Yet another take on air safety. Short of strip- and cavity-searching every passenger and hand searching every piece of luggage, I have no idea how you make air travel perfectly safe from terrorists, and neither does anyone else, especially the people in charge of actually trying to make it safe. Their bureaucratic approach so far has made air travel, once so simple, an inconvenient trial at best and a nightmare of delay and inefficiency at worst. It’s impossible to know if all these security measures have actually made us any safer, but I doubt it.
our system is a non-thinking rush to panic to do something and pretend it is very scientific. once we are at the airport, it may be too late. the 1988 PanAm bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland, was in the girlfriends luggage in the belly of the plane with a pressure device to detonate. Ried & Mutallab had the plane and the toilets yet attempted contact in their seats. Short of Ed Stein’s earlier comic of stripping, explosives in the shorts can happen. Israel continues under daily attacks for decades and is very successful using rational thought and a thorough program to stop the bad guys before they get to the airport. Please read the following from 12/31/09. georgie created the DHS as an umbrella to cover all the disparate agencies, yet they demonstrate an ongoing turf war. Someone may have passed on the information, along with other info, without highlighting or indicating a real problem. So rush to scan us more; do not think. Here are the demos on thinking over the enemy:
What Israel Can Teach Us about Airport Security – Cathal Kelly (Toronto Star)
While North America’s airports groan under the weight of another sea-change in security protocols, the experts keep asking: How can we make our airports more like Israel’s, which deals with far greater terror threats with far less inconvenience? “It is mind-boggling for us Israelis to look at what happens in North America, because we went through this 50 years ago,” said Rafi Sela, the president of AR Challenges, a global transportation security consultancy.
Despite facing dozens of potential threats each day, the security set-up at Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion International Airport has not been breached since 2002, when a passenger mistakenly carried a handgun onto a flight. How do they manage that?
The first layer of security that greets travelers is a roadside check. All drivers are stopped and asked: How are you? Where are you coming from? “Two benign questions. The questions aren’t important. The way people act when they answer them is,” Sela said.
Armed guards outside the terminal observe passengers as they move toward the doors, again looking for odd behavior. Inside the terminal, as you approach the airline check-in desk, a trained interviewer asks additional questions. “The whole time, they are looking into your eyes – which is very embarrassing. But this is one of the ways they figure out if you are suspicious or not,” said Sela. At the check-in desk, your luggage is scanned immediately in a special area.
Five security layers down, you now arrive at the body and hand-luggage check. “But here it is done completely, absolutely 180 degrees differently than it is done in North America,” Sela said. “First, it’s fast – there’s almost no line. That’s because they’re not looking for liquids, they’re not looking at your shoes….They just look at you…and that’s how you figure out the bad guys from the good guys.”
Sela maintains that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab would not have gotten past Ben-Gurion’s behavioral profilers. “You can easily do what we do. You don’t have to replace anything. You have to add just a little bit – technology, training…but you have to completely change the way you go about doing airport security.”
See also Aviation Security and the Israeli Model (New York Times)
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A couple of things…I read a few years back that we actually had fewer deaths the week of 9/11/01 overall in the United States, because we got so focused on the airstrikes that we didn’t have any where near the traffic deaths we expect every week of the year!
I’ve wondered for years when folks are going to realize that any thinking terrorist (here in the USA) would go for crowded malls, grocery stores, sports events, theaters, etc…where security is almost non-existent! Maybe it’s the mystery reader in me, but..whenever there’s a lack of hope…the perpetrator doesn’t care about getting away
I do wonder how the Israelis would deal with a middle class white lady who was a terrorist…and how much profiling is involved when they do their ‘more sophisticated’ terror prevention. Just don’t know…but wonder…
We had the joy in 2006/07 of hosting a Middle Easter Muslim kid on a leadership scholarship from Gaza while he went to Pomona HS here in Arvada. English was his 3rd language and he ended the year with the highest GPA in the entire school. He’s now studying medicine in Alexandria, Egypt and can’t go home because he wouldn’t be able to get out again, due to the Israeli blockade of the borders. He has a lot of anger because his home was totally destroyed last winter and his father, a pharmacist, has been unable to keep his sister and mother secure and living even a middle class life. What he misses about Colorado is the 2 mile walk he had each way to school every day…where the most dangerous thing he did all day was cross Wadsworth Blvd with the traffic light! I mention this because his scholarship was to allow him to see Americans in real life and make up his own mind; the kid has charisma that doesn’t quit and people WILL follow him, whatever he does. Yes, Israel does a pretty masterful job of protecting its own people from terrorists, but I got a chance to see why some people have totally given up hope and become terrorists in the first place. I learned a lot that I didn’t read in “Exodus” while he lived with us…perhaps even more than I learned as a child when the Iron Wings came from the reservation and lived next door to us…about what happens when new borders are established by folks who ignore the people who were already there.
Peace…and I truly appreciate almost all of your cartoons.
http://www.danielpipes.org/7866/airport-security-theater
a continuation of my above statement.
no doubt BarbS’ mate is in a difficult situation. We are writing world-wide airline security and people security before arriving at the airport so flying can be safe again.
Bush/Cheney could not cross an allegorical bridge without destroying it. There is hope, still, a little, for Obama/Biden to rebuild those many bridges and, hopefully, restore/build confidence in the US again and therefore diminish such threats. Education should help, too, if and when permitted. Would it not be nice for that end of the Arab/Islamic world to stop gloryifing death and martydom and give the people a chance? I leave you with a quote from Golda Meir more than 40 years ago:
We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children. We will only have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us.