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Why would they still go for airlines?
RAY MCALLISTER
TIMES-DISPATCH COLUMNIST
Saturday, August 12, 2006

The airlines again?

After Sept. 11, America got serious about airport security. If there was any way to avoid this, we would. More screeners. Longer lines. Even shoe checks.

Wouldn't terrorists be looking elsewhere, somewhere with less resistance? Experts said the nation's ports were a likely target. Or trains. Or power plants.

Then how to explain this week?

Airplanes still seem the target of choice, even after five years with no major incidents.

And are we ready?

Yet?

"I'm amazed myself," George Mason University professor Dennis J.D. Sandole said yesterday. One would have thought after 9/11, he said, that security officials would be brainstorming other threats to airplanes.

You don't have to be a rocket scientist, Sandole said, to anticipate other ways of blowing up aircraft, including liquid explosives. He sees people with water bottles everywhere when he flies.

Sandole, a former Marine and former police officer, is a founding member of George Mason's Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution. He sounds disheartened by what we have and haven't learned.

"What this tells me is that we -- the political leaders -- are still very reactive, rather than proactive," he says. They're using outdated techniques. Brainstormers seem to have run afoul of ideology in the Bush Administration, he said.

"The paradox is that people who are willing to kill us are far more creative than we are. . . .

"Just in terms of airport security, I'm amazed. What else is out there? We didn't think of shoe bombing until the shoe bomber."

William H. Parrish, a former Marine colonel and senior-level Department of Homeland Security official, is associate professor for homeland security and emergency preparedness at Virginia Commonwealth University.

"I don't think the threat to aviation was ever taken off the table," Parrish says. "We fully recognize the fact that aviation has long been a historic target for terrorism."

That goes back to hijackings of the early 1970s, which led to airport screening, he said, and then to the use of explosives by terrorists, as in the 1988 downing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Scotland.

Brainstorming is done, he said. Homeland Security and the FBI had issued a warning about liquids, he added.

But terrorists are constantly reassessing their approaches as roadblocks are put in their way, he said.

"This is the challenge in fighting this enemy that we have. We have got to be able to be prepared for almost anything . . . and still have a normal semblance of our daily lives. Terrorism is going to be with us a very, very long time."

The plot uncovered this week evokes one thwarted in 1995. Al-Qaida-linked Pakistanis had plotted to take down 11 U.S. airliners over the Pacific Ocean -- with liquid explosives.

"It looks to me like they're going back to some of their old ideas," Parrish said.

The plot apparently foiled this week could have worked. Federal investigators, working at the request of Congress, were able to carry materials needed to make a similar homemade bomb through security screening at 21 airports.

Both Sandole and Parrish say other threats are plausible.
Yet, as Parrish says, terrorists have shown "they will continue to use methods . . . that have been successful in the past, and they will come up with new techniques."

In other words, don't expect them to give up on airlines.

Contact staff writer Ray McAllister at rmcallister@timesdispatch.com or (804) 649-6333. His column runs Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Responses may be printed from time to time.