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This is going to be long, so please bear with me.
Yesterday I posted one of the many threads concerning the latest "Terra in the Skies!" threat, musing that the entire operation sounded not only unoriginal but from all reports, exhibited the sophistication of a third grade chemistry experiment. To some those comments may have seemed flippant and I was admittedly feeling a bit cynical, yet I was entirely serious about what for all intents and appearances is an international terrorist network whose members wouldn't make the cut of open auditions for Mythbusters.
Flying the unfriendly skies, my friends, should be the least of our worries if we are truly paranoid about a terrorist attack aimed at the United States. Following the attacks of Sept 11 there have been countless discussions about the vulnerability of our nation's infrastructure yet that lack of security which existed prior to 9/11 hasn't changed. George Bush hasn't made us any safer; so far, we've just been damn lucky.
Shortly after the fall of the Twin Towers and attack on the Pentagon, I took a long drive from my home in WV's eastern panhandle to my mother's home, nestled in a small town in SE Ohio. It's a trip I've taken too many times to count but I had never considered the landscape from the perspective of someone who now wondered, "Could it happen here?" This time I took mental note of all the places along the way that could be, if someone were so inclined, easily sabotaged and wreak the kind of mass destruction that would make blowing up an airplane look like child's play by comparison. That is not to make light of the hundreds who might possibly die in such an attack, not at all. Yet multiply that kind of shock and horror tenfold or an hundredfold and you'll understand what I observed from my point of view.
Now, traveling the breadth of the vastly rural and rugged WV countryside, "terrorist target" isn't the first thing which comes to mind. In reality it is differs little from the vast majority of the American landscape which lies outside our major metropolitan areas. There are still major interstates which handle vital east-west commercial traffic (in WV particularly, the major interstates are the only way to really travel through the mountainous terrain); there are still mainline tracks serving America's railroads and especially its coal and chemical industries; there are still power plants, bridges, river ports, fuel depots. In many cases these are especially vulnerable for the very fact that they operate in remote areas.
To focus on just twenty specific miles of this trip might serve my argument better, though, so let me take you on the short jaunt which begins when you leave the rugged Gauley River area and head east to Charleston, a route which tales you along the Kanawah River, WV's major inland waterway and separates the state's most populous cities in in the SE, Charleston and Huntington, from the rest of the state. This river is key to WV's economic vitality, serving not only barge traffic but by its banks and flood plains the rail and road accessibility so sparse in a mountainous land. While rolling plains may provide plenty of elbow room for a wide dispersal of factories and plants, in the Appalachians development began, out of necessity, along its rivers.
So what you end up with is a concentrated number of plants, highways, rail lines and population centers that follow a ribbon-like path parallel to the Kanawah. If you're along for my virtual drive, you'll note that the banks are clogged with numerous chemical plants belching out their noxious fumes -- plants like Union Carbide and Dow, just to name two among so many. Then there are the fuel and coal depots and the barges which carry their cargos. There are power plants. There are bridges upon bridges, some which probably needed to be replaced long ago. Then you reach Charleston itself and more bridges and the crossroads for several major interstates: US 79, 64 and 77.
Yes, that river is key in more ways than one. It was bad enough to consider what devastation a terrorist attack aimed at those chemical plants or bridges could do (and how totally open to sabotage they are), but when you factor in that river it gets even worse. You see, the Kanawah River flows directly into the Ohio at Marietta and from there past Huntington and on to Cincinnati and beyond. Whatever you do to the waters of the Kanawha will, eventually, end up in New Orleans. And all along that route the pattern I just described is repeated over and over and over again, with the addition of several vital dams and nuclear power plants. It is a scenario repeated along all of Ohio's tributaries, from the Allegheny and Monongahela in Pennsylvania to the Cache in Illinois. On a grander scale the pattern follows the Ohio to the Mississippi, the nation's most vital and vulnerable inland waterway. Thousands of miles of unprotected rivers and infrastructure which, if the subject to certain acts of terrorism, could result in the kind of destruction this nation has never experienced on its own soil and whose effects could be felt for decades. Water. In a way, it's all about the water.
I don't mean to downplay the horror and death which could result from a terrorist attack on some commercial flights, but in the scope of things there are any number of events which could occur that concern me much more. Confiscating some shampoo and deodorant at the airport will not make America safe, just really unpleasant company. The kinds of steps which needed to be taken years ago are ones the Bush administration has failed to employ despite the slick marketing of the vaunted " Department of Homeland Security" or the arrest of a dozen clumsy men with spiked sports drinks. We might as well worry about the guy in the fishing boat and what kind of bait he might be carrying in that tackle box.
So you'll have to pardon my skeptical eye when it comes to this latest chapter in the "War on Terror". Perhaps Al Qaeda truly did get "lucky", albeit in its own twisted way, with the terrorist attacks successfully launched in East Africa, Yemen, or on 9/11. But are they truly so limited in their thinking that blowing up airplanes has become the only tactic in their playbook? Somehow I doubt that. Just as in any game of American football, you can only run the same play so many times before the other team catches on and takes steps to stop you in your tracks. When you only run the ball once every few years you can't absorb those kinds of losses.
No, there has to be another angle in play here. Bin Laden is big on theatrics and spectacle, the Andrew Lloyd Webber of the terrorist set. Yet if his real motive is to cause serious damage to the American economy (which would involve anything to do with its infrastructure, power grid, agriculture, waterways, etc) we have seen no evidence of it. The destruction of American symbols and icons may scar the nation's psyche, but most of all it has provided ambitious and corrupt men in our country a platform and venue to invade and reshape the ME in their own image. It is not our society which has been crippled but that of Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon, with Syria and Iran next in the PNAC crosshairs. Blowing up another airplane will accomplish what? They blow up an airplane, we blow up cities and countries across the Middle East?
I may not be the sharpest citizen on the block but even to me, something about all of this just doesn't add up.... and that's what truly worries me.
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