Unqualified Offerings

By Thoreau

In keeping with the Roderick Long post that Jim linked to downblog, let’s remember what worked and what didn’t work.

Worked:

1)  Passengers getting out of their seats:  A passenger got out of his seat, extinguished the fire, and restrained the terrorist.

Didn’t work:

1)  Improvised bomb made by a loser:  Somehow illiterate guerrilla fighters around the world manage to build and detonate bombs every day.  Yet this loser failed at something that thugs around the world do without any problem.  They say that all politics is local, and maybe something similar applies to irregular warfare–thugs with enough skill to actually hurt people are busy in whatever local conflict rages in their neighborhood, while the incompetents go to the other side of the globe to fight (and fail).

2)  The watch list:  Look, I’m the last person to say that they should put more people on lists and scrutinize them.  In fact, I think that the watch list should  have fewer people on it.  However, if there’s a guy on your list, and his father calls you up and says “This dude is crazy!  He’s going to hurt somebody!” that’s probably one piece of the haystack that is worth a bit more scrutiny.

Yes,  I’m aware that all of this is easier said than done, and that any escalation of effort can easily backfire and turn into an intrusive and sprawling epic fail of an endeavor.  At the risk of sounding like those who say “We just need the right program!”, the fact of the matter is that intelligence work should be done, well, intelligently.  It isn’t easy, it isn’t perfect, but when intelligence fails the only option is to stop, think, and try to be more intelligent in the future.  Indiscriminately adding more hay to the stack is NOT intelligent, and it just makes it hard to find the needle.

(That said, I guess I can’t fault the government for ignoring an email from a Nigerian saying “Dear Friend, I am writing to contact you with important information that will be of mutual interest.”)

So, having established that intelligence failed and passengers succeeded, the government’s response is to put more restrictions on passengers, and not even let them have books in their laps for part of the flight.  Why am I not surprised that the War on Terror has culminated in a ban on reading?