Obvious security solution
There is one, as David Warren notes:
Conditions have now got so bad, from the 99 per cent of damage that is inflicted not by terrorists but by the cumbersome bureaucracies responding to them (100 per cent in this case), that we are now reading “mainstream” articles about how the Israelis handle airport security — with total success, against much greater threats, at lower cost, with no flight delays.
This is encouraging: people are actually discussing what works. I did notice several of the articles, though well-researched in other respects, carefully avoided mentioning the key element in the Israeli security strategy, which is: open ethnic, religious, demographic, and behavioural profiling.
It is not something anyone wants to do. It is just something that has to be done if we are going to avoid being slaughtered by terrorists.
And though we may not yet be talking about the issue directly, the cracks are appearing in the wall of political correctitude, which means it might eventually come down.
Is profiling fair? Not really, no. Nobody goes to the airport in the hopes of being deliberately selected for advanced screening because of his manner of dress, manner of speaking, country of origin, religious declaration, or manner of grooming.
Then again, nobody (except perhaps a “martyrdom”-bent terrorist) boards a plane in the hopes of having the plane blown apart in midair; nobody looks forward to a 30,000 foot descent alongside the shrapnel of the fuselage. Nobody boards a plane in the hopes of being incinerated upon impact with a skyscraper. It goes without saying that it is quite unfair to subject people to violent death when they do not seek it out. (Not being Muslim does not objectively constitute “seeking violent death.”)
The difference, of course, is that the first unfairness only results in a few localized instances of inconvenience and delay, and perhaps the occasional missed flight. The second unfairness results in dozens, perhaps hundreds, of deaths.
Yet, in the West at least, the opinion of those who “know best” still seems to view the former inconvenience as the greater evil, and is willing to risk the latter so as to avoid said former. And so instead, Western travellers are subjected to an ever-increasing number of “security” checks and screenings that do very little to make air travel more secure.
The Nigerian Christmas bomber knew as much, and was able to smuggle a bomb aboard a plane in the form of it’s component chemicals, more or less; he needed only to inject a small amount of liquid into the “bomb” in his underwear to do his deed. (Fortunately, he got his proportions wrong, so that the result was incendiary rather than explosive.)
Funnily, I’ve mused about the possibility of similar setups whilst emptying my pockets at the security lines in the various airports I’ve had a chance to see the inside of recently. The underwear idea never entered my mind*, admittedly, but the idea of bringing various chemical compounds aboard the flight and only then combining them certainly did.
Not that I know how to make anything explosive, mind you. But it’s not hard to look such things up, and I’m sure that one could craft a bomb out of various small quantities of materials that would, individually, get past the security desk with little or no questions asked. Add in the voltage that a laptop battery can generate, and…well…
…I mean, one only needs to blow out a window to create massive amounts of havoc. And if, once one got through security, one chanced to find a restaurant that didn’t give out plastic cutlery with the steak dinners*, that havoc would afford one quite a lot of opportunity for yet further mayhem.
And what will full-body scanners do to mitigate against such an attack, exactly? Or bag searches? Disallowing backpacks might mean a would-be chemist-bomber would have to carry his ingredients in his pockets, but is that really an obstacle? And if it is ruled that children (those under 17 years of age, say) are not to be scanned (as has been proposed in the UK, under a novel interpretation of British child porn laws), what then? The jihad has used young recruits before, both small children and teenagers. a father-son “martyrdom” team is not so far-fetched an idea, is it?
Unless we’re going to start mandating that all airport security staff be trained chemists, and then with a specialty in. explosives-making, what’s to stop a patient, chemically competent jihadist from doing any of the above?
And the rest of us can just stand in ever-longer lines, making us a more tempting target for a run-of-the-mill vest bomber. (The bomber need not “go off” in mid-air to ground air traffic.)
Or maybe we could just accept that profiling is a necessary part of effective security, as the Israelis have done.
When a convenience store is robbed by a person described as being “a Native male, in his 30s, with long hair” there is little point is the police interrogating someone fitting the description “a Chinese female, in her 60s, with short hair.” That’s not to say that would-be martyrs conform tosuch easy demographic categories in all cases, but it is to say that many would-be jihadists do often give off clues and indications of various kinds — their manner of dress and grooming, for example, or their behaviour in the security line.
The Israelis know this, and put that knowledge to great effect. Perhaps we should too.
* Ever tried to cut meat with a plastic butter knife? Let me tell you about my dinner in Denver on my most recent trip home…
