In the mean time real terrorist go on with the serious stuff...

From Debka; Hizballah is suspected of incursion Wednesday and ransacking of Israeli military arms and ammo store at Kibbutz Shomera

A few hours later, an IDF force combed through the S. Lebanese village of Merwahin opposite Shomera and questioned the villagers about the robbery. DEBKAfile reports the thieves made off with a large quantity of side-arms, anti-tank weapons, LAU rockets and hundreds of combat grenades.

Aren't our UN troops supposed to protect Israël?


The struggle of man against tyranny is the struggle of memory against forgetting.(Kundera)

OK, while I have often wondered precisely the same thing, I... oh, wait... what's that racket?  Colman, you better duck, I think that's the NSA knocking down your front door...

OK, in a serious reply to that comment... I think the impulse to attack transportation systems in general is borne out of a desire to not just cause mass casualties but to disrupt day-to-day activities.  Shopping centers would probably have the same effect, but the mass-casualty side of things would likely be smaller.

Where I live, there have been quite a few attacks over the last few years, targeting mainly tourism sites (beach resorts, hotels, the tourist-oriented souq), and the death tolls, while significant, have not added up to one big plane crash.  (I think about 30 were killed in Taba, 90 in Sharm and 19 in Dahab, plus another three in the Khan, whereas a 747 can carry around 450 people....)

Of course, a ferry company managed to kill more a thousand people through simple negligence, never mind the neverending litany of deadly train and bus crashes, so one wonders why the terrorists feel they need to bother attacking anything here.  They can't compete with incompetent cronyism when it comes to disrupting the transit system.

I expect they're done with planes by now. They've brought us to the point where our own security is screwing up air travel just as badly as any actual attacks could.

"Ideas or the lack of them can cause disease." - Kurt Vonnegut

Re. "What is the obsession with attacking planes anyway?"

What puzzles me is the obsession with (bogus) measures to protect aircraft. There had been aircraft hijackings and bombings before the Trade Center attack, but the "security" Maginot Line wasn't constructed until after.

As nearly as I can tell, the most recent absurdity is the latest link in a chain of absurdities:

WTC attack = cosmic threat
Hijackings = WTC attack = cosmic threat
Bombs = hijackings = ...
Liquid explosives = scary new bombs =...
Liquids = possible liquid explosives = ...

And finally:

Moist materials = liquids = ... = cosmic threat

And so we see the most powerful nations on Earth mortally afraid, not just of their own shoes, but now of their toothpaste as well.

By the way, given that acetone peroxide apparently couldn't plausibly be made by passengers on an airliner, has anyone heard a serious suggestion of what the binary-explosive threat might have been? Or why anyone would bother with binary explosives in the first place? Or why solids aren't considered at least as dangerous as liquids? Or why they x-ray shoes, given that explosives and rubber look the same to x-rays? Or how they get away with making rules that are vastly expensive but make no sense whatsoever? Or who "they" are, anyway, and how they manage to hide their shame from their neighbors?

Words and ideas I offer here may be used freely and without attribution.

Attacking shopping centres and stores would certainly be on my agenda if I was a terrorist boss, and I'd do it at times when they were particularly crowded such as the run up to Christmas.

Some bombs I'd use to kill people en masse a la the attacks on the tube last year, though that's expensive in terms of personnel, others I'd use to cause economic disruption by forcing the police to close and search say every shop in Oxford Street. Sometimes there would be a bomb, often there wouldn't but they'd have to do it all the same. I wouldn't just attack  major urban areas either - in fact I'd probably avoid places like London because people there are pretty much used to it thanks to the activities of various Ulster alphabet soups over the years. My bombs would be placed almost at random, you'd be as likely to find them in Basingstoke, Llandudno or Peebles as in London. No one would feel safe from my henchmens' activities.

Another thing I'd do is attack energy infrastructure such as power lines and gas works. They are unguarded and cannot be realistically defended. It's a cheap, low risk strategy and one can promote a seige mentality by having the lights go out all the time.  

Fortunately, as another poster noted, the nutters don't really seem to have thought about what they are doing carefully or have a long term plan. Hopefully it will stay that way.

Sophia

Quite possibly. We don't necessarily expect laws to apply to us ...

I'm already there. Just because of the hassle factor.

One of the reasons I passed on a proposed trip to the US was because of the bullshit - not just about carrying liquids, but the rest of it too.

I drink a lot of water anyway, and I'd normally take 2 litres on a transatlantic flight just to avoid cabin dehydration.

Arriving dehydrated is not fun, and not healthy, and not really doing much to stop terrorism either.

I wonder however if this isn't also a very lateral way to stop people flying - or at least to discourage them from flying while drunk?

Surely a couple of bottle of duty-free booze would be enough to cause some serious chaos on a plane anyway?