Diego Gambetta is one of my favorite social scientists. His writings on the Mafia and on trust are classics. I offer you a recent article by him on rationality and terrorism. Most importantly, he addresses the question of will this happen again. Here is one money quote:
“9/11 is a wild outlier among terrorist acts generally and also with respect to other actions attributed to al Qaeda. Moreover, the perpetrators themselves seem to be far out on the spectrum of dangerous individuals. While there is no dearth of suicide-mission volunteers, very few people share Mohamed Atta’s traits: highly skilled, methodically inclined, and ready to die. He acted and succeeded both as an organizer and as a perpetrator, unlike most other suicide missions in which different people hold these two roles. The lucidity and composure required by an organizer stand in contrast with the trance-like state needed to go on a suicide mission. Atta, the real-life approximation of a James Bond villain, was able to square that circle. Moreover, the attackers did not use WMDs and were extremely lucky not to be detected in time.
Furthermore, almost all the scary cases “uncovered” since 9/11-and widely discussed by politicians and the press-have turned out to be false alarms. In his February 2003 United Nations speech, Colin Powell mentioned 16 North African men arrested in Spain as an example of the links between Osama bin Laden and Baghdad. Now released, they have sued Jose María Aznar, the former Spanish Prime Minister, for slander. Even the case of Jose Padilla-the U.S. citizen arrested in May 2002 and held as an enemy combatant for allegedly planning to steal radioactive material to make a “dirty bomb”-has not yet produced criminal charges. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit ruled that he must now be freed from military custody.
Third, the several failed and foiled attacks reveal that the terrorists use low-level technology, and exploit unbalanced individuals, nothing like Atta. Remember Richard Reid, the British man who tried to blow up a plane by exploding his shoes. Or the four Moroccan men arrested in Rome with a map of the aqueduct and four kilos of “potassium ferrocyanide,” described by experts as a pretty harmless substance when distributed through water. Or the five Algerian men arrested in London in early 2003 allegedly trying to produce ricin, a highly poisonous substance extracted from castor oil for which there is no antidote (it recently appeared in Senator Bill Frist’s office). Tony Blair said the find showed that “this danger is present and real and with us now-and its potential is huge.” But the quantities of ricin found were tiny-so tiny, in fact, that they can no longer be found. Producing ricin with what turned out to be little more than a “chemistry set” is not easy, and last October the prosecution charges had to be scaled down to the attempted rather than the actual production of a chemical weapon. The only attacks with unconventional weapons anywhere in the world so far remain the mysterious anthrax case in the United States and the March 1995 spread of sarin gas in the Tokyo subway by the Aum Shinrikyo cult whose leader has just been sentenced to death.”
Obviously it is good news if this interpretation is correct. It is also important to keep this in mind when asking why the Bush and Clinton administrations did not take terrorist threats more seriously. Gambetta also tries to explain why the U.S. and Europe are so far apart over the Iraq war. Read the whole thing, as they say.
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