Amanda Ripley Author of The Unthinkable

OK, as I sit here waiting for Pres. Obama to speak (again!) on the attempted airplane bombing, I find myself perplexed by a very basic question. Perhaps I am missing something. But the indictment of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab alleges that he carried a device containing PETN and TATP, among other ingredients, onto Flight 253 in Amsterdam.

The indictment doesn’t say how much explosive material he was allegedly carrying, but news reports consistently cite 80 grams of PETN—which is just under 3 oz. (Not clear how much TATP he is charged with having carried.) In any case, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has ordered 150 backscatter scanners, full-body imaging machines, to help prevent another similar attempt. Over the next 12 months, TSA plans to order another 300 such scanners.

But wait... All passengers are allowed to bring 3 oz bottles of liquid onto the plane in their carry-on baggage—where it would not be noticed by a whole-body scanner, which scans the body, not the bag. And it would not be noticed at all period because it is legal.

Now, granted, it might be easier to have a bomb already assembled (more or less) and attached to one’s person. But it’s hard to know without knowing more about this device. It’s possible that a terrorist could just put these explosives in their plastic baggy and breeze through the scanner. And, in any case, these much-discussed whole-body scanners may not even notice this kind of device if it is in one’s underwear and not in the carry-on bag.

I dwell on these tedious details to make a point: This whole shared delusion about the need for more and more invasive screening is very curious. Bruce Schneier described the strangeness today in his CNN essay, “Stop the Panic on Air Security”:

We’re doing these things even though security worked. The security checkpoints, even at their pre-9/11 levels, forced whoever made the bomb to construct a much worse bomb than he would have otherwise. Instead of using a timer or a plunger or another reliable detonation mechanism, as would any commercial user of PETN, he had to resort to an ad hoc homebrew—and a much more inefficient one, involving a syringe, and 20 minutes in the lavatory, and we don’t know exactly what else—that didn’t explode….

We’re doing these things even though airplane terrorism is incredibly rare, the risk is no greater today than it was in previous decades, the taxi to the airport is still more dangerous than the flight, and ten times as many Americans are killed by lightning as by terrorists.

Now back to waiting for Obama and more rhetoric about zero tolerance for something 100% guaranteed to happen again…. Is it too early for a drink?

OK, I make my living off words. But there are some things that words can never really capture. To accompany my story on What Makes a Great Teacher, the Atlantic has posted three videos of highly effective teachers, courtesy of Teach For America. These are teachers who are moving low-income American kids forward at breakneck speeds—something many of us have quietly concluded can’t be done.

Each of the three teachers has a different style, but they all are good at the six things that Teach for America has found make all the difference in the classroom. The story explains what those six things are. But the video brings it all to life.

My personal favorite is Justin Meli of Texas, above. I love this video, man. I mean, I made my husband watch this video late on a Friday night when I had no business making him think about education reform. But I just couldn’t help it. Check it out.

I occasionally take a break from writing about risk and human behavior to write about education—a kind of slow-motion disaster. This fall, I spent months obsessing over an old puzzle, using very cool new tools. The question was, What makes some teachers truly exceptional—and others, well, unremarkable? The story, which appears in this month’s Atlantic magazine, is my attempt to solve the mystery.

I had a lot of help. I got access to a treasure trove of data from Teach for America, which has been studying this mystery longer and more rigorously than any other outfit. Then I spent days sitting in classrooms in DC public schools—classrooms that ran like powerhouses and classrooms where time just oozed by, with nothing much happening. I am grateful to all the teachers, principals and students who so graciously allowed me to observe and who talked to me about the realities of their classrooms.

Eventually, I learned that the way to spot a great teacher is not to watch the teacher. The secret is to watch the kids. In great classrooms, the students were in a hurry, and not just some of them. Their eyes tracked the teacher as he or she moved across the room. When the kids got an answer right, they whisper-shouted, “Yes!” and pumped their fists.

In other classrooms in the very same school, I saw the very same students stare off into space. They took extraordinary amounts of time to staple their homework or sharpen their pencils. They danced silent steps in their sneakers on the linoleum floors under their desks. They smiled at me and waved. When I sneezed, they offered me tissues. They were the same kids, but the adult standing in front of them was not.

This all matters because, as Kevin Huffman put it in a Washington Post column the other day:

[T]oo often when we look at the sorry state of public education (on the most recent international benchmark exam conducted by the Program for International Student Assessment, U.S. high schoolers ranked 25th out of 30 industrialized nations in math and 24th in science) we believe the results are driven by factors beyond our control, such as funding and families. This leads to lethargy, which leads to inaction, which perpetuates a broken system that contributes to our economic decline.

By now, the research is clear: the one factor that matters most in a child’s education is the child’s teacher. As kids, we knew this. There were great teachers—the kind who made you believe anything was possible. But we always chalked it up to some kind of magical power that few teachers could be expected to possess. Turns out we were wrong.

Finally, we can identify extraordinary teachers—with data, not hearsay—and investigate what they are doing differently. We can even make more of them. The question is, Will we?

In the Washington Post, Stephen Flynn has a nice round-up of the nation’s Top 5 shared delusions on homeland security. Flynn has spent the past several years tirelessly pointing out the great irony of 9/11: The only people who prevented a terrorist attack that day were regular people. The passengers on Flight 93 likely saved the lives of some of the very same DC politicians and pundits who have, for the past 8 years, utterly ignored the contribution that regular people make to homeland security.

Meanwhile, the Best Comment Award for Flynn’s piece goes to ExportLaw:

“My ancestors who fought the Brits at Kings Mountain and Cowpens didn’t fight for a government capable of protecting them - that’s what the British Crown offered. They fought for a government that was respectful of them and their rights such that they could and would protect their government.”

Nice.

In case you missed it, David Brooks had a cogent critique of the homeland-security hysteria in the NY Times the other day:

In a mature nation, President Obama could go on TV and say, “Listen, we’re doing the best we can, but some terrorists are bound to get through.” But this is apparently a country that must be spoken to in childish ways.

It does seem that we have become a nation of pansies when it comes to terrorism. It’s curious because we don’t expect the same paternalism when it comes to protecting us from other threats—guns, say, or automobiles. But when it comes to airplanes and violent Islamic extremists, there is apparently no limit to the indignities we will suffer.

Case in point: Fred Barnes, executive editor of the Weekly Standard, on FOX on Dec. 29, 2009:

“I agree with Senator Dianne Feinstein [who] said the other day that, look, if you’re going to err in the war on terrorism, err on the side of overreacting rather than under-reacting. The Bush administration’s policy was to overreact. It seems like the Obama policy is to under-react.”

It takes my breath away, it really does.

Terrorists depend upon overreaction to be effective. They can never match their first-world enemies in weaponry or budget, so they target small, psychologically resonant targets to achieve outsized impact. They did it again on Christmas day over Detroit. What Mr. Barnes seems to have forgotten is that they did not succeed. Or did they?

Josh Gerstein at Politico has a nice side-by-side comparing Bush’s reaction to the shoe bomber in 2001 to the Obama’s reaction this week. It’s an interesting notion, since both Richard Reid and Abdulmutallab, the suspect in this latest case, were said to have used PETN, a powerful explosive (more on PETN below). So what happened after that Dec. 22, 2001 bombing attempt (foiled by flight attendants and passengers) on an American Airlines flight from Paris?

[I]t was six days before President George W. Bush, then on vacation, made any public remarks about the so-called shoe bomber, Richard Reid, and there were virtually no complaints from the press or any opposition Democrats that his response was sluggish or inadequate…

...Bush was at Camp David when Reid used similar plastic explosives to try to blow up his Paris-to-Miami flight, which diverted to Boston after the incident.

Like the Obama White House, the Bush White House told reporters the president had been briefed on the incident and was following it closely….Bush did not address reporters about the Reid episode until December 28, after he had traveled from Camp David to his ranch in Texas.

To be fair, that was just three months after 9/11. Americans had not yet forgotten that terrorists were interested in attacking the country, and the bar for major news (and outrage) on the subject was lower. But still, an intriguing comparison.

Oh, yeah: To see what PETN looks like when it blows up, check out this CNN video. Pretty much comports with what the passengers I interviewed from NWA Flight 253 said he saw on the suspect’s lap… A loud pop, smoke—and, a minute or so later, flames rising above the suspect’s head.

I have a rant in TIME Magazine this week about the attempted bombing of Northwest Flight 253—and the ways in which the usual suspects (including the White House, Congress and the media) are totally missing the point.

Our national conversation about terrorism needs to become more sophisticated. We cannot expect zero terrorism attempts to ever happen in our airplanes ever again. We can and must work harder to reduce the chances. But this kind of crap drives me crazy:

“I’d rather, in the interest of protecting people, overreact rather than underreact.”—Sen. Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate intelligence committee.

Really?

Terrorism is a psychological war as much as a physical war. To win such a war, it is essential not to overreact. That is the crux of the matter. If you overreact, you become a force multiplier for the terrorists.

And yet, that is exactly what we are doing. How thrilling it must be for extremists to sit in Yemen and hear about the impact of a failed mission in American skies: The U.S. president is being forced to prove he is not weak on defense (despite the fact that he just helped Yemen bomb the crap out of militants this very month, with decidedly mixed results, and despite the fact that Obama has insisted on staying in Afghanistan over the objections of many in his party); Andrew Sullivan and at least one Congressional Republican have called for the resignation of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano; passengers around the world are being subjected to inane no-blanket rules and invasive frisks, just when it seemed they had no more dignity left to surrender.

Wow. Quite an accomplishment for a young man who did not successfully detonate his bomb.

Our complicity in boosting the terrorism threat was explained well by James Fallows in a 2006 Atlantic piece, “Declaring Victory”:

“Does al-Qaeda still constitute an ‘existential’ threat?” asks David Kilcullen, who has written several influential papers on the need for a new strategy against Islamic insurgents. Kilcullen, who as an Australian army officer commanded counter-insurgency units in East Timor, recently served as an adviser in the Pentagon and is now a senior adviser on counterterrorism at the State Department. He was referring to the argument about whether the terrorism of the twenty-first century endangers the very existence of the United States and its allies, as the Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons did throughout the Cold War (and as the remnants of that arsenal still might).

“I think it does, but not for the obvious reasons,” Kilcullen told me. He said the most useful analogy was the menace posed by European anarchists in the nineteenth century. “If you add up everyone they personally killed, it came to maybe 2,000 people, which is not an existential threat.” But one of their number assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife. The act itself took the lives of two people. The unthinking response of European governments in effect started World War I. “So because of the reaction they provoked, they were able to kill millions of people and destroy a civilization.

“It is not the people al-Qaeda might kill that is the threat,” he concluded. “Our reaction is what can cause the damage. It’s al-Qaeda plus our response that creates the existential danger.”

A Nigerian national allegedly attempted to blow up a Northwest Airlines jet as it descended into Detroit today around noon. The small explosive device burned the suspect’s hands but did no other serious damage, it appears. It’s too early to know exactly what to make of the incident, but a few thoughts to help sort through the frenzy of news that is already whipsawing into circulation.

* Who dunnit? Nigerian suspect, Yemeni device, al-Qaeda connection…?

The bomb, which the New York Times is saying was made partly of liquid, partly of powder, reportedly came from Yemen, and the suspect is said to be claiming an al-Qaeda connection. If true, this is not a shocker. We know that Yemen is a haven for al-Qaeda. In fact, al-Qaeda members have explicitly announced their intention to use Yemen as a regional base. The instability and weak government in Yemen make it very vulnerable to exploitation by extremists. To see footage from a very recent al-Qaeda rally in Yemen, check out this al Jazeera (in English) clip:

* Who’s to Blame? Obama! Yemen! Airport security! Fill in the blank!

Wasting no time, the ranking Republican on the U.S. House Intelligence Committee seized upon the news of the attack to criticize the Obama administration for not taking the Yemen threat more seriously and call for more aggressive action. “People have got to start connecting the dots here and maybe this is the thing that will connect the dots for the Obama administration,” Rep. Pete Hoekstra told the Detroit Free Press.

An odd thing to say on the very same day that Yemeni forces, back by the United States, launched an air strike on suspected al-Qaeda leaders in Yemen. That strike killed some 30 people and was the latest attack in a series. Last week, a battery of strikes killed about 34 people. The attacks were ordered by President Obama himself, ABC News is reporting.

To further complicate the blame game, these kinds of military raids can actually make the al-Qaeda threat worse, at least in the short term, by boosting recruitment and support among locals. No cruise missile goes unpunished, that old American story. From TIME:

But regardless of who did what, a primary target in the attacks — Qasim al-Raymi, the al-Qaeda leader who is believed to be behind a 2007 bombing in central Yemen that killed seven Spanish tourists and two Yemenis — is still at large. And reports of a U.S. role, and mass civilian casualties at the sites of the attacks, have sparked a public outcry and added to anti-American sentiments across the country. ...
Indeed through the backlash that followed, the attacks have started to look like more of a boon than a bust for Yemen’s al-Qaeda revival, as well as for other opponents of Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s regime. Iran — which Yemen accuses of backing the Shi’ite Houthi rebellion in the north — headlined the attacks on its state-sponsored Press TV with: “Obama ordered deadly blitz on Yemen.”

For now, most of the televised speculation will probably focus on airport security: How could a passenger carry incendiary materials from Nigeria through a connection in Amsterdam? And that’s worth exploring. But if it’s true that the suspect mixed the materials on the plane and injected the liquid with a syringe into powder, which was strapped on his leg, as the New York Times is reporting…. AND none of this worked…well, it’s probably worth focusing most of our energy on understanding U.S. policy and intelligence in Yemen and Nigeria.

* Who is Not to Blame?

Once again, we are reminded that are most reliable counter-terrorism assets are…regular people. As on 9/11, the people who took the most courageous and impactful action were fellow passengers—who helped tackle the suspect and put out the fire, according to the eye-witness account of a passenger sitting three rows back. Check out the blow by blow from the Detroit Free Press:

Syed Jafry of Holland, Ohio, who had flown from the United Arab Emirates, said after emerging from the airport that people ran out of their seats to tackle the man. Jafry was sitting in the 16th row—three rows behind the passenger—when he heard “a pop and saw some smoke and fire.” Then, he said, “a young man behind me jumped on him.”...He said the way passengers responded made him proud to be an American….By all accounts, the suspect was immediately tackled by at least one man, and several other passengers ran towards him immediately trying to put the fire out.

None of this will come as any surprise to regular readers of this blog. But it’s worth pointing out since, in all the hearings that Congress will inevitably hold about the Detroit incident, I doubt much time will be spent talking about how the people in charge should trust regular Americans with more information and work much harder to leverage the dedication of regular people with the same conviction the government invests in new (fallible but highly profitable) explosive-detection equipment.