Mao’s death toll has been estimated to be anywhere from 10 million to 80 million, or 120,000–960,000 deaths per year. If we use the per-year terrorism death rate from Alan Harris of 1000_1,024ya, and apply it to the 20^th century (a generous application), then the last century’s terrorism death toll was still vastly smaller than a single year of Mao.

One review of US military psyops programs speaks for itself (“Military Social Influence in the Global Information Environment: A Civilian Primer”, King 2010_14ya):

Beyond this, U.S. military perception management specialists are convinced that modern enemy information campaigns have been so successful that they have tipped the balance in recent conflict, successfully frustrating U.S. and allied forces (Collings & Rohozinski, 2008_16ya; Murphy, 2010_14ya; Seib, 2008_16ya). For instance, it has been argued that optimal management of satellite television, Internet-based media, and journalist access to information thwarted Israeli Defense Force (IDF) activity in Lebanon in 2006_18ya (Caldwell et al 2009_15ya). And Al Qaeda, many believe, continues to be a formidable foe, not because of military resources, but as a result of their highly coordinated global media campaign (Kilcullen, in Packer, 2006_18ya; Seib, 2008_16ya).

“Deaths from international terrorism compared with road crash deaths in OECD countries”: “In the 29 OECD countries for which comparable data were available, the annual average death rate from road injury was approximately 390 times that from international terrorism. The ratio of annual road to international terrorism deaths (averaged over 10 years) was lowest for the United States at 142 times. In 2001_23ya, road crash deaths in the US were equal to those from a September 11 attack every 26 days.”↩︎

And let’s not even talk about the usual death toll; “The Most Dangerous Person in the World?”, CounterPunch:

Deaths of Americans due to terrorist activities, according to the US State Department, have averaged less than 15 per year since 2002_22ya. And all of those occurred abroad. The majority were in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. (Civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan were not counted due to the fact those occurred in war zones.)

John Mueller, “Reacting to Terrorism: Probabilities, Consequences, and the Persistence of Fear”; Ohio State University, February 6, 2007_17ya:

However, as can be seen in the figure, the number of people worldwide who die as a result of international terrorism by this definition is generally a few hundred a year. In fact, until 2001_23ya far fewer Americans were killed in any grouping of years by all forms of international terrorism than were killed by lightning. Moreover, except for 2001_23ya, virtually none of these terrorist deaths occurred within the United States itself. Indeed, outside of 2001_23ya, fewer people have died in America from international terrorism than have drowned in toilets. Even with the September 11 attacks included in the count, however, the number of Americans killed by international terrorism over the period is not a great deal more than the number killed by lightning—or by accident-causing deer or by severe allergic reactions to peanuts over the same period. In almost all years the total number of people worldwide who die at the hands of international terrorists is not much more than the number who drown in bathtubs in the United States—some 300–400.

Another assessment comes from astronomer Alan Harris. Using State Department figures, he assumes a worldwide death rate from international terrorism of 1000_1,024ya per year—that is, he assumes in his estimate that there would be another 9/11 somewhere in the world every several years. Over an 80 year period under those conditions some 80,000 deaths would occur which would mean that the lifetime probability that a resident of the globe will die at the hands of international terrorists is about one in 75,000 (6 billion divided by 80,000). This, he points out, is about the same likelihood that one would die over the same interval from the impact on the earth of an especially ill-directed asteroid or comet. If there are no repeats of 9/11, the lifetime probability of being killed by an international terrorist becomes about one in 120,000.

Never are opportunity costs more relevant than in security. From Mueller & Stewart 2011_13ya:

Although these tallies make for grim reading, the total number of people killed in the years after 9/11 by Muslim extremists outside of war zones comes to some 200 to 300 per year. That, of course, is 200 to 300 too many, but it hardly suggests that the destructive capacities of the terrorists are monumental. For comparison, during the same period more people—320 per year—drowned in bathtubs in the United States alone. Or there is another, rather unpleasant comparison. Increased delays and added costs at U.S. airports due to new security procedures provide incentive for many short-haul passengers to drive to their destination rather than flying, and, since driving is far riskier than air travel, the extra automobile traffic generated has been estimated to result in 500 or more extra road fatalities per year.

Given the rarity and low costs of attacks, it’s very hard to justify expensive security measures like full body scanners; a conservative analysis nevertheless writes in its abstract:

The cost of this technology will reach $1.2 billion per year by 2014. The paper develops a cost-benefit analysis of AITs for passenger screening at U.S. airports. The analysis considered threat probability, risk reduction, losses, and costs of security measures in the estimation of costs and benefits. Since there is uncertainty and variability of these parameters, three alternate probability (uncertainty) models were used to characterise risk reduction and losses. Economic losses were assumed to vary from $2-50 billion, and risk reduction from 5-10%. Monte-Carlo simulation methods were used to propagate these uncertainties in the calculation of benefits, and the minimum attack probability necessary for AITs to be cost-effective was calculated. It was found that, based on mean results, more than one attack every two years would need to originate from U.S. airports for AITs to pass a cost-benefit analysis. In other words, to be cost-effective, AITs every two years would have to disrupt more than one attack effort with body-borne explosives that otherwise would have been successful despite other security measures, terrorist incompetence and amateurishness, and the technical difficulties in setting off a bomb sufficiently destructive to down an airliner. The attack probability needs to exceed 160-330% per year to be 90% certain that AITs are cost-effective.

Or consider the broader picture; “Terror, Security, and Money: Balancing the Risks, Benefits, and Costs of Homeland Security” (2011_13ya), by John Mueller and Mark Stewart:

The cumulative increase in expenditures on US domestic homeland security over the decade since 9/11 exceeds one trillion dollars…Thus far, officials do not seem to have done so and have engaged in various forms of probability neglect by focusing on worst case scenarios; adding, rather than multiplying, the probabilities; assessing relative, rather than absolute, risk; and inflating terrorist capacities and the importance of potential terrorist targets. We find that enhanced expenditures have been excessive: to be deemed cost-effective in analyses that substantially bias the consideration toward the opposite conclusion, they would have to deter, prevent, foil, or protect against 1,667 otherwise successful Times-Square type attacks per year, or more than four per day.

…As we approach the tenth anniversary of 9/11, federal expenditures on domestic homeland security have increased by some $360 billion over those in place in 2001. Moreover, federal national intelligence expenditures aimed at defeating terrorists at home and abroad have gone up by $110 billion, while state, local, and private sector expenditures have increased by a hundred billion more. And the vast majority of this increase, of course, has been driven by much heightened fears of terrorism, not by growing concerns about other hazards-as Veronique de Rugy has noted, by 2008 federal spending on counterterrorism had increased enormously while protection for such comparable risks as fraud and violent crime had not, to the point where homeland security expenditures had outpaced spending on all crime by $15 billion.[3] Tallying all these expenditures and adding in opportunity costs-but leaving out the costs of the terrorism-related (or terrorism-determined) wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and quite a few other items that might be included-the increase in expenditures on domestic homeland security over the decade exceeds one trillion dollars.

There are a number of estimates of how much Iraq has cost:

1. The Bush administration estimated Iraq at $50-60 billion.

2. Joseph Stiglitz in 2005_19ya estimated a total cost of >$2 trillion.

3. In 2008 Stiglitz upped it to >$3 trillion (see The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict).

4. In 2011_13ya, President Obama publicly estimated the cost of Afghanistan & Iraq at >$1 trillion.

5. Also in 2011_13ya, the CRS estimated Pentagon expenditures at >$1.3 trillion 2001^–₁₀2011_13ya.

6. The Watson Institute for International Studies’s 2011_13ya report “The Costs of War” puts it at >$3.2 trillion (omitting interest, non-federal medical & social service expenses, aid to Iraq or Afghanistan or Pakistan, or damage done to non-American interests).

From the translation of a 2001_23ya recording of Bin Laden released by the Pentagon:

…we calculated in advance the number of casualties from the enemy, who would be killed based on the position of the tower. We calculated that the floors that would be hit would be three or four floors. I was the most optimistic of them all…

Notice that Bin Laden clearly does not expect any towers to collapse, much less 2 or 3, and that only the people on a few floors would be killed; contrast this to the reliable & easily calculated figures of >4000 casualties if Al Qaeda had instead carried out the Bojinka plot (which successfully tested a bomb on board an international airliner). While the results of 9/11 were ultimately more impressive, this was unforeseeable by AQ; it was the wrong choice to make if they cared about results. (Playing the lottery is a bad decision, even if you happen to win one time.)

For more context, see a compilation of 1994^–₁₀2004_20ya statements by Bin Laden (which does not include the above).↩︎

“Global terrorism follows a power law”, Physics World, discussing the ArXiv paper “Title: Scale Invariance in Global Terrorism”:

Clauset and Young analysed a database that contains details of more than 19,900 terrorist events that occurred in 187 countries between 1968_56ya and 2004_20ya. According to the database, which is maintained by the National Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism (MIPT), at least one person was killed or injured in some 7,088 of these events.

“Al Qaeda in Its Third Decade: Irreversible Decline or Imminent Victory?”, Brian Michael Jenkins, RAND 2012:

Arrests of homegrown terrorists show an uptick in 2009_15ya and 2010_14ya, but this is primarily the result of increased recruiting in the Somali diaspora and the FBI’s increased use of sting operations. Ethiopia’s invasion of Somalia provoked strong sentiments among America’s Somalis, who regard Ethiopians as their historical enemies. Fund-raising and recruiting began soon after, which U.S. authorities became aware of when American Somalis turned up in Somalia. This discovery led to a nationwide effort involving federal agents and local police working with cooperative Somali communities to prevent further recruiting.

Fortunately, few of America’s jihadists have proved to be very dedicated or competent. They are not determined, cunning “lone wolves”; they are skittish stray dogs. Most of the 32 jihadist terrorist plots uncovered since 9/11 were immature expressions of intentions. Only ten had what could be described as an operational plan, and of these, six were FBI stings. Perhaps the most serious interrupted plot was Najibullah Zazi’s plan to carry out suicide bombings in New York’s subways. Outside of the stings, only three plots led to attempted attacks. One was Faisal Shazad’s failed bombing in Times Square. Only two resulted in fatalities: Carlos Bledsoe’s shooting at an Army Recruiting Center in Arkansas and Nidal Hasan’s attack at Fort Hood. “Active shooters” like Hasan are currently considered the most worrisome threat.

By comparison, the United States saw an average of 50 to 60 terrorist bombings per year in the 1970s and a greater number of fatalities. The passage of ten years since 9/11 without a major terrorist attack on an American target abroad or at home is unprecedented since the 1960s.

And think, these numbers are all true despite how much the FBI stings smell like entrapment and trumped-up malcontents; AQ indeed has little operational capability under any serious pressure—unless one wishes to argue that the US government is actually competent when it comes to fighting terrorism, though nowhere else?↩︎

Of course, terrorism is not about terror, so it’s not a surprise that actually accomplishing terrorist groups could experience ‘mission drift’ or ‘lost purposes’ where members prefer the status quo and inactivity and pursuing more congenial goals that used to be correlated with the organization accomplishing its goal (much like Max Planck’s quote that science advances death by death).

“Academics Debate Whether Osama bin Laden’s Death Will Have Imapct on al-Qaeda Leaders”:

…53% of the terrorist organizations that suffered such a violent leadership loss fell apart—which sounds impressive until you discover that 70% of groups who did not deal with an assassination no longer exist. Further crunching of the numbers revealed that leadership decapitation becomes more counterproductive the older the group is. The difference in collapse rates (between groups that did and did not have a leader assassinated) is fairly small among organizations less than 20 years old but quite large for those more than 20 years in age, and even larger for those that have been around more than 30 years.

Assassination of a leader does seem to negatively impact smaller terrorist groups: The data shows organizations with fewer than 500 members are more likely to collapse if they suffer such a leadership loss. But organizations with more than 500 members are actually more likely to survive after an assassination, making this strategy “highly counterproductive for larger groups,” Jordan writes.

Consider how Squeaky Fromm’s failure to understand her assassination of President Gerald Ford would fail because she hadn’t loaded her gun: “It wouldn’t go off!…It didn’t go off. Can you believe it? It didn’t go off.” Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was arrested immediately afterwards for driving without license plates. Why did Mohammed A. Salameh get arrested after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing trying to get his deposit back for the truck used in the bombing? Or the DC snipers for sleeping in their car, or John Ausonius robbing banks on a bicycle, or a Muslim Russian who blew herself up when an unexpected text message was sent by her cellphone carrier (or Somalis just blowing themselves up, not that they beat the Iraqi instructor who killed himself & 21 recruits), or the British Muslim who eschewed AES in favor of a Caesar cipher “because ‘kaffirs’, or non-believers, know about it so it must be less secure”!

Abdullah al-Asiri, after cleverly arranging contact with his assassination target (a Saudi deputy Minister), decided to execute him with a bomb hidden up his anus; the bomb was not big enough to do more than slightly injure the minister (but did kill him). Ibrahim Abdeslam did likewise, perhaps because he smoked too much weed to bother with planning.

The Boston bombers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev were undone when they decided it would be a great idea to kill a police officer, then do some carjacking and robbery.

The 2010 Times Square car bombing attempt bomber failed to do his homework and believed he had created a fertilizer bomb, but he hadn’t, and in any case, his wiring meant that all he accomplished was setting his car on fire. Still, that was better than the 2007 Glasgow International Airport attack, where they tried to use a car bomb made out of propane, but drove the car into a bollard rather than anywhere important, set it on fire, and one of the terrorists himself caught on fire and was the only fatality. (Propane is a recurring theme and does not seem to work very well, eg. another French attack similarly failed: “Inès Madani, 19, and her three friends were alleged to have followed to the letter his instructions to ‘fill a car with gas cylinders, sprinkle petrol in it and park in a busy street … BOOM.’ The women ran off leaving the warning lights flashing after failing to detonate the gas by setting fire to a rag.”)

Mohammed Taheri-Azar ran over 9 people—killing none—and turned himself in peaceably; reportedly, he managed to choose a narrow area where he couldn’t accelerate, was too lazy to get a gun permit so he could buy a gun, decided not to enlist in the US military because he had bad eyesight, and in general was feckless, prompting the reporter to write:

Taheri-Azar’s incompetence as a terrorist is bewildering. Surely someone who was willing to kill and die for his cause, spending months contemplating an attack, could have found a more effective way to kill people. Why wasn’t he able to obtain a firearm or improvise an explosive device or try any of the hundreds of murderous schemes that we all know from movies, television shows, and the Internet, not to mention the news? And once Taheri-Azar decided to run people over with a car, why did he pick a site with so little room to accelerate?

A would-be jihadist tried to shoot up a train in France in August 2015 but had to beg for his handgun back after two American soldiers wrestled it away and in any event, all his guns had jammed and he knew neither how to unjam a gun nor how to load a magazine into his handgun.

In the 2016 Nice attack, Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel tried the Taheri-Azar strategy but this time chose an open street filled with crowds and used a truck (as previously recommended by Al-Qaeda & later by ISIS, and also employed in the 2016 Berlin attack with >11 fatalities); this simple strategy resulted in an astonishing 84+ deaths. Still, there were some peculiar aspects: police “found a fake automatic pistol; two fake assault rifles, a Kalashnikov and an M-16; a nonfunctioning grenade; and a mobile phone and documents.”, leaving one to wonder why a terrorist would bring along a broken grenade and 3 useless guns—the grenade understandably couldn’t be tested in advance, but surely he at least test-fired the assault rifles? Which makes the laziness of Riaz Khan (0 fatalities) all the more remarkable in telling his ISIS recruiter (whose frustration can only be imagined) that he wasn’t going to bother to learn how to drive a car:

The transcript of the conversation begins with the terror chief asking: “What weapons do you intend to kill with?” Riaz replied: “Knife and axe are at the ready.” It goes on: “Brother, would it not be better to do it with a car?” He responds: “I can not drive.” The terror chief instructs: “You should learn.” Khan answers: “Learning takes time.” The ISIS commander then responded: “The damage would be much greater.” Khan says: “I want to go to paradise tonight.”

Ahmad Khan Rahami conducted >3 bombings in NY/NJ in 2016, killing no one, and was quickly identified because of fingerprints & the cellphones he used as detonators were registered in his name; despite his head start, he only made it a few miles into NJ where he was found sleeping, homeless-style, in front of a bar.

And in 2024, Thomas Matthew Crooks had a semi-automatic AR-15 rifle which he used in a prone position on a rooftop a few hundred feet away from Donald Trump, in an ideal sniping situation (thus possibly the largest Secret Service failure in history), where an ordinary shooter would have accuracy of a few centimeters—and missed so badly he killed someone else.↩︎

From “The Terrorism Delusion: America’s Overwrought Response to September 11”:

In sharp contrast, the authors of the [50] case studies, with remarkably few exceptions, describe their subjects with such words as incompetent, ineffective, unintelligent, idiotic, ignorant, inadequate, unorganized, misguided, muddled, amateurish, dopey, unrealistic, moronic, irrational, and foolish.⁹ And in nearly all of the cases where an operative from the police or from the Federal Bureau of Investigation was at work (almost half of the total), the most appropriate descriptor would be “gullible”. In all, as Shikha Dalmia has put it, would-be terrorists need to be “radicalized enough to die for their cause; Westernized enough to move around without raising red flags; ingenious enough to exploit loopholes in the security apparatus; meticulous enough to attend to the myriad logistical details that could torpedo the operation; self-sufficient enough to make all the preparations without enlisting outsiders who might give them away; disciplined enough to maintain complete secrecy; and-above all-psychologically tough enough to keep functioning at a high level without cracking in the face of their own impending death.”¹⁰ The case studies examined in this article certainly do not abound with people with such characteristics. In the eleven years since the September 11 attacks, no terrorist has been able to detonate even a primitive bomb in the United States, and except for the four explosions in the London transportation system in 2005_19ya, neither has any in the United Kingdom. Indeed, the only method by which Islamist terrorists have managed to kill anyone in the United States since September 11 has been with gunfire—inflicting a total of perhaps sixteen deaths over the period (cases 4, 26, 32).¹¹

Director Chris Morris on the real-life inspirations:

I was, out of curiosity, just reading about the subject. I was reading a book by Jason Burke on Al-Qaeda, and I came across an example of a bunch of people from Yemen who wanted to blow up a U.S. warship on Millennium Eve. They went down in the middle of the night, 3 a.m., they filled up a boat with explosives, and it sank. I thought, “Ah.” I laughed out loud when I read that. I wasn’t expecting to laugh when I was reading that book. Then I came across a couple more examples—a guy who set out to blow up an officer at a compound, I think it was a Kurdish compound. He went off on a job, he was called back, so he built up over another week and a half, basically got himself psyched up to do it, went up to the compound. As he was going through the gate the guard said, “Who are you here to see?” He said, “I’m here to see the chief officer.” He said, “All right. By the way, what’s under your shirt?” The guy said, “Oh, yeah, it’s a bomb.” And again I thought, this is just ridiculous. How he got to that point. And then I started pursuing that line. I read a few other books, and similar little silly things happened, things that were sort of stupid-level, ordinary human behavior funny. Then I went to a high court case. There were a bunch of guys in the docks for buying fertilizer making very loose plans what to do with it, and there was about three months of surveillance from MI-5. Page after page of absolutely ludicrous, pretty much stoner drivel. Drug-free, but it was hard to believe when you read it. I thought, wait, we’re on to something here. The ideology is terrifying, but it’s somewhat modified when it’s juxtaposed with conversations about what a great actor Johnny Depp is, how cool he’d look with a big beard. Just silly things, which seem surprising, until you think, “Why would these guys be any different to any other bunch of guys?”… I was struck that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed took an hour to get himself ready for the camera, because he kept wanting to choose a costume that didn’t make him look fat. You have this, I think, right the way through the top.

Although such speculation can be very fun and quite educational. I refer the interested reader to the thousands of plots suggested in Bruce Schneier’s first, second, third, and fourth “Movie-Plot Threat Contests”↩︎

Ireland’s estimated loss in dollars from the Irish pork crisis of 2008.↩︎

“An unaddressed issue of agricultural terrorism: A case study on feed security”, Kosal & Anderson 2004_20ya:

Fifteen years later, also in rural Wisconsin, chlordane, an organochlorine pesticide, was intentionally added to rendering plant material that was then distributed to major animal feed producers (Neher, 1999; Schuldt, 1999). Tainted feed was identified as having been distributed to over 4,000 farms, principally dairies, and led to recalls in four Midwestern states of products including cheese, butter, and ice cream that were suspected of contamination. The action level for chlordane is parts per billion. The charged suspect [caught through letters] was a competitor of the targeted facility. The cost to the feed producer alone was estimated at over $250 million.

Kosal & Anderson 2004_20ya, describing the Dioxin Affair:

In late winter 1999_25ya, poultry farmers in Belgium began reporting sharp decreases in egg production, chicks exhibiting abnormal developmental behavior, and instances of unexpected death, predominantly due to eggs failing to hatch (Bernard et al 1999_25ya; Crawford, 1999_25ya; Lok and Powell, 2000_24ya). Dioxin-contaminated feed originating from a single producer of fat for animal feed was found to be the cause. Apparently, one single storage tank had been contaminated. The incident prompted a U.S. ban on all chicken and pork from the European Union; trade suspensions and warnings with respect to other European foodstuffs were issued by over 30 governments around the world. The estimated financial impact exceeded $1.5 billion (Reuters, 1999; Lok and Powell, 2000). Three cabinet-level ministers from Holland and Belgium resigned, and the Belgium Premier lost his June 1999 reelection bid. The official source of the dioxin has not been conclusively determined.

Wikipedia fails to mention that the 2 infamous grapes were probably not even poisoned.↩︎

“Poisoned Grapes, Mad Cow, and Protectionism”, Engel 1999_25ya.↩︎

You would think that by this point we would know exactly how many!↩︎

Bruce Schneier remarks in 2011, of a survey/book of known American terrorist incidents which found that most involved law enforcement and its informers, that none successfully employed a bomb:

Note that everyone who died was shot with a gun. No Islamic extremist has been able to successfully detonate a bomb in the U.S. in the past ten years, not even a Molotov cocktail. (In the U.K. there has only been one successful terrorist bombing in the last ten years; the 2005_19ya London Underground attacks.) And almost all of the 33 incidents (34 if you add LAX) have been lone actors, with no ties to al Qaeda.

Inasmuch as Bum-kon could’ve killed his victims as effectively with his firearms. His attacks were unopposed by the police and were stopped by his suicide, so Bum-kon could have just shot the <10 people killed by grenades; Wikipedia describes his leisurely massacre:

Initially, he killed three operators at the local telephone exchange to prevent others calling from emergency services. He then walked from house to house and used his position as a police officer to make people feel safe and gain entry into their homes. He shot most of his victims, but in one case he killed an entire family with a grenade. He continued this pattern for a full eight hours. After Woo had shot a number of people in one village, he would resume the spree killing in a nearby village. In the early hours of April 27, after rampaging through five villages in Uiryeong county, Woo took his final two grenades and strapped them to his body. He then held three people captive and then set the grenades’ fuses, killing both himself and his final victims.

“Where Are All The Terrorist Attacks?”, 2010-05-04:

As the details of the Times Square car bomb attempt emerge in the wake of Faisal Shahzad’s arrest Monday night, one thing has already been made clear: Terrorism is fairly easy. All you need is a gun or a bomb, and a crowded target. Guns are easy to buy. Bombs are easy to make. Crowded targets – not only in New York, but all over the country – are easy to come by. If you’re willing to die in the aftermath of your attack, you could launch a pretty effective terrorist attack with a few days of planning, maybe less.

According to the 9/11 Commission Report, the resources actually expended by al-Qaeda on 9/11 were roughly >$500,000 and 5 years.↩︎

This is just his confirmed kill count.↩︎

Impossible, you say, that they could remain at liberty for so long? Then consider the example of George Metesky the “Mad Bomber”, who placed 47 bombs in New York City over 20 years, injuring 15 people. He was only apprehended when his letters to the newspapers began including such highly specific details as working for Con Edison & then developing pneumonia & tuberculosis.↩︎

One possible objection to my sniper plot is that by selecting Simo Häyhä as my exemplar, and suggesting that an indefinite kill-rate of 1 person per month, I am cherry-picking my data; most terrorist-snipers, the suggestion goes, would be more akin to the Beltway sniper attacks by John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo: resulting in few deaths (11) and relatively quick apprehension (3 weeks).

The DC sniper attacks, however, were not conducted at sniper ranges, were multiple killings by the same person in the same time and location, and were conducted poorly—the two were arrested and discovered because they were sleeping in their car.↩︎

Mueller & Stewart 2011_13ya:

Beyond the tiny band that constitutes al-Qaeda central, there are, continues Sageman, thousands of sympathizers and would-be jihadists spread around the globe who mainly connect in Internet chat rooms, engage in radicalizing conversations, and variously dare each other to actually do something. [Hoffman 2006_18ya. Inside Terrorism. Revised and expanded. New York: Columbia University Press.] All of these rather hapless-perhaps even pathetic-people should of course be considered to be potentially dangerous. From time to time they may be able to coalesce enough to carry out acts of terrorist violence, and policing efforts to stop them before they can do so are certainly justified. But the notion that they present an existential threat to just about anybody seems at least as fanciful as some of their schemes.

By 2005_19ya, after years of well-funded sleuthing, the FBI and other investigative agencies noted in a report that they had been unable to uncover a single true al-Qaeda sleeper cell…It follows that any terrorism problem in the United States and the West principally derives from rather small numbers of homegrown people, often isolated from each other, who fantasize about performing dire deeds and sometimes receive a bit of training and inspiration overseas.

Steve Moore, “The Mountain of Missing Evidence” while writing on the Amanda Knox case:

When I was on an FBI SWAT Team, we had an exercise designed to teach us the dangers of trying to fight off a knife attack. A red magic-marker played the part of a knife, and an “assailant” would attempt to attack another member of the SWAT Team with it. We did this in white t-shirts and open sleeves so we could see the wounds. Within seconds, the assailant had usually dispatched the victim with stabs and slashing attacks to the neck and torso, as the victim fought back desperately. Without exception though, the attacker was “cut”. Always. And almost every time on the hands or fingers. This is because the victim, in attempting to fight off a knife, reaches for the hands, which deflects the knife into fingers or other parts of the hands. In addition to the “cuts”, there were bruises and lacerations simply from elbows and arms flying. Also, folding knives have no ‘hilt’, a perpendicular piece between the knife handle and blade to keep your hand from sliding forward when using the knife for stabbing. When this happens, the attacker usually receives slash injuries to his finger just below (or in the vicinity of) the second knuckle. Amanda could not have known that. She had no such cuts. Rudy Guede, when arrested had such cuts across three of his fingers. One piece of evidence used against O.J. Simpson in his stabbing/slashing murder trial was that he had a severe cut on his finger, likely inflicted during a stabbing motion when his hand slid over the blade. In the FBI, I have been involved in several physical altercations, including a couple of attempts to take a knife away from a person. Each of those events ended in all parties having bruises and/or cuts. And these people weren’t fighting for their life; they were just fighting to keep from being arrested. Meredith had 46 wounds consistent with a fight for her life. Rudy had just such cuts on his hand. If Meredith had been attacked by three people, is it plausible that in all of Meredith’s fighting that she was unable to inflict a single scratch or a bruise on either of her other two attackers? Not really.

All anecdotes like Lincoln or Kennedy or Archduke Ferdinand aside, statistical analysis seems to bear out that, as one might expect, assassinations do change things. See “Hit or Miss? The Effect of Assassinations on Institutions and War”, Jones & Olken 2009_15ya.↩︎

This may or may not be a useful strategy. Lehman Brothers was reportedly savaged by its fellows, who smelled its financial weaknesses; but Cantor Fitzgerald was reportedly attacked after 9/11, yet has survived:

Such was Mr. Lutnick’s reputation that in the days and weeks after Sept. 11, some of his rivals actually gloated over Cantor’s devastation. They jumped at the opportunity to put an end to his firm, which pocketed many millions in commissions while enabling the great investment houses to trade bonds in relative anonymity.

See for example Robb’s 2007_17ya The Discovery of France, and more generally James C. Scott’s fascinating Seeing Like A State.↩︎

eg. in Dan Simmons’s Hyperion Cantos or Larry Niven’s Known Space↩︎