[SpicyLemonZest]

How old are you? I think a lot of younger folks don't fully adjust for important factors: plane hijackings used to be much more common, 9/11 was committed by the second group of Islamic terrorists who tried to blow up the World Trade Center, and 9/11 was the third major terrorist attack by Al-Qaeda in a 4 year span. It's easy now to say that it was a crazy worst-case scenario, but that was not at all obvious then; for all we knew, securing cockpits might have been impractical, and we'd just have to prepare the Air Force to shoot down a couple hijacked flights every decade.

There were real excesses, and I ultimately agree with you that many of them were predictable in advance, but there was no feasible version of a response that did not go at least a little into crazyland. It was a crazy time.

[thwarted]

> younger folks don't fully adjust for important factors: plane hijackings used to be much more common

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_hijackings

(I can not say how comprehensive that wikipedia list is).

There's more in the 70s and 80s than I was expecting (having lived through the 80s), but given how many flights there are, hijackings have been and are exceedingly rare; and most of these are not even US flights. These are "driving is orders of magnitude more dangerous than flying" and "10x a very small number is still a very small number" numbers.

https://businesstats.com/global-air-traffic-number-of-flight...

https://easbcn.com/en/how-many-planes-fly-per-day-around-the...

https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/world-air-pas...

These numbers only serve to re-enforce that the response of giving up liberty for (the feeling of) security due to terrorist action in the US was probably outsized. General population awareness in general was probably more of a deterrent after 9/11 than any of the first order 9/11 response actions, especially considering that the US gave countries in the middle east further reason to hate Americans and US foreign policy after 9/11. Obviously, terrorist attacks get a lot of air time and column inches, which feeds the perception of the risk.

[antonvs]

Having lived through the 70s, part of the issue was the amount of media coverage hijackings received.

The Entebbe raid was the canonical example, playing out as it did over a full week: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entebbe_raid

And there had been another hijacking just the week before that one.

You can quote statistics at people all you want, but when something like a plane hijacking is happening nearly two out of every three months on average (throughout the entire 1970s), and sometimes on a weekly basis, and making a big splash in the media every time, people are going to want something to change.

[Morromist]

It was a crazy time, not in the danger from hijackings but the enormous amount of fear and cowardice America built up within itself. It was crazy because of the mass hysteria not the violence. Take this example: 1.2 million Americans died from Covid. 3000 americans died in the twin towers attack. That's 0.25% of the number that died from covid. However we gave up considerably more liberty to defend against the hijackers than we did the virus. It was a very unusual incident but the response wasn't warranted. I mean like 1/3 of the people who died in the twin towers, about 1000 people a year, die from being hit by trains, but you don't see anyone demanding we give up constitutional rights, or do literally anything at all to change that.

[marcus_holmes]

Or guns. I find it crazy that the US gave up a ton of freedoms to stop the terrorists, but refuse to give up their guns. The guns clearly and obviously kill more people every year than the terrorists.

Make it make sense.

[what]

1.2M Americans died with Covid, maybe.

[asdff]

Christ, I thought we were through with this tin foil hattery...

Even Trump's CDC admits it was 1.2 million deaths FROM covid.

[csb6]

"Real excesses" is a bit of an understatement. There is the security theater instituted by the TSA, the militarization of police, normalized Islamophobia, mass surveillance of U.S. citizens, torture as an official military policy, indefinite detention of "unlawful combatants", a trillion dollars spent destroying Iraq and Afghanistan, a million killed and many more made refugees. The rise of ISIS and the refugee crises in Europe can be traced back to the War on Terror. The Middle East should not be the punching bag for America to take out its "crazy" feelings (where "craziness" appears to be a polite way of saying "bloodlust").

[bruce511]

With any luck the latest debacle is so clearly a fail, that future presidents may be reluctant to get involved again (at least for a while).

In the aftermath of Vietnam, the US was reluctant to get involved militarily (at least overtly.) That seemed to last until Kuwait. The success there seemed to embolden US hawks, and there were a couple long-term excursions after that.

The current dude apparently fell for the ever-present hawks, without the savy to ask the right questions. His total capitulation, after demonstrating the ineffectiveness of the military, while at the same time proving the effectiveness of asymmetric warfare, will (perhaps, hopefully) be an educational moment for future presidents.

Certainly it is a valuable educational moment to other defendents. You don't need to fight back. You just need to affect something else the world cares about. And, it turns out, global shipping is especially vulnerable.

[SpicyLemonZest]

I would point to the TSA as a key example of what I'm talking about. You say "security theater", but which of the things they do are security theater, and which are the ones that drove plane hijackings to near-zero? We can make reasonable guesses, but does another major skyscraper get blown up if we guess wrong? It's not so easy, and it was hard to the point of impossibility in the aftermath of 9/11.

> The Middle East should not be the punching bag for America to take out its "crazy" feelings (where "craziness" appears to be a polite way of saying "bloodlust").

Yes, this I agree with. The Iraq War in particular was clearly not justified.

[crote]

> which are the ones that drove plane hijackings to near-zero

9/11 itself was. The general view before 9/11 was that a hijacking is an inconvenience: you get an unexpected detour via Cuba and have a nice story to tell at the next holiday party, but that's about it.

The second it became clear that the plane itself was the weapon and that there was a very real possibility you wouldn't walk away from it, hijacking became virtually impossible as every. single. passenger. would now be very much motivated to fight in order to prevent a certain death. United 93 already made this clear: they found out about what happened to the other planes, so they tried taking back the airplane. They didn't get it back, but the terrorist attack itself definitely failed.

Even without any kind of TSA future hijackings would almost certainly be closer to United 93, as American Airlines Flight 63 showed in practice.

[tfourb]

My guess world be that the TSA had exactly nothing to do with any decline in hijackings. That is most likely due to new security protocols around cockpit access, as hijackings haven’t stopped but are committed mostly by pilots now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525

[laserlight]

> which are the ones that drove plane hijackings to near-zero?

How many plane hijackings have occurred in other countries, which don't have the TSA?

[SpicyLemonZest]

Every country in the world responded to 9/11 with enhanced airport security. After the end of "shoes off" last year, I don't think the US is stricter in any meaningful way than the global norm.

[crote]

Not all of them have the same kind of enhanced security, actually. For example, if you transfer from a flight from Africa to Europe to one from Europe to the USA you sometimes have to go through security again, as the African security didn't meet American standards.