The New Face of Terror

Since 9/11, airports here in the US have gone through any number of changes, supposedly to enhance our security. I'll not run down the list, as I think we're all aware of the changes.

I will point out, that in spite of their added costs, both in direct security expenditures, and indirect social costs in delays, increased time spent waiting in the airport, etc., that we are no safer in the air or at the terminals than we were this time last year.

The Dirty Little Secret that they don't want you to know is that the new procedures put in place are meant to actually increase only your sense of security, and not the reality. The biggest problem after 9/11 the airlines faced was to get folks back flying again. This has been approached not as a problem of security, but one of marketing. So, the procedures put into place were the ones that were the most visible to the flying public, not the ones that keep us the safest.

For example, there are no plans, even today, to put into effect two measures that would keep us safer from the greatest danger we now face - not more 9/11 style hijackers, but a bomb loaded into the cargo department of the plane.

The Israeli airline, El Al, puts every single piece of loaded cargo in an airtight chamber. The air is pumped out of it, to simulate the air pressure decrease of the plane reaching it's normal cruising altitude. This will safely detonate any bomb rigged with a fuse designed to go off at altitude, the most common and effective way to rig such a device.

Cargo loaded onto passenger airplanes goes into large, somewhat flimsy, metal containers. The ones used here in the US have been designed to be as strong and light as possible, for reasons of economy. As a consequence, they offer little protection from any explosion that occurs inside them, being, in fact, little more than a convenient source of additional shrapnel. There are manufacturers of these containers that make a much stronger version, using materials such as Kevlar, that can contain or greatly diminish the blast of any reasonably sized bomb a terrorist might smuggle aboard. In nothing else, they would force the terrorists to use much larger bombs, making the task of detecting them much easier. As it is, a bomb of less than a pound can easily take down a passenger plane.

The airlines have repeated rejected the use of these blast-resistant containers, on the grounds of increased cost.

Neither of these proposals would seem as needed, were the airlines going to meet the requirement laid upon them to have each piece of baggage examined before being loaded onto the plane. Of course, they are not going to meet this deadline, again citing the lack of time, equipment, and resources.

So, as they're confiscating your tweezers and fingernail clippers, making you check-in two and three hours before your takeoff time, and asking you if you packed your own luggage (surely the most foolproof security precaution known to man) keep in mind that there are no procedures in place to keep a terrorist from blithely stuffing a bomb into his suitcase, and having it placed unexamined into the cargo hold of the plane. We do intend to take great pains to use, at considerable expense, a baggage matching system, designed to make sure that the terrorist has to get on the plane with that bomb, so the terrorist would have to be suicidal to do such a thing, but, oh, yeah, there seem to be a few of those around.

Compound this with the fact that those in charge of airport security seem to have been recruited from the dullest of those swimming in the shallow end of the gene pool. I've an embarrassment of riches to chose from as examples here, so I'll just pick one that happened to be in my inbox this morning.

The BBC reports that security officials at LAX took exception to a Britsh woman's GI Joe doll. It seems that Joe was carrying a two-inch long plastic battle rifle, which, I presume, the suck-urity dullards there though could be used to intimidate the crew and hijack the plane.

One of these newly-federalized intellectual giants is quoted as saying ""We have instructions to confiscate anything that looks like a weapon or a replica. If GI Joe was carrying a replica then it had to be taken from him."

I feel so much safer now. Until such time as these idiots can somehow stumble across a clue, this is one American that will be driving on his vacations.

[Addenddum - Aug 7, 2002: A friend of mine was going to Mexico on vacation today, and flying out of IAH. (Houston Intercontinental) As she was having to cool her heels there for a few hours, I offered to meet her for a drink. (She's purty easy on the eyes)

I happened to be riding the little underground shuttle that takes you between terminals with a pilot. He flew for Continental. I told him of the LAX GI Joe fiasco. He looked around at the other passengers in the car, and said, "I can't really tell you my opinions about that when I'm in uniform."

At the next stop the other passengers got off, and he went to ranting. He said that I would not believe what he saw the security morons do every single day. He then proceeded to tell me of them searching a law enforcement officer, one who was allowed to carry a weapon on board, who was in fact wearing his pistol, and watching them, get this, confiscate his tweezers!

I swear to fucking dog I am not making this up, though I don't blame anyone of you that doesn't believe me. I don't think I would in your (hopefully not stuffed with Semtex) shoes.]

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I just finished reading a thought-provoking essay on Jacksonian influences on American culture and politics, via a link found on Steven Den Beste's site. The entire article is rather long, but worth it, to me anyway. Of course, I've always thought that Jackson was one of the greatest presidents, and not given his props these days. :-)

A sample quote to pique your interest: "Jacksonians are instinctively democratic and populist. Hamiltonians mistrust democracy; Wilsonians don’t approve of the political rough and tumble. And while Jeffersonians support democracy in principle, they remain concerned that tyrannical majorities can overrule minority rights. Jacksonians believe that the political and moral instincts of the American people are sound and can be trusted, and that the simpler and more direct the process of government is, the better will be the results. In general, while the other schools welcome the representative character of our democracy, Jacksonians tend to see representative rather than direct institutions as necessary evils, and to believe that governments breed corruption and inefficiency the way picnics breed ants. Every administration will be corrupt; every Congress and legislature will be, to some extent, the plaything of lobbyists. Career politicians are inherently untrustworthy; if it spends its life buzzing around the outhouse, it’s probably a fly. Jacksonians see corruption as human nature and, within certain ill-defined boundaries of reason and moderation, an inevitable by-product of government.

Disclaimer: once again, it's long, and prolly of more interest to political science junkies more than anyone else. But if you're a European that doesn't quite understand why things like the ICC smell bad to the citizenry here, or why we seem to be marching unilaterally off to war in the streets of Baghdad, this article will go a long way towards helping you understand these positions, even though it may not persuade you of their ultimate validity.

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