Pity the international traveler. One terrorist fails in his attempt to blow up a plane by sewing an explosive device into his underpants and so now airport security, already unpleasant, slow and laborious, will become even more unpleasant, slow and laborious. Is the future of airline travel akin to going into hospital? Are we one day going to be obliged to have our bodies scanned before being stripped down to a hospital gown in order to be allowed to fly? It sure feels like this is the way we are headed.
Will increased security screenings make air travel safer? No, they will not. Extra security measures may make it slightly harder for a willing terrorist to blow himself up in an airplane, but it will never make it impossible.
And even if it did, all it would do is move the threat elsewhere, from planes and airports to any other place where people congregate. If your aim is to kill innocents, and you do not care who those innocents are, which clearly these terrorists do not, you will always find a way to inflict carnage. Since in the eyes of Al-Qaeda and its like anyone is a valid target, it is not possible to create a watertight safety net through which no terrorist will enter.
But extra security measures are definitely on the way. The real winners are the manufacturers of body scanners. These machines essentially strip you naked on camera and can detect whether you have hidden explosives in your underwear or even inside a cavity in your body as one terrorist recently did. They cost around a million dollars a piece. Imagine how many will be needed if you were to install them in all airports that operate flights to the US? And for this safety net to work, you would need them to be in place everywhere or else your safety net would have great big holes in it, so what would be the point?
Apart from the cost, these scanners are unpleasant. They strip us of our dignity since the person operating the scanner can see the outline of our flesh right down to the shape of our private parts. They are also slow. To make every traveler go through one of these would add hours to the already lengthy queues you encounter at security. What is more, nobody knows whether passing through these scanners will have detrimental effects on health in the long run.
Installing scanners will not stop terrorist attacks from happening; they will simply make the worried feel safer and give politicians the opportunity to say they are doing something to protect the public. The scanners are an enormous and scandalous waste of money.
What people seem too willing to forget is that this was a failed attack. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was easily thwarted in his attempt. Yes, he had enough explosive on him to blow up a plane, but he failed to even do himself serious damage. Just like Richard Reid, the so-called shoe-bomber, this attempt showed that there are still men crazy enough to try to blow up a plane and that the terrorists have a rather vivid imagination in terms of creating ways to sneak a bomb on a plane, but their determination and imagination surpass their actual ability to turn their plans into a deadly reality.
Whereas the terrorists that blow up cars or backpacks in crowded places also still exist and are unfortunately extremely successful in creating the carnage they hunger for. It is simply that this is taking place in countries like Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan and we don’t care about those deaths. We are far more concerned with the potential deaths of 300 passengers on a plane going to Detroit, aren’t we? Or so it would seem yet again.
The real failing in this case is two-fold. First the terrorists failed. Their idea was clever but it did not work. Second, and more important, the intelligence services failed. Abdulmutallab’s own father went to the American Embassy in Lagos to warn them about his son! And this was not all. Different agencies had different pieces of the puzzle that, had they had the good grace to talk to each other, would have easily thwarted this attempted terrorist attack before the terrorist attempted to board the plane.
Here again the answer is not to add names indiscriminately to the no-fly list and punish innocent travelers who happen to have names common in the Middle East. This would not only be counterproductive. After all surely terrorists know how to travel under an assumed name. This would make the boarding process even longer and harder for all passengers. The key word here is intelligence, in the true and complete sense of the word. What is needed is a genuinely intelligent approach to fighting the terrorist threat.
For instance, instead of spending millions on body scanners, the US and others with the cash and the intention to use them, would be better advised to spend the money helping failed states or countries struggling with lawlessness. Even a failed terrorist needs a safe place to train. In this case it was Yemen. The Yemeni foreign minister has pleaded for more help from the international community in fighting the terrorists now using his country as a breeding ground. He pointed to a need for more helicopters. What is a more intelligent investment in the fight against terrorism — body scanners that help reveal that a terrorist is hiding a potential bomb on his body or a helicopter that helps a country flush out potential terrorists before they make it to an airport? - ([email protected])
