steven aftergood nails it (again)

posting the whole thing (sorry Steve), but it's too right not to

"To attack [America's electrical] grid, a terrorist need only study publicly available trade journals, which explain where new facilities are constructed," according to an op-ed in the New York Times on August 13. "A terrorist could then disable a particular system by destroying the computers and relays housed in the poorly protected building."

The New York Times op-ed editor has an affinity for such claims about the simplicity of perpetrating a disastrous act of terrorism. On May 30, the Times published an op-ed article asserting that "a terrorist," using a 27 page manual found online, could manufacture gram quantities of botulinum toxin and cause tens or hundreds of thousands of casualties. No lab scientist familiar with the procedures involved would endorse that scenario, presented by a Stanford business professor. The notion of a hyper-competent terrorist who can easily overcome the physical and technical obstacles that perplex and detain ordinary mortals has become a common rhetorical trope in public discussions of terrorism. George Smith of GlobalSecurity.org conducted a Nexis search for the phrase "easy for a terrorist" (and similar formulations) and found about one hundred mainstream media citations over the past two years. Judging from press reports, nearly everything comes "easy" to terrorists:

"From food terror, to manipulating the flu virus, to blowing up chemical plants, to getting driver's licenses, to coming across the Mexican border, to buying large caliber guns, to shooting down planes with ground-to-air missiles, to spreading hoof-and-mouth disease and destroying the cattle industry, to paralyzing Los Angeles by attacking power stations, to causing major blackouts, to putting anthrax in bagged rice," Smith found. "There really is no end to it. It's stupefying in its universality."

Such glib assessments of terrorist capabilities are worse than simply wrong. They spread fear and a sense of helplessness, doing the work of the terrorists, and they threaten to dissipate limited security and financial resources in a hundred different directions.