Terrorists and air travel

The 9/11 Commission Report has been released today, and you can pull up a copy by clicking here: click here for report   It is 585 pages long. 
 
About the only good news I found after a quick scan for a few key words like "Graham" (as in Senator Bob, who would make an excellent vice president), "Florida," and a few cities in Florida, is this:
 
"The terrorists who hijacked three other commercial flights on 9/11 operated in five-man teams. They initiated their cockpit takeover within 30 minutes of takeoff. On Flight 93, however, the takeover took place 46 minutes after takeoff and there were only four hijackers. The operative likely intended to round out the team for this flight, Mohamed al Kahtani, had been refused entry by a suspicious immigration inspector at Florida’s Orlando International Airport in August."   (Page 28)
 
It would be comforting, somewhat, to know that airport security was actually doing its job somewhere, but note that the agent on the ball that day was an immigration inspector, not your routine airport security guy.  Airport security had no clue that such a thing would happen.  It is easy to criticize, but hindsight is always 20-15. 
 
We have flown many times since 9-11-01 and I haven't flown with an abnormal fear of disaster.  I have no great confidence in airport security, but there are much easier targets in the U.S. than commercial airplanes today.   I'm not going to live my life in fear that the "next one," whatever that may be, will get me.  The drive to and from the airport is still the most dangerous part of the trip.
 
I've been doing a little reading of Irish and Scottish history lately.  It amazes me how much blood has been shed over the centuries by soldiers and innocent civilians, always in the name of power, greed, and religious zealotry.   Our ancestry includes Scottish, Irish, and German blood, and before that, a mixture of Scots, Picts, Saxons, Normans, and Vikings too.  That mixture occurred as a result of military conquests.  We - that is, all of humanity - are a violent species.