New Straits Times
Sunday, Sep 11, 2011
Air travel
WHERE one could once check in their luggage and breeze past the security gates with little problem, all passengers and their baggage are now vigorously screened. Some of the new security measures include:
- Having a valid boarding pass or identification document before going through the security gates;
- Allowing only one hand luggage and one handbag or briefcase per passenger;
- Only travel-sized toiletries (100ml or less) are allowed in the hand luggage. The containers have to be placed in a plastic zip-lock bag for screening by the airport authorities;
- All metal objects (including watches, coins, spectacles and belt buckles), coats and shoes have to be removed before going through the metal detector;
- All handphones and laptops should be placed in a container for scanning;
- No sharp instruments or flammable objects like letter openers, knives, box cutters, scissors and lighters are allowed in the hand luggage;
- Besides passengers travelling with infants who need baby formula and passengers requiring prescription medicine, all other passengers are barred from carrying any liquid on board;
- Do not wrap gifts;
- Some airlines and airports have a watch-list of passengers who are suspected of having terrorist links while the United States has a "No Fly List" of people who are not allowed to board a commercial flight in or out of the country;
- Airlines have installed reinforced cockpit doors which are to be locked throughout the flight and video cameras for the pilots to view what is happening in the cabin; and,
- Some airlines have employed armed air marshals.
Islamophobia
While prejudice, fear and even hatred against Islam has been around since the time of the Islamic Revolution in Iran in the 1980s, renewed interest in the religion, especially in America and Europe, was sparked by the Sept 11 attacks launched by Islamic jihadist group al-Qaeda, led by its then leader, Osama bin Laden.
While the attacks prompted more people to learn about Islam, it also led to a growing number of anti-Islam activists who viewed every Middle Eastern or South Asian with a beard and turban with suspicion.
Even Sikh men were not spared this profiling because of the turbans their religion requires them to wear.
Closer to home, some Malaysian Indians also encountered problems with the US Immigration authorities because their passports bore the A/L (anak lelaki) abbreviation, which the uninformed Immigration officials concluded were Arabic names.
The backlash included attacks against these groups of people, vandalism and, more recently, outrage over plans to build an Islamic prayer and community centre near Ground Zero. A Christian pastor also threatened to burn the Quran.
In July, Norwegian Anders Behring Breivik, who feared that Muslims were taking over Europe, killed 86 youths at a youth retreat on the island of Utoeya.
The Patriot Act 2001
The Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA Patriot) Act of 2001 was formulated to deter and punish terrorist acts in the US and around the world. This is to enhance law enforcement investigatory tools and other purposes, including:
- to strengthen US measures to prevent, detect and prosecute international money laundering and financing of terrorism;
- to subject to scrutiny foreign jurisdictions, foreign financial institutions and classes of international transactions or types of accounts that are susceptible to criminal abuse;
- to require all elements of the financial services industry to report potential money laundering; and,
- to strengthen measures to prevent use of the US financial system for personal gain by corrupt foreign officials and facilitate repatriation of stolen assets to the citizens of countries to whom such assets belong.
Building and safety measures
Throughout last week, as the world inched towards the 10th anniversary of 9/11 today, there have been reports of "credible but unconfirmed" intelligence that the US has received on a terror threat. The fear is not unfounded and the threat remains very real.
So, what if it happens again? And if it does, can people in any of the tens of thousands of high-rises in US withstand an attack like that?
There have been many proposals by building experts over the decade past to reinforce these existing buildings through structural changes but because of hefty costs, most have remained just proposals. Instead, the tallest buildings in the US and beyond have chosen to just put in place tougher security measures and sophisticated surveillance cameras.
Some building and safety measures taken in the US over the past decade include:
- Some 40 post-9/11 building code changes were recommended by the International Code Commission, including wider stairways, to ensure firefighters can climb up while occupants are coming down;
- Chicago requires high-rises to have an emergency evacuation plan on file. The city and the tallest buildings must provide the fire department with their floor plans so crew know the exact layout of the buildings;
- New building construction in New York City must have stairwell enclosures that are wider and made of harder materials. Buildings must also be built to prevent "progressive collapse" like how one floor fell onto another as the Twin Towers collapsed in on itself; and,
- Materials and measures once reserved for military and government buildings are being incorporated into private buildings.
Military spending
In the US alone, the annual base defence budget increased from US$295 billion (RM886 billion) in 2000 to US$549 billion last year, an increase of 86 per cent, not including funds attributed to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and other expenses related to the "War on Terror".
Since President Barack Obama took office in 2009, he had tried to scale down the defence budget, but only managed to trim spending around the edges and has kept many of the security measures put in place by his predecessor, George W. Bush.
In 2009, while deficits ballooned in many countries, the world spent 50 per cent more on arms and military operations than it did in 2000.
Last year, only three of the top 10 military spenders of 2009 trimmed the military budget; the US went down US$37 billion, the UK decreased by US$1.4 billion and India went down by US$3 billion. China, France, Russia, Japan, Saudi Arabia and Italy increased their military budgets, with the exception of Germany, which has remained constant.
The fear of cyber-terrorism
Post-9/11, along with the advent of the digital age, the fear of cyber-terrorism was born.
It's a time when there is growing military and economic dependence on information technology and the digital infrastructure. So, one of the most immediate fears born from that day is that there might be a "digital 9/11" which might have even more devastating and far-reaching consequences than the physical one.
Former White House "Terrorism Czar" Richard Clarke, who was special adviser to the president on cyber-security, said the potential for massively disruptive cyber-attacks was real. He spent his last year in the Bush administration focusing on cyber-security and the threat of terrorism against the critical infrastructure of the US.
But, interestingly, top IT experts are saying now that one of the things that we got very wrong post 9/11 was the "conflation of threats to computer security with terrorism".
"Ten years on, and there's no reason to believe that terrorists have successfully mounted any kind of attack using the Internet that would be any more difficult to deflect than that produced by a student in his back bedroom," prominent security blogger and senior technology consultant of Sophos, Graham Cluley, had reportedly said.
When it comes to cyber-attacks, there are experts who believe that nation-states are the threats to be feared most in the coming years, with some assessing that China has emerged as a far greater threat to US cyber-security than terrorist groups like al-Qaeda.
The birth of new terms, phrases 9/11: The incident on Sept 11, 2001 where four coordinated attacks were carried out against targets in New York and Washington D.C. Close to 3,000 people were killed when 19 al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four passenger jets and crashed into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, and into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after it was prevented from reaching its intended target in Washington D.C.
The popular name for the attacks first appeared on Sept 12, 2001 in a New York Times op-ed piece titled "Amer ica's Emergency Line: 9/11".
Ground Zero: the site where the destroyed World Trade Center stood in New York.
War onTerror or Global War on Terror: The phrase was first used by United States president George W. Bush and other high-ranking US officials to denote a global military, political, legal and ideological struggle against organisations designated as terrorist and regimes that were accused of having a connection to them or providing them with support or were perceived as posing a threat to the US and its allies.
It was typically used with a focus on militant Islamists and al-Qaeda.
Osama: Reference to Osama bin Laden, the founder of al-Qaeda, the organisation responsible for the Sept 11 attacks. He was a major target of the War on Terror, with a US$25 million (RM75 million) bounty by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and was killed on May 2 this year in Abbottabad, Pakistan, by US Navy SEALs and Central Intelligence Agency operatives. His was buried at sea.
Ninety-one newborns in the US were named Osama between 2001 and 2009. In Malaysia, chocolate cookies named Osama made an appearance during festive seasons.
Al-Qaeda: Meaning "the base", it is a global Sunni Islamist militant group founded by Osama bin Laden in the late 1980s. It operates as a network calling for global Jihad and has been responsible for the Sept 11 attacks, 1998 US embassy bombings and 2002 Bali blasts.
It has been designated a terrorist organisation by many countries, especially the US, the United Nations Security Council, the European Union and North Atlantic Treaty Organisation .
Weapons of Mass Destruction(W MD): Weapons that can kill and bring significant harm to people, buildings and the environment.
Coined in reference to aerial bombing with chemical explosives, t he y have come to distinguish large-scale weaponry of other technologies, such as chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear.
After the Sept 11, 2001 attacks and the 2001 anthrax attacks, an increased fear of non-conventional weapons and asymmetrical warfare took hold of the US and other Western powers and prompted the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, over the alleged existence of WMD in the country. However, no WMD were found in Iraq.
Axis of evil: A term first used in 2002 by then US president George W. Bush to describe Iraq, Iran and North Korea, governments he accused of helping terrorism.
Shock and awe: The military doctrine of "rapid dominance", written in 1996 and used in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Even the movie world has taken a swipe on Bush's use of this term during the Iraq invasion, as seen on Avatar.
Guantanamo Bay: The detention camp established in 2002 at a US naval base in Cuba, by the Bush administration to hold detainees from the war in Afghanistan and later Iraq.
Let's roll: A term that means to move and start an activity, attack, mission or project. The words were reported to have been uttered by Flight 93 passenger Todd Beamer shortly before he and fellow passengers tried to take over their plane from the hijackers.
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