So, future Mohammed Attas will simply make sure their Visa is current when they board planes.
You asked how 9-11 could have been prevented with ID cards and I explained how. I noticed that you did not find a flaw in my explanation.
Now, you want to know how they will prevent future events. Unfortunately, we're always planning for the last attack, not the next attack. We got zapped on 9-11 because we never thought that hijackers would want to die and we trained pilots based on that assumption. We would have to set up criteria to be used in conjunction with the IDs and those criteria would have to anticipate how Atta might try to get around them. Whatever criteria we used, no matter how well we anticipated, they wouldn't guarantee anything, simply reduce the risk to, perhaps, an acceptable level.
The problem is getting consensus on what is an acceptable risk. The public is notorious for its inability to react rationally to risk. We get hysterical about smallpox and expect heroic and expensive efforts from the government to protect us from it. Meanwhile we wrap our car around a tree. Before and after 9-11, we are safer in a plane than in a car, but we don't deal rationally with the difference. A national ID can buy us some risk reduction, not absolute safety. We have to assess the trade offs, which is why we look at pros and cons.
I am not personally troubled by the notion of having a national ID. Uncle Sam has had me on its radar screen from the time I married an Air Force officer in 1964 until April of this year when I retired from federal service. They have my fingerprints. I'm used to it and it doesn't bother me. I understand that others are not as comfortable with the idea as I am but I am at a loss to understand how having a national ID would be a significant "burden." It's certainly less of a burden than standing in line for a couple of hours each time you get on a plane or cross a border.
There is one potential risk in national IDs, the risk that the slippery slope and advancing technology will eventually lead us to Uncle Sam snooping on law abiding citizens. We have to interpret that risk in terms of the terrorist risk, both of which are hard to measure. And even if we could measure them, the public would react emotionally without reference to actual risk.
Karen |
