The Psychosis of Airport Security

When a new threat appears, it is the duty of all public officials to take action, even if nothing reasonable can be done. If they do not show that they are trying to resolve the problem, the media will not take them seriously, hence the strong reactions of the American government following the recent arrest of the terrorist “slip-bomb.”

Umar Farouk Adbulmatallab is Nigerian and Muslim. The American government has therefore ordered that all passengers traveling to the United States from Nigeria, Pakistan, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Yemen and seven other Muslim or partially Muslim countries will be submitted to additional security checks at the airport. They will be manually searched and their hand baggage will be opened and inspected. This is what will settle the problem. There should no longer be any explosives passing through under the guise of underwear.

However, Abdulmatallab wore his bomb as clothing. What purpose does it serve then to manually inspect hand baggage? Furthermore, even by frisking a man down from top to bottom, there is no reason why they would have found the incriminating underwear.

On another note, the list of countries affected by these new measures is quite interesting. If Cuba is one, it is probably to include a non-Muslim country, even though the Cuban government has never supported anti-American terrorism (quite the opposite, in fact, even if it supposedly happened a long time ago).

Exempt Countries

Even more striking is the absence of Great Britain, France, and the Netherlands from the list of countries whose nationals must undergo careful inspections before entering the United States. Great Britain is the home of Richard Reid, the man who unsuccessfully attempted to blow up a plane that departed France to the United States with explosives hidden in his shoes. The group stopped by the police that was trying to bring aerosols containing liquid explosives on board aircraft that was destined for the United States was British. Abdulmutallab, meanwhile, went through security checks at Schiphol Airport in the Netherlands in order to go to Detroit. Why, then, are these countries exempted from the checks?

I certainly feel as though am launching into a rant, but, in fact, I am not clamoring for more rigorous security checks. I am in favor of “security” in smaller airports and, in return, checks advanced to the entrance, before potential terrorists can even check in at the counter.

Apart from Richard Reid and Umar Farouk Abdulmatallab, all attempts at bombings on airliners bound for the United States have been foiled by intelligence services, not by the hundreds of thousands of underpaid “security agents” who are responsible for carrying out the checks at the gate. Moreover, they stopped neither Reid nor Adbulmutallab. What conclusions can we draw from this?

The conclusion is that reinforcing additional security at airports is a total waste of time and money. Of course, we must continue to implement basic security checks to prevent passengers from carrying weapons on airplanes. However, it is not necessary to be grateful to the politicians who bow to the inept wishes of the media, and we must accept and remember that nothing is perfect. We are 50 times more likely to die in an auto accident than in a plane crash caused by human error, a technical failure, or a “slip-bomb.” The other solution is to attempt to fill in all of the gaps, but the obvious gap in airport security is the lack of search for anal bombs.

Invasive Searches

The first suicide bomber wearing an explosive in his rectum has already debuted (though not in an airplane). Four months ago, a militant linked to Al-Qaeda managed to thwart all checks and detonated himself in the presence of Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, the Saudi Arabian Deputy Minister of the Interior. The detonator was most likely activated remotely, but an airline passenger would simply have to go to the bathroom to blow himself up.

If Abdulmutallab had boarded the plane to Detroit with an explosive device hidden in his body and not sewn into his underpants, how would security have detected it? The only way would have been through the classic prison method consecrated by time: a full body cavity search.

We could obviously do this in airports. It would take five or six times more guards and we would need to significantly expand the search space in order to provide passengers with a minimum of privacy, but if we were really determined to eliminate all air threats, we could search all suspicious body cavities. “Sir or Ma’am, lean forward please.”

Yet no one advocates the application of this policy, and not for fear of a latex glove shortage. The psychosis of airport security is mainly symbolic. If we began to check the contents of the cavities of the human body, it would serve to further destabilize people instead of reassuring them. In this case, common sense prevails over “security.” This should be the case more often!