walk through the Californian hills with flares and create dozens, or hundreds, of wildfires.
- Send terrorists into cinemas at the start of the big summer movie season with duffel bags full of explosives. Detonate. People avoid cinemas, Hollywood loses billions.
- Hide explosives inside bottles of cranberry sauce and put them on the shelves of grocery stores the afternoon before Thanksgiving.
- Bomb randomly chosen food courts in mall across America with explosives on ten minute timers. Repeat every day for a week.
- Wait for events like the New York City steam pipeline explosion, or the Minneapolis bridge collapse, and then release videos claiming responsibility while chanting "Allah Akbar".
- Fly private jets into key dams.
- Set fire to crowded seaside boardwalks at the height of summer's tourist season.
- Set off smoke bombs at major sporting events, counting on the mass panic to produce trampling deaths and injuries and give people The Fear about attending major sporting events in the future.
- Mass murder peoples' pets.
But my personal favourite is the following :
They should drive everywhere in SUV’s (one per vehicle and even better with little American flags flapping in the wind to destroy fuel efficiency) and leave doors open when the AC (or heat) is full blast. The CO2 produced will fill the atmosphere and cause the Earth to retain heat to the point that the polar ice caps and most of the major glaciers melt and flood the oceans. The result will have global impact with disastrous effects on the coasts and disrupt the natural ecosystems that provide our food.Or perhaps this one :
I'd send out millions of IRS audit letters.
This site started collecting ideas from readers about how terrorists might next attack America in late 2004. The mind-boggling list now runs into hundreds of quick summaries. From the economically disruptive :
Terrorists might kill the head of every fortune 500 company when he went out to get his morning paper.And the explosive :
Terrorists might plant bike path land minesTo the plain dippy :
Terrorists might pack a life-like robot panda with explosives, kill other pandas
Despite the fury and outrage provoked by the Freakonomics invitation to get terroristically creative, it's astounding how many times such lists have been compiled before online by American websites in the years since 9/11. They're everywhere.
Not surprisingly, the Freakonomics question caused dozens of commenters to vent their outrage at possibly giving terrorists new ideas on how to cause terror in the US, and some demanded the FBI launch investigations on the post.
As we said, holding such a forum is hardly a new idea online, and if someone coming up with an attack scenario online needs to be investigated, then why not investigate Tom Clancy, ten thousand other terror-novel writers and the creators of '24'?
But the Freakonomics forum also yielded the below comment, which sums up a lot of the turgid atmosphere you find on American news forums, and in letters to the editor of small town American newspapers. That's not to say the atmosphere is only online. Americans can sense what is coming, and seem, generally, remarkably well informed on the numerous ways Bush Co. has terrorised its own people by using the threat of terror to expand its control of the nation and its people, while shredding the Constitution and the Bill of Rights :
The reason attacks like this haven’t happened isn’t because the terrorists haven’t thought of them, or because our intelligence agencies have prevented them… it’s because the threat has been been falsely inflated.
Your government wants you to be afraid so it can strip you of your freedoms and control you. The news media wants you to be afraid because it will keep you glued to your TV, boosting ratings with “Breaking News” plastered across the screen every time Homeland Security announces that it has foiled a contrived “terrorist plot.”
You are being manipulated into accepting slavery.
Wake up before it’s too late.
— Posted by Sean
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