If I had meant to be disrespectful, I would have said something along the lines of "Did the 1983 suicide truck bombing of the 8th Marine barracks in Beirut that killed 241 troops while you were serving as a military intelligence analyst for 1st Marines make you even less suspicious for the likelihood for potential terrorist attacks?"
I understand your point with people jumping to alarmist conclusions -- and I have my own reservations, as I noted before -- but I think you're going too far in the opposite extreme in thinking that 'the terrorist just want us to be scared' when they've proven many times that they're perfectly capable of carrying out operations both here and abroad.
It shouldn't be the trait of an intelligence analyst to be so patently dismissive, but maybe the Marines were just trying to make me paranoid by constantly bombarding me with 'Loose Lips Sink Ships' and 'Boris Is Watching' propaganda when I served.
I might not have taken that as disrespect. Actually, your original jab was pretty good, and if I wasn't being pestered I would have taken it better.
I spoke to the Intelligence Chief of that unit about 3 months after that bombing. He was touring commands and giving presentations. He was still pretty shaken, I wondered if this role he was assuming was also a kind of therapy. He wanted people to know that he'd received something like 1300 various bomb threats, as I recall, the week before the attack, and that was typical. They were overloaded with un-analyzable information. There was no way to determine which was significant.
I suspect that in the noise, a lot of them were significant, and there were a lot of probes before a operation was selected. I think the Seattle ferry's a reasonable concern. I think there are hundreds maybe thousands of reasonable concerns in like this in this war.