USING THE ISRAELI METHOD FOR AIRLINE SECURITY: MAJ.GEN. PAUL VALLELY

Posted By on January 11th, 2010

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.5224/pub_detail.asp
Israelification: The Way to Secure Air Travel
Maj. Gen. Paul E. Vallely, US Army (Ret)

North America’s airports groan and grind under the weight of another sea-change in security protocols and requirements mostly with much infliction on the innocent American traveler. One word keeps popping out of the mouths of more knowledgeable experts: Israelification. I have traveled in and out of Israel five times over this past decade and have espoused on Fox News beginning in 2001 that theirs is the path to security that we needed to implement.

Question is, how can we make our airports more like Israel’s, which deal with far greater terror threat with far less inconvenience? “It is mind-boggling for the Israelis to look at what happens in North America, because Israel went through this 50 years ago,” said Rafi Sela, the president of AR Challenges, a global transportation security consultancy. He has worked with the RCMP, the U.S. Navy Seals, and airports around the world.

“Israelis, unlike Canadians and Americans, don’t take s**t from anybody. When the security agency in Israel (the ISA) started to tighten security and travelers had to wait in line for – not for hours – but 30 or 40 minutes, all hell broke loose here. Israelis said, ‘We’re not going to do this. You’re going to find a way that will take care of security without touching the efficiency of the airport.”

That, in a nutshell is “Israelification” – a system that protects life and limb without annoying you to death.

Despite facing dozens of potential threats each day, the security set-up at Israel’s largest hub, Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport, has not been breached since 2002, when a passenger mistakenly carried a handgun onto a flight. How do they manage that?

“The first thing you do is to look at who is coming into your airport,” said Sela.

The first layer of actual security that greets travelers at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion International Airport is a roadside check. All drivers are stopped and asked two questions: 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.

Officers are looking for nervousness or other signs of “distress” – behavioral profiling. Sela rejects the argument that profiling is discriminatory.

“The word ‘profiling’ is a political invention by people who don’t want to do security,” he said. “To us, it doesn’t matter if he’s black, white, young or old. It’s just his behavior. So what kind of privacy am I really stepping on when I’m doing this?”

Once you’ve parked your car or gotten off your bus, you pass through the second and third security perimeters.

Armed guards outside the terminal are trained to observe passengers as they move toward the doors, again looking for odd behavior. At Ben Gurion’s half-dozen entrances, another layer of security is watching. At this point, some travelers will be randomly taken aside, and their person and their luggage run through a magnetometer.

“This is to see that you don’t have heavy metals on you or something that looks suspicious,” said Sela.

You are now in the terminal. As you approach your airline check-in desk, a trained interviewer takes your passport and ticket. They ask a series of questions: Who packed your luggage? Has it left your side?

“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. It takes 20, 25 seconds,” said Sela.

Lines are staggered. People are not allowed to bunch up into inviting targets for a bomber who has gotten this far.

At the check-in desk, your luggage is scanned immediately in a purpose-built area. Sela plays devil’s advocate – what if you have escaped the attention of the first four layers of security, and now try to pass a bag with a bomb in it?

“I once put this question to Jacques Duchesneau (the former head of the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority): say there is a bag with play-dough in it and two pens stuck in the play-dough. That is ‘Bombs 101’ to a screener. I asked Ducheneau, ‘What would you do?’ And he said, ‘Evacuate the terminal.’ And I said, ‘Oh. My God.’

“Take Pearson. Do you know how many people are in the terminal at all times? Many thousands. Let’s say I’m (doing an evacuation) without panic – which will never happen. But let’s say this is the case. How long will it take? Nobody thought about it. I said, ‘Two days.’”

A screener at Ben-Gurion has a pair of better options.

America: Before we spend billions of dollars more, let’s start the above process and security screening as the first step.

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Paul E. Vallely, Major General (USA/Ret.) is an author, military strategist and Chairman of Stand Up America and Save Our Democracy Projects.

Categorized under: BOOKS.
Tagged with: no tags.

Comments are closed.