Awaiting armageddon: is the paranoia justified? "No one can say that major incidents never again will occur in the U.S., but successful attacks are much more difficult than people realize.".

• Author: Scherer, John L.
• Position: Worldview

THE PROBLEM with the war against terrorism is that no international terrorist incident, major or minor, has occurred in the U.S. since Sept. 11. Most people would not consider this a problem. Government officials and experts ought to be reassuring the nation that such an occurrence in the U.S. is highly improbable. They have done just the opposite.

* Attorney General John Ashcroft invoked the "highest state of alert," warning of an attack in the U.S. or Yemen on or about Feb. 12, 2002. Nothing happened. After Washington received information about possible assaults against Jewish institutions in New York and Washington, D.C., the terror alert was raised from yellow to orange in February, 2003. Another false alarm.

* At the end of February, 2003, the FBI issued an alert, warning thai terrorists were targeting dams and power stations, suspension bridges, apartment buildings, and gas stations. Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who was captured around that time near Rawalpindi, Pakistan, had studied engineering at two colleges in North Carolina, and experts insisted he would have learned how to bring down bridges. Nothing of the sort occurred.

* Phone intercepts and the Saudis provided other warnings in July, 2003. Five-man Al Qaeda teams, it was asserted, were preparing to storm the cockpits of planes sometime between July and the end of October. The terrorists might use flash-bangs to distract the passengers just before or after takeoff. Of course, such an act would have stunned the terrorists as well as the passengers and crew, but it was all academic anyway.

Many antiterrorist measures are for show. Swabbing luggage for traces of explosives is unnecessary, since only one bomb has detonated on an aircraft anywhere in the world since 1995. That happened on a small plane over Brazil in 1997. It landed safely, although one person was killed. The last bombing of a commercial airliner that has departed from a U.S. terminal occurred in the 1980s. X-raying luggage does not identify every type of explosive, but it solved the problem of suitcase bombs years ago. No terrorist ever has hijacked an aircraft using a metal nail file. A terrorist has yet to use a belt or the heel of a shoe fashioned from the plastic incendiary compound Semtex to bomb a plane. He or she would need a detonator for the explosive, and a detonator is less likely to pass airport security.

Attacks at sea have been a major concern, but terrorist success, here as well, remains elusive. Since...