What We Really Learn from Airport "Counter-terrorism" Measures

Brian Ross of ABC News loves to report on what he figures as the scandalous performance of the government in leaving us vulnerable to terrorist attacks. One such report that surfaced recently, but is traceable to a story done in October of 2006, concerns an attempt to test airport security at Newark Airport. ("Not Enough People, Not Enough Training: Airport Screeners Continue To Miss Hidden Weapons") The result of twenty-two attempts to bring weapons through security was that twenty of the attempts succeeded. The real lesson to be learned from this is not how incompetent the government is, but, given the evident ease of carrying out terrorist attacks with weapons on airliners, how tiny the actual threat is. In other words, if in precisely the area we have invested so much time and attention and money for counter-terrorism measures, we are still failing most of the time, we must conclude that the absence of terrorist attacks or discovered attempts cannot be attributed to our counter-measures, but to the absence of terrorists in the U.S. trying to carry them out.

From airport security we can also learn how the War on Terror generates statistical evidence, out of whole cloth, to justify itself.  A new study shows that government agencies cannot agree on definitions of terrorism or counter-terrorism or terrorist crimes, and that produces wildly inaccurate statistics about the effects of our "anti-terrorism" measures.  See Dan Eggen's Washington Post  article published February 21, 2007. "Justice Department Statistics on Terrorism Faulted"