Open Thread (12/29/2009)

It appears the 'communication problem' George W said he would fix across security systems, was the root cause of this security breach.  Security in this country is a putrid bueaurocratic pile protected by politicians, lobbists & agencies each hovering over their 'rice' bowls with the 'W' fix just adding another bowl filled with federal employees.  Since air travel involves other nations, many of whom have bigger piles than us, improvements in communications, let alone practice, will take decades to improve, if ever.

Since December 22, 2001 when Richard Reid, a/k/a The Shoe Bomber failed to detonate the PETN hidden in his shoe aboard American Flight 63 from Paris to Miami air travelers passing through airport checkpoints have been asked to remove their shoes so that the footwear can be inspected for explosives. No visual inspection can detect the presence of PETN hidden in a shoe, yet travelers are still subjected to that indignity. On December 25, 2009 Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab failed to bring down Northwest flight 253 from Amsterdam to Detroit when the packet of 80 grams of PETN concealed in his underwear failed to explode. Will the TSA now request that air travelers remove their underwear for inspection following the Crotch Bomber's attempt?

The question is not wholly facetious. Both attempts came at a time of peak air travel. Both were foiled in part by alert air crews and passengers but were unsuccessful because the bombs did not perform as expected. The Shoe Bomb and now the Crotch Bomb incidents demonstrate that no system of air travel security can be relied on to be 100% effective. Because we have become so reliant on international air travel a major mission of the TSA has been to provide to the traveler a sense of security, that the government is doing something while the reality is that the system is full of holes.

The complaint that a person identified as a potential terrorist was on a Watch List but not included in a No Fly list is legitimate and TSA and other law enforcement agencies need to evaluate how that occurred. Reliance on such rosters is more about the illusion of secure air travel than a practical solution to foiling terrorists. Had the Crotch Bomber's family not been prominent and concerned about their son's evident radicalization Abdulmutallab would not have appeared on the Watch List at all. It is unrealistic to expect that any system of preflight screening would be able to assess the entire Earth's population for risk.

The point is that we cannot construct a wholly secure system of air travel unless we ban all passengers except those who have passed a rigorous pre-flight background investigation - and even then we can expect that a hole in the system will exist and be exploited. We have to accept some risk of another and successful attack if we are to continue to rely on air travel and the airline industry. How much risk are we willing to accept? How much government delving into our personal lives are we willing to accept as the price of air travel security? Is the solution mandated strip searches to resolve anomalies after full body scans of every passenger? . What indignities in the airport check points are you willing to accept?

Three Score and Ten Plus One

Keith Hays

Any and all that will keep that plane in the air without exploding. You can take my shoes, sniff me, take a picture of my junk, but just get me there without some idiot taking me out by blowing a hole in my plane. That's just the way I roll. I would concede to allowing people who don't want the indignities to fly designated flights that don't require as much security, but at least give me the option of every protection available.

Do you request as much security and screening before you ever get onto the Interstate?  Because you've got a much larger chance of dying there than you do in a terrorist attack on a plane.  On the order of 16.5 million to one.  The odds of dying while driving to the airport are significantly worse.

It's not just the indignaties, it's how effective these methods are at keeping us "safe from terrorists", and the short answer is that they're not doing much of anything.  But if having your junk scanned before you hop on a plane gives you a warm, fuzzy feeling of "safety", then I expect that you'll be demanding much more rigorous safety checks at each entrance to the Interestate Highway System.

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This last post conclusively proves that Arvid is in fact Laurel Prussing. Sad. - Anonymous on 2009-06-22 @ 9:30am

And yet, we did nothing and every time bin Laden was offered to Clinton, he refused.

That's funny, because I remember Clinton going after bin Laden and being accused of "wagging the dog" to distract people from the Lewinsky scandal. I also remember the NIE report titled "Bin Laden determined to attack in the US" and it being utterly disregarded.

The US intel community also pretty much knew that there were no WMDs in Iraq. That's the very reason Rumsfeld had to set up a separate and parallel intellgence structure inside the Pentagon and distinct from the CIA.