More About Airport & Airline Attacks

In my last post, I noted that terrorist attacks against airports and airlines were rare in the U.S. Rare is an imprecise term, and on e of the problems I have with modern journalism is the overuse of general and imprecise terms surrounding important issues.

To be more precises: of the 554 terrorist incidents occurring in the U.S. since January 1, 1968, only 50 have been against airports and airlines, according to the data in the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism (MIPT) Knowledge Base. The 50 incidents include nine hijacking but not the attacks on 9/11. The events of September 11, 2001, which are listed as three separate attacks, are classified as an unconventional in the Knowledge Base because aircraft were used as weapons and the targets were business and government facilities. There have been eight terrorist incidents, including 9/11, in which unconventional tactics or weapons were used. They include the ricin attacks against news and government personnel in 2003 and 2004, the staking of trees by the Earth Liberation Front in 2001 and the lacing of two seedless grapes with cyanide in 1989.

The Knowledge Base does not track whether any of the individuals involved in the 50 actions against airports or airlines were or pretended to be airport or airline employees to gain access to their targets. It does indicate that airline and airport employees have been injured and killed in some of the incidents which resulted in injuries or fatalities. Injuries and/or fatalities were reported in only about 10 percent of the incidents.

It should also be noted that the only terrorist incidents recorded in the Phoenix metropolitan area was the arson and firebombing of a luxury home near Scottsdale's McDowell Sonoran Preserve in 2001 by ecoterrorist Mark Warren Sands. Similar arsons occurred in the foothills of the Santa Catalina Mountains north of Tucson that same year.

The Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism is a non-profit organization formed after the 1995 bombing of the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City. It is dedicated to preventing terrorism on U.S. soil or mitigating its effects. The MIPT Knowledge Base is a resource for the research and analysis of terrorist incidents, court cases, groups and leaders around the globe that includes data from the RAND Corporation, the Terrorist Indictment database and Detica's research on terrorist organizations.

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Informed Ideas