WHY MORE SECURITY DOESN'T WORK

Sam Smith, Progressive Review - Following the 9/11 attacks, I argued that the best way to reduce the threat of radicals from the Mid East was to reduce their constituency by meeting the decent concerns of moderates from the Mid East. In the eight years since 9/11, we not only have not done this, we have, through our policies, greatly added to the anger and complaints of those in the region, whether radical or not. Through our policies America has thus served as the primary recruiting agency for Al Qaeda and others of its ilk. There is nothing increased security or reducing constitutional protections can do to change this.

Sam Smith, Progressive Review, 2002 - So here we are a year later, $37 billion out of pocket and still scared as hell someone's going to attack us. We're not the first with the problem. Many years ago some people built castles and walled cities and moats to keep the bad guys away. It worked for a while, but sooner or later spies and assassins figured out how to get across the moats and climb the walls and send balls of fire into protected compounds. The Florentines even catapulted dead donkeys and feces during their siege of Siena.

The people who built castles and walled cities and moats are all dead now and their efforts at security seem puny and ultimately futile as we visit their unintended monuments to the vanity of human presumption.

Like the castle-dwellers behind the moat, we are now spending huge sums to put ourselves inside a prison of our own making. It is unlikely to provide either security for our bodies nor solace for our souls, for we are simply attacking ourselves before others get a chance.

This is not the way to peace and safety. Peace is a state without violence, interrogations, and moats. Peace is a state of reciprocity, of trust, of empirically based confidence that no one is about to do you in. It exists not because of intrinsic goodness or rampant naivete but because of a common, implicit understanding that that it works for everyone.

This discovery is often hard to come by, but it is still cheaper, less deadly, and ultimately far more effective than the alternative we seem to have chosen, which is to imprison ourselves in our castle and hope the moat keeps the others out.

Jason Rosenbaum, Fire Dog Lake - In the wake of 9/11, Malcolm Gladwell wrote a New Yorker article on the history of hijackings, concluding:

"Can we close the loopholes that led to the September 11th attack? Logistically, an all-encompassing security system is probably impossible. A new safety protocol that adds thirty seconds to the check-in time of every passenger would add more than three hours to the preparation time for a 747, assuming that there are no additional checkpoints. Reforms that further encumber the country's already overstressed air-traffic system are hardly reforms; they are self-inflicted wounds."

The history Gladwell had detailed is one in which, repeatedly, security procedures on air travel had addressed the most recent crime or attempted crime, always looking backward and always being evaded by the next round of hijackers. . .

Airport-security measures have simply chased out the amateurs and left the clever and the audacious. "A look at the history of attacks on commercial aviation reveals that new terrorist methods of attack have virtually never been foreseen by security authorities," the Israeli terrorism expert Ariel Merari writes, in the recent book "Aviation Terrorism and Security."

So what can be done to actually make us safe, as opposed to waste our money and our time and make us feel safe? Well, we can start looking at the hard questions. Why do people who live across the world want to kill innocent Americans? What makes these people so violent? What policies have we pursued across the world to get so many people so angry with us?

There will always be crazy people, and the world will never be perfectly safe. But we get more terrorism when we do things as a nation and as a society that cause these crazy people to organize with each other, and give them the climate to work with the moneyed backers and political leaders who would never give them the time of day otherwise. The term is blowback, and it's well-defined and real.

If we can take away the causes that create sympathy for terrorism and turn terrorists into martyrs around the world, then we will cut actual terrorist incidents to almost nothing. But if we don't, all we'll have to rely on is security theater.