Security Scare – May 11, 2005

Stan Goff

Ate something that didn’t agree with me, so I laid down and switched on the tube. What ho! People running like bomb victims from Congress and the White House, as CNN’s breathless news models belabored the emerging obvious.

A Cessna 150 had penetrated the three-mile inner circle of Washington DC’s protected airspace… the most restricted airspace in the country. The wayward pilot turn out to be a man with a minor on board, en route from Souther Pennsylvania to an air show in Lumberton, NC. Fighter planes and helicopters surrounded this hapless plane almost directly over the capital and escorted to the two terrified travellers to a nearby airfield, where they are now being freaked out by interrogations from the alphabet soup of law enforcement types who have some manner of jurisdiction.

The government’s line is that the security system worked “flawlessly.” In the army, we called this pissing on you leg and telling you it’s raining. Puleeese!

This plane did not hug the earth as any interloper who’d stolen or rented a general aviation aricraft might have — evading radar to approach a target. No, it flew into this restricted airspace and got within 90 seconds of the capital at a designated altitude, nakedly exposed to radar the whole way.

Here is an excerpt from a study I did two years ago:

“What the Department of Homeland Security apparently has not figured out is that it is likewise not necessary for attackers to hijack airplanes outside the country to activate the huge “dirty bombs.” The U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) released a report in September 2003 that showed 70 general aviation aircraft had been stolen inside the United States within the last five years. That is an average of 14 aircraft a year. These are small planes at short-takeoff-and-landing (STOL) airfields.

“Cursory research shows that the most common light aircraft in the United States is the Cessna Skyhawk.

“A Tomahawk Cruise Missile is a precision weapon that can hug the earth, evade radar, travel to a range of 600 miles, and deliver up to 1,000 pounds of high explosive onto a target. A Cessna Skyhawk has a range of 687 miles, can carry a payload up to 675 pounds, and likewise can hug the contours of the earth to evade radar and deliver its payload with pinpoint accuracy.

“These general aviation aircraft then, with the simple addition of a committed pilot prepared to die and 500 pounds of high explosive, could be employed as a “poor person’s Cruise missile.”"

That is exactly why I said in an earlier post:

“There are 3,000 chemical facilities in the US that are within a danger radius of at least 10, 000 people, 700 plants that would endanger 100,000 or more people, and 123 that could hit more than a million residents. There is transportation sabotage, water suppply sabotage (imagine 20 gallons of LSD), coal fired power plants, internet disruption,… in many ways, when you think about it, the targets selected for 9/11 were not mad mass destruction targets but targets selected carefully for their strategic and symbolic import – a major global financial center (where Unocal and the CIA had offices), the Pentagon, and (according to some) the Capital. Financial, military, and political decapitation.

“I hate to break it to those who fantasize that OBL, or whomever, was out to create the worst imaginable havoc out of pure antisocial evil, but if that were the case, the target in New York would not have been the WTC; it would have been the Indan Point nuclear reactor.

“Based on the immense wealth the United States as accumulated through its dominaton and exploitation of the rest of the world – including, by the way, it’s imperial allies – we are now captured in a giant net of potentially lethal and highly vulnerable technomass. Anyone that wants the US bad enough, can get it… only all of us are stuck here in “it.”

So the logical conclusion would be, at least in my tiny brain, the US should remove any motive for waging such an attack by backing away from policies directed at large populations that are exploitative. provocative, and plain destructive. I know that’s not very macho, ‘backing down’ and all that. But the correspondence between machismo and stupidity in my experience has been at or near 100%.”

Having the most powerful military in the world and the most technologically complex society in the world is not making us safer. Quite the contrary.

And the so-called security measures that put interceptors up just in time to shoot down a disoriented private plane almost directly over the White House is deterrent eye-wash. Everyone who watches this with the least idea what they are seeing now knows that everything in the US is penetrable.

Our security lies in standing down imperial power.