{"id":9,"date":"2006-09-10T08:21:30","date_gmt":"2006-09-10T12:21:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/jjjj\/2006\/09\/10\/safety\/"},"modified":"2006-10-23T06:30:07","modified_gmt":"2006-10-23T10:30:07","slug":"safety","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jjjj\/2006\/09\/10\/safety\/","title":{"rendered":"Safety"},"content":{"rendered":"

One justifiably prominent question<\/a> as we approach the fifth anniversary of the 9\/11\/2001 attacks is: Why have there been no subsequent attacks on American soil? I propose a politically suicidal answer that may nevertheless have some merit: Al Qaeda and the other terrorists aren’t really such a big deal. They don’t have the skills, the determination, the incentives, or the resources to pose a particularly great threat.<\/p>\n

This is an obviously controversial position. I cursorily propose eight reasons to take it seriously:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. The 9\/11 attacks did not make use of unconventional weapons.<\/li>\n
  2. Al Qaeda members and leaders were “surprised” that the 9\/11\/2001 plane-projectiles caused the collapse of the WTC towers.<\/li>\n
  3. The passengers of United Flight #93 demonstrated that hijackers would never again be able to use a plane as a projectile.<\/li>\n
  4. Al Qaeda financial resources, so far as they are publicly documented<\/a>, amounted to only a few tens of millions of dollars per year prior to the 9\/11\/2001 attacks.<\/li>\n
  5. Subsequent attacks on the US would provide no benefit for Al Qaeda in its hypothesized<\/a> efforts to topple the Saudi regime.<\/li>\n
  6. Radicalized Muslim communities are uncommon in the US.<\/li>\n
  7. Vulnerabilities abound in the US: it wouldn’t take much sophistication to pull off a major attack.<\/li>\n
  8. Whatever the size of the threat, domestic politicians have strong incentives to exaggerate it.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    If, with the trillions of dollars the US has spent on homeland security and defense since 9\/11\/2001, further attacks hadn’t been “prevented,” I would have been surprised.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    One justifiably prominent question as we approach the fifth anniversary of the 9\/11\/2001 attacks is: Why have there been no subsequent attacks on American soil? I propose a politically suicidal answer that may nevertheless have some merit: Al Qaeda and the other terrorists aren’t really such a big deal. They don’t have the skills, the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":283,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[608],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jjjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jjjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jjjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jjjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/283"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jjjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jjjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":124,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jjjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9\/revisions\/124"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jjjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jjjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/jjjj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}