Terror Threats to Our Schools

The other day I ran across an article in the North County News concerning the decision of the Yorktown school district to hire Michael Dorn to improve school safety and protect it from a terrorist attack.

While it is important to make continuous efforts to improve school safety, I would be quite suspicious of the credibility of any “expert” who makes a serious case for the prevention of a terrorist attack against our schools.

In fact, I’d probably fire him.

In the article, Mr. Dorn makes his case for the prevention of terrorism against U.S. schools with a few arguments.

First, he references examples of terrorist attacks on schools in other countries. One example he gives is Chechnya. It is true that in 2004 Chechyan separatists took 1200 adults and children hostage in an autonomous republican in the North Caucases region of the Russian federation.

The historical record relating to the motivation of the terrorists is a point of debate, but many believe that the terrorists were driven by a combination of the desire to get Russia allow Chechnya to secede from the Russian Federation and to establish an Islamic Emirate across the North Caucuses. To the best of my knowledge, no similar conditions exist in northern Westchester County (or anywhere in the United States). There is no ongoing civil war in the United States and there is no threat of succession.

Second, he references evidence that demonstrates that terrorists in Afghanistan were training to take over a school. Was this evidence ever corroborated? Was the school in question in the United States? In Westchester county? Do the terrorists who engaged in this training have any significant resources or outside support?

Similar evidence was found of terrorists training for home-break ins and golf course attacks. Would you really invest money in terror proofing your home or local golf course? Would you not consider abandoning your membership if your country club raised its membership fees in order to provide security against a terrorist attack?

Dorn also relies on “warnings from Homeland Security” that the nation’s schools are “potential terrorist targets.” These warnings are based on the all-so examples of the attack in Chechnya and the training in Afghanistan presented by Mr. Dorn. As noted by USA Today, “Officials said it was unclear who downloaded the information and stressed there is no evidence of any specific threats involving the schools…. The Education Department's advice is based on lessons learned from the Russia siege. But there is no specific information indicating a terrorist threat to any schools or universities in the United States, Hickok said.”

And, of course, anything/anyone is a potential target. You are potential target of a gang member, but are you seriously concerned that you will actually be targeted by one?

Certainly, any claims made by the Department of Homeland security should at least be treated with some degree of skepticism and not automatically accepted as true. The New York Times noted in 2002:

It's bad enough that the terrorists are using fear as a device. Does the Bush administration have to do the same thing? The Islamic enemy strums on our nerves to hurt our economy and get power. The American president strums on our nerves to help his popularity and retain power. Both the bad guys and the good guys are playing with our heads and ratcheting up the fear factor. ...the question is being asked here: Is the Bush crowd hyping things? First the government leaked word that it had identified a Qaeda mastermind of the 9/11 plot, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a development hailed as an investigative coup. But the creep is still at large. Then the president unveiled his Homeland Security Department plan. But yesterday even top Republicans were dubious about whether it could work without the F.B.I. and C.I.A. under its umbrella. And on Monday Mr. Ashcroft, Bobby Three Sticks and Paul ''Bomb Iraq'' Wolfowitz breathlessly told the nation that they had thwarted a scary radiological bombing plot. In its eagerness to convince itself and us that it has prevented something, the Bush administration has built up the dirty bomber into an Atta-like terrorist capable of leveling downtown Washington. But privately it acknowledges that he may be far less than that. The plotter was a Chicago street punk named Jose Padilla, a hothead with a long criminal record who was thrown in jail in Florida for shooting at a motorist in a road-rage incident. Even law enforcement officials and counterterrorism experts were skeptical about whether he had the brains, know-how and materials to build a dirty bomb from scratch, or whether he was even an officially sanctioned Qaeda terrorist. '

Second, Mr. Dorn relies on simple risk assessment – “[people] really have to think about the unthinkable.” He is correct that to be seriously concerned about this you have to be concerned about something that has almost no chance of occurring. I am very curious as to what the statistical probability of a terror attack on U.S. schools is. I am even more curious as to the odds of a terror attack on Yorktown high school are. Mr. Dorn often repeats his claim that these attacks are possible, but he never even asserts that they are probable.

I’d say the probability is close to zero. John Mueller, a professor of National Security Studies at Ohio State, made the following observations in the September/October 2006 issue of the prestigious journal Foreign Affairs:

Americans have been regularly regaled with dire predictions of another major al Qaeda attack in the United States….. But if it is so easy to pull off an attack and if terrorists are so demonically competent, why have they not done it? massive traffic jams, or exploiting the countless other vulnerabilities that, according to security experts, could so easily be exploited? One reasonable explanation is that almost no terrorists exist in the United States and few have the means or the inclination to strike from abroad… Americans are told -- often by the same people who had once predicted imminent attacks -- that the absence of international terrorist strikes in the United States is owed to the protective measures so hastily and expensively put in place after 9/11.. Accordingly, the government's protective measures would have to be nearly perfect to thwart all such plans. Given the monumental imperfection of the government's response to Hurricane Katrina, and the debacle of FBI and National Security Agency programs to upgrade their computers to better coordinate intelligence information, that explanation seems far-fetched. Moreover, Israel still experiences terrorism even with a far more extensive security apparatus…If al Qaeda operatives are as determined and inventive as assumed, they should be here by now. If they are not yet here, they must not be trying very hard or must be far less dedicated, diabolical, and competent than the common image would suggest.. ." Intelligence estimates in 2002 held that there were as many as 5,000 al Qaeda terrorists and supporters in the United States. However, a secret FBI report in 2005 wistfully noted that although the bureau had managed to arrest a few bad guys here and there after more than three years of intense and well-funded hunting, it had been unable to identify a single true al Qaeda sleeper cell anywhere in the country. …But while keeping such potential dangers in mind, it is worth remembering that the total number of people killed since 9/11 by al Qaeda or al Qaedalike operatives outside of Afghanistan and Iraq is not much higher than the number who drown in bathtubs in the United States in a single year, and that the lifetime chance of an American being killed by international terrorism is about one in 80,000 -- about the same chance of being killed by a comet or a meteor. Even if there were a 9/11-scale attack every three months for the next five years, the likelihood that an individual American would number among the dead would be two hundredths of a percent (or one in 5,000).

2 1/100s of one percent risk of an American dying in a terror attack. And I’m sure those odds greatly exceed the risk of Yorktown High school being attacked by terrorists.

Third, Mr. Dorn uses fear to scare the living beJesus out of people. He himself claims that his group is “not just here to scare people,” and that he will tell people things that they “don’t want to hear” and that he “guarantees they will not forget.”

Of course, Mr. Dorn is not the only person to use fear to secure your financial support for his services. As noted by Wikpedia: “An appeal to fear (also called argumentum ad metam or argumentum in terrorem) is a logical fallacy in which a person attempts to create support for his or her idea by increasing fear and prejudice toward a competitor. The appeal to fear is extremely common in marketing and politics.”

Wipedia explains how the fallacy works:

Either P or Q

Q is fearsome

Therefore, P is true.

Q is the fear of terror attacks. P is Mr. Dorn’s solution.

The ironic thing is that Mr. Dorn’s use of fear actually undermines his solutions. I doubt ID checks would have stopped the Chechnyan rebels. Seminars and improved security measures can make only schools “undesirable targets” so that “terrorists will go elsewhere” if we are dealing bunch of pathetic terrorists who are about as dangerous as characters in a Monty Python movie.

And is "elsewhere" the golf course? If it is, we have accomplished little.

Furthermore, if there is actually a terrorist threat to our schools, highlighting the weakness will only increase the risks of a truly unstable individual actually targeting our schools:

In particular, that little bit in the promo about our schools being among the most vulnerable sites is truly reprehensible. Planting the seed that these are good sites to attack could easily result in an unstable individual (as these people generally are by definition) creating a true tragedy

Of course, in a world of unlimited resources it might not be a terrible idea to take measures to reduce the risks of terrorist attacks on our schools (assuming it could be accomplished in a way that did not highlight any vulnerabilities). It is certainly possible for terrorists to attack schools, golf courses, and even grocery stores. Any place or person is a potential target.

But resources are not unlimited. Our schools struggle to pay rising medical and energy costs, to fund co-curricular activities, to provide updated textbooks and contemporary media resources for all students, to grow library collections, to fund field trips, and even to deal with plausible threats to school safety.

Investing in any of these is a better use of resources than hiring an expert to play on our post 9-11 fears and scare us into trying to prevent an “unthinkable” terrorist attack on our schools. We should invest resources in individuals and technologies that can provide assistance to deal with actual problems that we face today and are likely to face in the foreseeable future.

I can only hope that other districts do not fall victim to Mr. Dorn’s fear tactics and treat him with the same skepticism a space scientist discussing the risks of a meteor hitting Yorktown High School would face.