by Roger Bourke White Jr., copyright October 2015
This case study is to show how seeing a pattern, a bad pattern in this case, can help us avoid expensive mistakes when deciding what to do when a scary crisis strikes.
The scary crisis I will be analyzing is the 9-11 Disaster and America's response to it. I will be editorializing here, and explaining what I think a better response would have been.
That better response would have been: Business as Usual.
I will explain more...
Few things have been as painful for me to watch, personally, as America's response to the 9-11 Disaster. In the words of Kurtz in Joseph Conrad's short story Heart of Darkness, "The Horror! The Horror!", and I'm referring to the response not the incident.
It is my feeling that the response, what is sometimes called the War on Terror, was a decade-long distraction from America's real problems -- such as adapting the economy to post-DotCom Crash conditions and foreseeing an upcoming financial crisis -- and thus has cost America dearly.
Watching the response was what sparked my thinking on Panic and Blunders. There had to have been a better response, and there had to have been a way for people to see this better response.
So for me, this is a big, big issue, and if we can avoid a repeat of a Blunder of this magnitude in the future, the world will be a much better place for it.
I have broken this discussion into topics. Understand these topics, and you have the background for the recommendations I will make as to how to deal with terrorism in the future.
Here are the topics:
o Anti-Terrorism should be criminal, not military
o Big Media and Big Government are feeding Big Terrorism because it is Big Theater
o The key Anti-Terrorist tactic that the government and the community are not employing is Business as Usual
o Succumbing to The Curse of the Patronizing Habit, or "I'll be pilloried if something happens on my watch, so I must protect people from themselves."
o Anti-Terrorism is redefining what it means to be American, and the new definition ain't good
These are the topics. Here we go....
It is clear now that the first and biggest mistake the Bush Administration made in response to the 9-11 Disaster was deciding that terrorism was a military problem, not a criminal problem. All sorts of bad solutions cascaded out of this choice, the biggest of which became the Iraq War and the following decades-long widespread unrest in the Middle East.
But this Middle East quagmire was only the most visible problem, there were a lot of others, as well.
Terrorism is a criminal problem because terrorists are first and foremost criminals. Consider the characteristics of terrorists:
o They are a very small group of people
o They have very little firepower
o They count heavily on surprise and shock value
Terrorists are an exceedingly small group of people who are hiding in a large population that is mostly against what they do, but is not enfranchised enough to stop them. This is a situation that calls for policemen, not soldiers. Policemen have enough firepower to stop terrorists once they are found -- terrorists don't succeed because police can't out shoot them, they succeed because they can't be found before they cause trouble.
This means that finding terrorists is the key to solving the terrorism problem, and since terrorists hide in civilian populations, this means that getting good intelligence on civilian populations is the most critical step.
Q: What produces the best intelligence on civilian population?
A: That's easy: other civilians! Who hasn't been watched by a neighbor?
Terrorism can happen when a neighbor watches, and doesn't feel motivated to report what he or she sees. Palestine is a hot-bed of terrorism because the neighbors of terrorists feel little motivation to report their suspicions to a police force that will take action. So, the first and best cure for terrorism is changing the perception of neighborhoods concerning the appropriateness of terrorists. The more neighbors think terrorists are such a bad idea that they are worth reporting, the less terrorism there is.
If a neighborhood can't be "cured" enough to report terrorists, the next best line of defense is the police force and lawyers. Police are very much involved "gathering intelligence" on the day-to-day activities of neighborhoods, and are expected to be doing so. To have police add anti-terrorism to their normal anti-criminal activities is very easy and very cost effective because it involves almost no change in their activities. Remember: terrorists are first and foremost criminals, just like drug dealers. If police are trying to find drug dealers, then they can add "and terrorists", almost as easily as writing the phrase "and terrorists" into their operating manual. Not much more than that is needed.
There is another very important reason to keep anti-terror a neighborhood and police activity. Doing so supports Rule of Law, and Rule of Law is at the foundation of good government in general. More on this later.
What makes terrorists different than other criminals is the novelty of their acts. Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were the first people to use a truck bomb on a US building in the American Heartland. The 9-11 people were the first people to suicide hijack an airplane. This novelty element is very important. It is important because once it has happened once, the average person knows what to look for to keep it from happening again, and that particular kind of terrorist act can then be stopped from happening again simply by being more vigilant about the right signs of activity -- few, if any, additional precautions are needed. Just as important, if elaborate precautions are taken to keep it from happening, the elaborate precautions are expensive and usually don't work.
The way to deal with a novel terrorist attack is to recognize that it is novel, and then get back to business as usual.
In sum, the best way to fight terrorism is to build communities that won't support terrorism. This means stable and prosperous communities in which the members feel they have a stake in their own well-being and strong faith in the justness of their government -- they feel enfranchised. One element in building enfranchisement is Rule of Law.
What is needed to combat terrorism is more belief on the part of the community that what terrorists are doing is wrong, and that community members should do something about it when they see terrorist acts being prepared. Note again that this form of anti-terrorism is identical to anti-criminalism, which is a very good thing. It means that every effort to fight crime becomes an effort to fight terrorism.
Soldiers do not fight terrorists well for two basic reasons: first, soldiers are designed to fight other soldiers (terrorists are criminals, not soldiers), and second, the military will use military intelligence to find terrorists, not civilian intelligence.
The military is designed to confront other militaries. Using the military against terrorists is using the wrong tool, and, ironically, it can sow the seeds for more terrorism.
For example, in Iraq, the Second War, the US military intervention produced large numbers of guerrillas where there were formerly small numbers of terrorists (perhaps vanishingly small numbers). An armed insurrection is something the military can deal with effectively, but it is not really the road the US wanted Iraq to go down when it started the war. Using the military to find terrorists in Iraq changed the mission in Iraq from stopping terrorism to putting down insurrectionists. The American troops found themselves fighting alligators instead of draining swamps.
The heart of this problem is that military intelligence is very limited in quantity compared to civilian intelligence. Military intelligence is designed to find out things about other militaries: bases, supply lines and depots, troop movements and troop capabilities. Other militaries will have these things in fairly distinct organizations and places -- military units operating out of military bases -- so the amount of resource needed to keep track of another nation's military resources is small.
Terrorists are a vanishingly small in number compared to another nation's military, and hiding in a huge sea of civilians, not in distinct, isolated places. They don't need much infrastructure, so terrorist bases are also vanishingly small when compared to military bases. What this means is that having military intelligence be the backbone of researching and discovering terrorist groups is using the wrong tool for the task. The right group is, again, police forces, criminal lawyers, and enfranchised neighbors. These are the people who are well set up to find and deal with a handful of dangerous malcontents in a sea of benign civilians.
Another problem that confronts all intelligence gathering is separating fact from fantasy. The number of people who have fantasized about doing terrorist acts is staggering compared to the number of terrorist acts actually committed. One of the tasks that is part-and-parcel of being a police force is distinguishing harmless cranks in a community from truly dangerous people. This kind of distinguishing is much harder for military intelligence people do to at the neighborhood level because it takes "knowing the territory".
Since the military intelligence tool isn't the right one for dealing with terrorists, some really bad "fitting the tool to the task" happens. Since the military can't easily use civilians to find terrorists, it falls back on using captured or betrayed terrorists to find other terrorists -- interrogation. When community research is used, instead of being a "knocking on doors and asking people"-kind of activity, it tends to be a "kicking in doors and rounding up people"-kind of activity. This is really bad because this kind of rough-and-ready anti-terrorism is counter to Rule of Law, and undermines support for Rule of Law very quickly. A community that goes through a couple of these anti-terrorist sweeps, will lose all faith in supporting normal police activity as a form of anti-terrorism, and, ironically, such neighborhoods are transformed into terrorist hotbeds.
So, when military intelligence is used to find terrorists, it quickly alienates neighborhood members and police forces from both anti-terrorism and anti-criminal efforts. Soon they will give only grudging help to keeping a community orderly, and a vicious cycle begins:
o A neighborhood becomes suspect so the military shows up and abuses the Rule of Law as it searches for terrorists.
o Because the military abuses the Rule of Law, the police and community members see little value in supporting Rule of Law. Community members and police become disempowered, and the neighborhood becomes tolerant of criminal activities.
o The increased criminal activity builds the infrastructure for more terrorism (community members who won't report criminal activities when they see them), and the community develops a reputation for harboring terrorists, which brings the military back.
Another element in the vicious cycle is that military intelligence interrogations are usually conducted in secret -- once again, outside the bounds of Rule of Law. This means there is little oversight of these interrogating activities and abuses of the sort depicted by the Abu Ghraib Prison Photos are an inevitable consequence. The interrogations may be conducted in secret, but the rumors of their abusiveness will be no secret, and all the neighbors of those being interrogated see themselves as even further outside of the Rule of Law.
So after a short while, the neighborhoods won't help the military intelligence people much, and this "scalpel in the War on Terror" becomes dull, indeed. Who loses the most in this "Use Military Intelligence to find Terrorists" vicious cycle? Rule of Law and the goal of a peaceful, orderly community lose most. Who wins the most? The terrorists win: Any community touched by a run-in with military intelligence looking for terrorists becomes both a criminal and a terrorist haven.
Conclusion: Support your local policeman, not your local soldier.
To build communities that reject terrorism, you must build communities that support Rule of Law. (or respect some kind of legitimized ruling hierarchy) To support anti-terrorism, communities must feel that terrorism is inherently a bad idea, and the members must feel that reporting their suspicions of terrorist activities will improve their lives, not make them worse by bringing down door-breaking-down soldiers on the community.
Big Media loves a good story. And not just one story, it likes a steady stream of good stories. It is voracious in its appetite for sound bites. Because of this appetite for interesting news, Big Media has no problem with playing up the terrorist angle in news.
This has been good for news, but it has also been good for Big Terrorism. Terrorists are advertising a cause, and, just as carefully as business people, they look for value from their advertising dollar. Whenever Anti-terrorism is Big News, the terrorists get huge returns from their "advertising" efforts. And this, in turn, encourages them to put more resource into advertising in Big Media. Terrorism is a booming entertainment segment of the early 21st century.
What can be done to break this vicious circle of terrorists making news stories which promotes more terrorist news stories?
First, some things have to be recognized:
o One, that playing up the terrorist angle of a news story does promote more terrorism.
o Two, that playing up the anti-terrorist angle of a news story is the same as promoting the terrorist angle.
o Three, when someone reports "why" a terrorist act was committed, they are advertising the terrorist cause, and directly promoting terrorism.
o Four, when the government plays up its anti-terror measures, it is helping terrorism by doing market research for terrorists -- it is identifying which targets will cause the most sensation if they are hit.
Here is a suggestion for one way to break the value to Big Media of reporting terrorism.
Big Media should break itself of its habit of sensationalizing terrorism. The best way to break a habit is to introduce some negative feedback. I propose that Big Media do this through self regulation. I suggest Big Media declare that promoting terrorism is now in poor taste, and support that decision with a "terrorist discount" program.
The way the program would work is this: news and programs are monitored for their "terrorist-related content" and programs which have terrorist-related content are counted as part of the "terror percentage" of that outlet. Each month the terror percentage of a media outlet is calculated (terrorist-related material as a percent of total material), and when the percentage is high enough, a discount is given back to advertisers. The higher the terror percentage is for a month, the larger the discount. This discount is given on top of whatever other discounts are negotiated by advertisers.
The advantages of this approach are:
o No new entities are involved, so there is little new red tape or overhead.
o Since they are getting some money back, advertisers will be happy to help monitor the outlet's performance, again reducing the overhead costs.
o If the terrorist news is hot enough, it will be reported, but using a terrorist angle to fill holes in a slow news day will be discouraged. This change will do a lot to help cool the current terrorist hysteria.
In summary, Big Media must recognize and take responsibility for its role in promoting terrorism. There would be much less terrorism if there was much less media coverage of terrorist acts. Big Media needs to change its ethics and reporting styles so that it reports terrorist events without promoting the terrorism itself. As soon as it does this, terrorists will see no gain in promoting their cause with an act of terrorism, and Big Terrorism will very quickly go away. (It will, however, be replaced by something else that is an obnoxious way of advertising because such is the nature of some people who fanatically support causes.)
The first and foremost anti-terrorist tactic that every government and community should be supporting is Business As Usual. Since terrorism is a form of advertising, its purpose is to change the actions of the community. If the community doesn't change its actions, then the terrorism has failed. It is resource badly spent, and it will be seen as that by future prospective terrorists -- they will find some other way, some more cost effective way, to promote their cause.
But when the Bush Administration changed the way billions of federal dollars were spent, and encouraged local governments to change how more billions of dollars were spent, these people were not "unbowed by terrorists", they were succumbing hook-line-and-sinker to the terrorism message. What a return the terrorists got on their promotion effort!
When Big Media whips up anti-terrorist frenzy by daily reporting of stories with terrorist angles and those stories cause even more change in how even more billions of dollars are spent, the terrorists are winning even bigger, and they are even more strongly encouraged to keep allocating more and more of their resources to terrorist acts.
The way to break this cycle is to ignore terrorism, to conduct business as usual in spite of terrorist acts. Terrorist acts should be reported by the media, but not in a way that advertises them. The creation by the Bush Administration of the Homeland Security Department is a wonderful symbol of what the government should not be doing. What the government should be doing instead is fighting crime, poverty and those things which cause people to not buy into the system. General forms of crime, the common kinds of crime, not once-in-a-Blue-Moon terrorist acts, should be the justification for security-improving expenditures.
The more the community feels that Rule of Law applies to each member, and the more the community feels that each member benefits from Rule of Law, the more active the community will be about defending itself from crime, and its little subset, terrorism. For this reason we should be working on strengthening Rule of Law and working on eliminating all those "exceptions" to Rule of Law that have accumulated through the years to deal with various crises-de-jour, such as Prohibition, War on Drugs, and War on Terrorism and in the 2010's... Trigger Warnings, of all things. [sigh]
The reason we need to be working on getting these exceptions out of our legal system is that each exception isolates part of the community, and that isolation keeps those community members from feeling like they are benefiting from Rule of Law. A person who enjoys doing drugs is going to feel isolated from the Rule of Law because of the War on Drugs. This person is not going to be enthusiastic about helping police fight terrorism. This problem is not ancient history. Nowadays those measures which put immigrants outside the rule of law are at cross-purposes with anti-terrorism.
One of the deadliest acts to Rule of Law is having a TV reporter stick a microphone in the face of a government official at the scene of some disaster and ask, "What are you doing to prevent this from happening again?"
This is deadly because it makes the politician feel like he or she has to do something, when, in fact, the best thing that politician could do is often... nothing! Sometimes things just happen. And sometimes, things should just be allowed to happen.
In 2003, after the Columbia disaster, NASA announced it would no longer use the Space Shuttle to repair the Hubble space telescope because it could not be inspected for post-launch problems there. NASA not using the Space Shuttle to fix the Hubble is an example of a time when something should just be allowed to happen. Launching the Space Shuttle is a risky business. That can't be changed, so it should just be allowed. NASA is being too patronizing, and the American community is supporting that over-patronizing nature because they won't tell the reporter not to ask that question at the scene of a disaster. They won't say to the news networks, "That question is not in good taste at this time."
This curse of being over patronizing is made worse by the current American tort (legal) system. On my trips to New Zealand, I have seen how a society operates where people take more responsibility for their own actions, and there is big difference. In New Zealand I've seen people rappelling down the sides of hotels in the centers of big cities. We can't do this in America because the hotels can't count on the courts deciding that a person who rappels down the side of their building is fully responsible for their own actions. This is a sad loss for America.
Homeland Security, the Bush Administration's War on Terrorism, and Big Media's constant yammering about the terrorist angle in the daily news changed America. They changed how we perceive ourselves, and the change isn't good.
o We have become cowardly. We have institutionalized seeing a terrorist behind every bush.
o Fear has replaced the "can do" attitude. Fear is closing our borders to new people and new ideas. Fear is replacing "high moral ground" in our foreign relations.
o American government has become a fertile ground for Kafkaesque-style regulations. An example being the trouble Senator Edward Kennedy had when he tried to fly (article in the Washington Post on 20 August 04):
When he went to purchase a ticket, the airline representative would say, "I can't sell you one."
"Why not?" asked the Senator.
"I can't tell you that." said the airline person.
"Who can tell me?"
"I can't tell you that, either."
"What should I do now?"
"I can't tell you."
The Senator had the misfortune to have a name similar to the name of someone being watched by someone in Homeland Security, so that other someone is being kept off public transportation. You would think the airlines and the government would want to clear up a mistake such as this one, and certainly the quickest way to clear it up would be to contact the person who made the decision. But, the thinking goes, if Homeland Security revealed who has made this decision, that would reveal the sources used for making the decision, and that would compromise Homeland Security. So in the name of Anti-terrorism, the public has to live with a decision made by a person who will never know the harmful results of the decisions he or she makes. And, by deliberate law, this deciding person can't know the results.
Amazingly, this kind of thinking has been condoned by the executive, legislative and judicial branches of the government. (There have been cases brought to various courts, and the courts have refused to try them.)
Amazingly, this thinking comes from the Clinton years, not the post 9-11 years.
Amazingly, no one in government or the media seems to recognize that this puts the decision maker outside of any good accountability loop, and we should expect heaps of abuses as a result. This accountability problem is identical with that which produced the Prison Abuse Photos.
How can we call this Kafkaesque-style of governing good government? This is an example of how fighting terrorism with a War of on Terrorism is poisoning the American way of thinking. It is absolutely death on Rule of Law, and it is absolutely death on the concept of citizens protecting their own way of life by cooperating closely with police to solve criminal problems. It is a huge step towards developing a secret police system, because the next step in government logic is, "If the citizens won't protect their government -- us -- we will set up an institution which does."
It is death on the concept of Informed Democracy, which is at the heart of our governing system. How can voters make good choices about government when the government conceals relevant information from voters?
Yet another problem with secret rules, is: how am I, a citizen, supposed to tell a "real" secret rule from a "false" secret rule that some smooth-talking con-artist has fabricated to steal something from me? If I know that my government has secret rules, and someone walks up; flashes and official-looking ID and says, "I want something from you, and there's a secret rule that says you have to give it to me." What am I, a citizen, supposed to do? Who do I check with to find out if this person is a con-artist or a real government agent? If the person is a real government agent, how do I check if they are citing a real secret law? I can spell A-B-U-S-E!
Having secret rules that the public has to obey is a bad, bad idea, any way you slice it.
None of these fruits of conducting a War on Terror is good; they are all deadly poison. To have good fruits we must move beyond thinking of 9-11 as something that needs action.
America needs to get beyond 9-11. We need to get back to business as usual.
o We need to start seeing 9-11 as a one-of-a-kind incident, and not the basis for a new way of thinking.
o We need to start seeing terrorism as just a photogenic subset of crime. We need to get fighting it out of the hands of military intelligence, and deliberately take away its advertising value.
o We need to accept that the world is a risky place, and we need to understand that when we try to make-believe that it is not a risky place, it costs us terribly in terms of our personal freedoms, and in the strength of Rule of Law.
This is a lot that we need to do, and it clearly won't be easy. But when we succeed America will be a safer place, a more comfortable place, and a place more like our American Ideal.
On July 22nd, 2004, a large commercial building in Suwon, Korea caught fire. The fire lasted for roughly twelve hours, and at its height the flames were gushing out of the top two floors while fire engines with huge fire hoses were spraying away to knock the flames down. It was quite spectacular to watch. I know because I was watching and photographing it from my office window, a few blocks away.
The damage done: tens of millions of dollars for the building proper, and another tens of millions for the inconvenience of, first, cleaning up, and second, not having the building there for a few months while it gets rebuilt. (No lives were lost.)
But, spectacular as this fire was, I could not find an article about it in the Korea Herald (Korea's largest English language newspaper), The Asian Wall Street Journal, or using Google News Search on the Internet.
On July 25th, 2004, a United Boeing 747 airplane turns around 90 minutes after taking off from Sydney, Australia, and returns to Sydney airport. Why? Someone wrote "BOB" on a "barf bag" and dropped the bag near a toilet. Instead of assuming this meant the name Bob, or "Best of Breed" or "Best on Board" or "Boobs on Bounce" or something else innocuous, the pilot assumed this meant "Bomb on Board", and went into Anti-terrorist Panic.
The damage done: tens of thousands of dollars for the aborted flight, and little follow-on damage because all the passengers departed the next day safely.
But, stupid and low damage as this incident was, I found stories about it on Google News Search for two days, and in The Asian Wall Street Journal.
What do these two reports have to do with the War on Terrorism? They show why Terrorism and the War on Terrorism are both alive and booming today.
The first report has nothing to do with Terrorism, but in spite of its decent visual nature, suitability for sound biting, and big economic impact, it was hardly reported. The second report has no decent graphics and no economic impact, but it was hot news for two days.
This means that Big Media is subsidizing terrorism.
This kind of reporting means: the biggest source of financial support for terrorism is American- and World-media!
The terrorists, with full media support, are taking Page One from the Marketing 101 textbook:
"As much as possible get someone else to pay for your advertising.
"If you frame your advertising as a news event, the media themselves will pay for your advertising, and, in addition, it will look much more credible."
Big Media is wholeheartedly behind the terrorists in this marketing strategy. Long after the 9-11 Disaster, the news media filled up the "news hole" with a big percentage of stories with terrorist-related hooks. This kind of reporting is de facto subsidizing terrorism.
We are in a vicious circle of fear causing more fear, and this fear is becoming institutionalized. We need to break this circle of fear and get back to living in a circle of optimism. This is not impossible, or naive. We simply have to believe in Roosevelt's Truism, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." A key element in regaining optimism and dismantling the institutions of fear is changing how Media report on terrorism. Media must live up to their own words about how they run their industry, and become truly "responsible" in their reporting on terror. This means being "brave" enough not to do hysterical reporting at every opportunity. This Terrorism Discount I proposed above is a way of "adding courage" to each and every media person, so it's easier for those in the industry to choose "doing the right thing."
When we break the cycle of fear, we as a community can do something that's been very slow to happen: truly get beyond the 9-11 Disaster and go back to being optimistic Americans -- the kind of Americans we all like the best, and the kind that will do the best things for the whole world.
This thought came to me when I read this editorial in the Wall Street Journal -- this 19 Oct 09 article, Civilian Courts Are No Place to Try Terrorists We tried the first World Trade Center bombers in civilian courts. In return we got 9/11 and the murder of nearly 3,000 innocents. by Michael B. Mukasey, who was attorney general of the United States from 2007 to 2009, is saying that Rule of Law can't handle terrorists. He says in opening:
"The Justice Department claims that our courts are well suited to the task.
Based on my experience trying such cases, and what I saw as attorney general, they aren't. That is not to say that civilian courts cannot ever handle terrorist prosecutions, but rather that their role in a war on terror—to use an unfashionably harsh phrase—should be, as the term 'war' would suggest, a supporting and not a principal role."
Grrrr...
There's no quicker way to bring my blood to boil than by suggesting that terrorism is so special that Rule of Law can't handle it.
This is exactly the thinking that brought on the whole 9-11 Decade of Terror. The War on Terror was America's biggest blunder in this decade, at least, and perhaps bigger than the blunder that the Vietnam War was part of.
Mukasey goes on to point out that trying terrorists is expensive and... well... scary would be the way I would paraphrase it. He seems to think of a terrorist trial as a mob boss trial-on-steroids. I would agree that it has some things in common with a mob boss trial, but the "on-steroids" part I would seriously question.
Personally, if I was a Manhattan person and given a choice between being a participant in a trial that would anger people living in "Jersey", and one that would anger people living in caves south of Kabul... no question about which one would cause me more worry!
I would call Mr. Mukasey's opinion that terrorists are a special case an example of the scar that 9-11 created in America's thinking, particularly in the thinking of those living in New York City and working in the Pentagon, where people got to be not just spectators but participants in the Greatest Terrorist Act of the Century.
I would suggest to Mr. Mukasey that he needs to rise above his fear and recognize that if civilian courts can't handle this problem, then he is disenfranchising civilians from being part of the solution to terrorism, and that is a big part of the recipe for more decades of terrorist disaster.
As long as terrorism is a war, only warriors can fight it.
If terrorism becomes a crime once again, then people will be enfranchised and this problem will be solved by community action. People can spot terrorists a hundred times more effectively than government workers can because there are a million times as many people in communities as there are government workers hired to be looking for terrorists. But that doesn't matter unless those people who spot the trouble believe that their actions can help solve the problem -- unless they believe they are enfranchised on this issue.
And rule of law -- civilian courts trying terrorists -- is part of enfranchisement.
It is sad, but the Obama administration has fouled up a step in the right direction. Here is a WSJ 9 Feb 10 editorial, Cheney's Revenge, on an effort of the time to deal with with Gitmo and trying chief terrorist KSM. It points out that while the Obama administration likely had a symbolic show trial in mind for KSM, the real world version would be expensive, uncertain and scary, and support in New York City for the trial evaporated.
Changing the venue away from Manhattan makes good legal sense -- it can convincingly be argued that the people of New York City are too close to these events to be unbiased.
But that is not what was being argued for at the time. What was being argued was that terrorists are going to come up with some Hollywood plot device that average metro area New York gangsters don't have, and spectacularly disrupt the trial, so the trial will have to have extra layers of expensive and disruptive security that a high-profile gangster trial would not need.
...Eh? Oh! This was like the liquid bomb plot device that spooked the TSA in 2006! ...Right! I understand now!
And this is a perfect example of why this trial should be conducted, and in a thoroughly civil fashion. It is to rehumanize America's view of terrorism -- make Americans feel that these are bad people, but no more that that -- just bad people. These terrorists are not magical people. If they get released for any reason and go back to being terrorists, they are not going to accomplish anything super bad, they will accomplish average bad.
We need to see that America's treating terrorists as super evil beings is just as silly, and just as damaging, as the Middle East's treating America as the Great Satan. One step in ending this special view is a civilian trial -- even if it results in terrorists being released. Conducting the trial, no matter what outcome, strengthens the rule of law. And it is the enfranchising effect on the community that rule of law brings about that will permanently stop terrorism.