Dionysus,
The point I was making about not recognizing middle eastern from other people is that any attempt to profile middle easterners will ultimately become "I'm suspicious of anyone with year-round tan and bushy eyebrows", so the profile doesn't even fit the target group. I don't know if they were middle easterners or not, but that wasn't relevant to the point I was making about AZredhawk's racial profiling. It was a low-risk situation for terrorism, and the racial profile doesn't even narrow down the suspicion to people from countries that have produced terrorists. It just makes brown people of any nationality with bushy eyebrows more likely to have the Feds called on them because they went to walmart-that's not a good thing, imho.
None were ever actually coordinated. Remember the "DC Sniper?" Look what two nuts and a Bushy did to an entire Metropolitan area.
Of course I remember it-I was there. Despite what you might have read on the news, DC did not come to a screeching halt, the metro kept running, the stores stayed open, and people were able to buy groceries and get home after work to watch the 24/7 news coverage of the case.
What the sniper attacks
did do was get people ready to support whatever search/seizure/gun-ban law that was thrown at them. If DC weren't already under a total gun ban, the sniper case hysteria probably would've earned one. But it wasn't going to get in the way of doing business.
And how likely was the possibility of two fully-loaded jetliners taking out the WTC?
That unpredictable part of that was the combination of two targets into one big plot-but the two targets themselves (airliners and the WTC) were not only predictable, they'd both been attacked in the past already. Predicting that terrorists would hijack planes, and that they'd attack the WTC, was not difficult at all. It already happened before September 11th.
