[geeks] oh my god.

[D.A. Muran-de Assereto]

I just heard on CNN that there was a passenger in the bathroom
on the plane that went down in PA who was talking to authorities on
his cellphone, apparently up until the last minute.
We'll find out more when those tapes come out. I'd like to believe
that someone decided to be heroic.

Unfortunately, the primary characteristic of something like this is
that you're never really sure it's over unless you have a very good
estimate of your attacker's resources. The planning on this series
of events indicates a fair level of sophistication, but actually,
if things are as they seem, the resource expenditure is rather low.
I'd estimate that you'd need somewhere between 8 and 15 operational
suicidal fanatics to pull this off, based on their level of competence,
plus some logistics support. This isn't very many people, considering
the types of resources that are available to world terr organizations.

Political grandstanding aside, we have a history of pulling together in
support of retaliation for events like this. I've never met anyone who
had any regrets about ElDorado canyon, except that we missed Qadafi. Same
goes for most of the other retaliations -- generally, the complaints are
that
we missed the prime target or that they went on too long and cost too much.
In order to do this right, we will have to put together a massive campaign,
and not allow ridiculous protestations of terr-supporting governments to
get in our way. It also has to be a quick and surgical response; once the
immediacy of the horror wears away, both Americans and foreign governments
will start to worry about the potential consequences and cost of
retaliation.

Much as I hate to say it, either the Israelis or the French generally handle
this sort of thing better than we do. Their sense of proportion occasionally
leaves
something to be desired, but they really don't worry about the public
relations
aspects of what they do until after the fact.

I would expect politicians to make the most of this, but hope that the
traditional
sense of unity in adversity prevails. As long as they make their hay by
standing
behind the American people and the efforts of the in-place administration to
clean this up and nail the attacker(s), it's all more-or-less irrelevant.
What irks
me is that, as sure as shooting, someone is going to point a finger at the
intelligence
community and start a bloodbath. One of these days, we will understand that
intelligence
agencies are not omniscient, and that effective intelligence collection,
analysis,
and reporting cost stratospheric amounts of money.

Dave Muran-de Assereto