Let’s Face It: There’s really no stopping terrorism

Dude, I’m tellin’ ya……….

My buddy is one of those guys who likes to send out a lot of political crap in his emails. The type where it encourages you to send it to 20 of your own friends so that a worldwide boycott on buying gasoline for one day can happen. Or to bother your friends to bother their congressman about immigrants as if anything whatsoever will ever happen thru those efforts.

I hate politics with a passion. I hate talking about it. I despise reading newspaper articles, political commentary on TV….whatever. It’s all bullshit and lies. But I don’t hold it against my friend or demand he stop sending me the stuff. I don’t want to drop off of his mailing list entirely. Occasionally he forwards a good dirty joke. And on the very rare occasion, he sends a current events item that does capture my attention. 

Like the one he sent me the other day. Maybe you received it too. It is an article/summary about a lecture given in New York City recently by Juval Aviv. Apparently this man was the Israeli agent on which the film Munich is based. He was Golda Meir’s bodyguard and she assigned him with tracking down and bringing to justice the terrorists that slaughtered Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Games.

The article goes on to build on his already substantial credibility by giving him credit for predicting the London subway bombing on the Bill O’Reilly show a week before it happened. Also with supplying the Bush administration with intelligence on the 9/11 attacks a month before they happened. The article claims that this man is now in the employ of the US Congress as a security consultant. Whether any or all of these claims about Juval Aviv are true or not, I have no idea. But no matter how accurate his background is reported or how decorated he may—or may not be, what he is credited with saying at this NYC lecture is right on the mark so many times.

He predicts the next major terrorist attack on US soil in the next couple of months. It is what he points out about our security structure that really hits home, though.

He describes how all of our security measures are reactive instead of proactive. Like when the one guy tried to light an explosive in his shoe. Now we all have to take our shoes off. Then someone else tried to smuggle an explosive liquid on a plane. So now we all can’t bring liquids on-board. Aviv laughingly asked what will happen when someone puts a liquid explosive on their underwear? What will be our reactionary directive then?

The sad part is that those observations are right on the money. But it was his next opinions that match my own views for a long time now. He says that terrorists won’t be using airplanes as their weapon again anytime soon—if ever. We weren’t prepared. They exploited that weakness. And we have reacted with those weak checkpoint searches and restrictions.  So now terrorists will move on to our next biggest weakness.

Aviv says that the next major attack will be a coordinated effort in several locations across the US wherein simple explosives in suitcases and backpacks will be detonated in heavily populated buildings. Just like it happens in Israel. It doesn’t have to be a government building, a national landmark, or a courthouse, etc.

In fact, most likely those places will be excluded. It’s much simpler than that.  They’ll set one off in a McDonalds at lunchtime. And in the packed convention hall of a Vegas hotel. Maybe another one in front of the major league baseball stadium where hundreds of people are in line to get in. Or even in the stands during the game.

I’ve made this same observation for many years. The friend who circulates all this political material (including this email on Aviv) and I were season ticket holders to the Chicago Bears for four years. This was right at the time of 9/11. And in our usual reactionary approach, they started checking tote bags and purses a lot more thoroughly at the entrance gates. For about half-a-season. After that, it was back to just making sure people had a valid ticket and weren’t carrying bottles of beer or liquor. I remarked to my buddy then…..and several times since then at various places……how easy a terrorist could wipe out 100 or more people at these venues.

It’s the price we pay to enjoy the freedoms of choice that we have (entertainment, food, recreation, etc).

I went to four major league baseball games this year and one Blackhawks game already. No one at the gates has done as much as pat my back or chest or made me open up the flaps of my coat. That’s how easy it is to wear a dynamite vest into almost any venue. I hate to say it, but just in the state of Illinois, terrorists could wreak havoc–killing thousands without ever coming within miles of the Sears Tower.

At 1pm on a Saturday, they could simultaneously hit the busiest roller coaster line at Great America, the overflowing Murphy’s Bleachers pub across from Wrigley Field before the game, any busy suburban McDonalds, and the check-in line at O’hare aiport. 

That was another major point about Aviv’s dress-down of our airport security. We wait until people are at security checkpoint just before entering the terminal area before we look them over. They could kill just as many people at the front of the airport at a busy check-in time as they could on an in-air flight. And Aviv says they may very well try that ploy as long as we remain reactive instead of proactive. He says if we are going to conduct searches right down to the shoes, it should happen BEFORE a person even enters the airport. Until we do that, a check-in line attack is quite possible.

Even though I claim to have made these observations long before I read the piece on Juval Aviv, I also surrender to another simple truth. There is really no way to avoid these attacks outside of the airport. Short of doing a complete pat-down search before we enter a fast food restaurant or a movie theatre, it’s like I said before. To enjoy the freedoms that we do in the US, we basically have to leave ourselves exposed to these types of attacks. Even if we did perform full pat-downs at every venue, that still doesn’t stop the guy just walking past the throng of people milling in front of Wrigley Field and detonating himself. Or gathered for a St Patrick’s Day parade downtown. Or Taste of Chicago.

There really just isn’t any way completely around it. From here on, periodically we have to pay for our freedoms with some innocent lives. Like they do in Israel.  

That’s just the way it goes.