Just one thing to be thankful for, and that is that this thing didn't happen at the height of the Cold War. Nobody is going to be taking reprisals against people with a massive nuclear arsenal.

The assumption that this is a huge conspiracy involving governments and all that just isn't necessarily true. All it needed was a bunch of people willing to die, and ready to kill as many people as required, together with the kind of information about flights and aeroplanes and so forth that any of us with Internet access could get together within a few hours if we really had to.

Plus the knowledge that there was a virtually non-existent security system for internal flights in the USA.

The key component being the first - the bunch of people willing to die and kill. If the response to this is the kind of response that some people are predicting, the effect will be to create a whole lot more of that component.