...more recent posts
One new picture added to the World Trade Center photos. Also, I fixed the issue that was preventing some versions of IE on the Mac from seeing the photos. I'll fix all other pictures on the site over the next few days.
My amazement continues. What a perfect attack. Beautiful really, if it wasn't so horrible. So simple and such complete destruction. News reports keep speculating about the masterminds behind the plot and how only a few terrorist groups in the world have the capabilities to pull something like that off, yet there appears to be no evidence to back that up. The reality, and the elegance of the attack, was that almost anyone could do it. The whole thing might have cost just a few thousand dollars. The damage is certainly well into the billions. Maybe trillions? That's some return on investment. And then on top of that, there seems to be no way to defend against it.
Assuming that the public will not stand for mandatory strip searches of all airline passengers I can only think of one thing to do. Airplanes should be reconfigured so that the cockpit is seperate from the cabin. No doors, and reinforced thick steel walls seperating the two areas. Not a locked door - no door. These planes can still be attacked. They can be blown up with bombs. Passengers can be killed. But the plane itself cannot be commandeered in mid flight by a passenger and turned into a guided missle. This seems like a simple to implement step that will almost completely take away the possibility of this sort of disaster (I guess the plane could be taken over on the ground while the attackers could still get into the cockpit section from the outside, but that seems orders of magnitude harder for the attackers.)
Without this measure, it's hard to imagine this won't happen again. And again. And again. A few hundred bucks for a couple of tickets, and a few ceramic knives is all it takes to bomb the pentagon or knock down the World Trade Center? (Well, plus that willing to die part.) This is not acceptible. Tougher security checks at airports are not going to matter. Moving naval battle groups into New York harbor is not going to matter. Star Wars or any other crazy high tech solution will not matter. We must try to make peace, and in the mean time we have to make it impossible for people to easily get their hands on giant flying bombs.
[I'm posting more WTC related stuff in the comments below]
I'm O.K., if anyone is wondering.