RUTHFULLY YOURS

Written in association with Christopher J. Ward (PhD).

As there is only a short time between Thanksgiving and the Christmas holidays, the furore about passenger screening and intrusive searches is likely to continue, albeit at a slightly lesser level for a while, as the media focuses on other matters of interest.  I had promised to address some of the problems with screening airline passengers and the rights of passengers.  You have the right to fly safely and to the destination you intended.  You pay for that right along with your ticket.  I mentioned the excellent STRATFOR article by Scott Stewart in Part One and commented on the number of people checked through airports everyday in the U.S.  As you will see, that figure was averaged out at 1.9 million passengers each day.  I indicated that averaging is not always the best method of analysing figures and there are other statistical techniques, the technicalities of which I will not dwell on, that indicate certain days of the week or the year would have a much higher travel rate than 1.9 million.  For example, if we were to use an offer a statistical method and look at the median, another method of analysis, we can expect to find peak travel clustered around various holidays, public, religious and those connected with the university year.  And I want to play devil’s advocate for a moment.

Keep the figure of 1.9 million in mind and then think of the number of staff required at airports to conduct searches, handle documentation, and ensure that there are no bottlenecks.  Then consider the employment of such people.  I do not have sufficient information at hand to be definitive but quite obviously this is a 24 x 7 x 365 operation across the various time zones of the U.S.  And the same applies for most western countries.  Short of catastrophic blizzards or industrial action, airports are expected to be open for business all day, every day.  From time to time, I have looked at the Australian situation and let my imagination run riot: if you like, I have tried to put myself in the position of a potential attacker who either wants to hijack, bomb or place a device on board an aircraft and I have looked from various perspectives.

Firstly, when people travel anywhere especially distances, they carry luggage.  Since various attempts to blow up aircraft in-flight, there have been limitations on what can be carried on board and I don’t think I need to process through the dreary list of forbidden items.  As I indicated in Part One, I fully agree with former FBI agent Dave Gaubatz that is possible, with reasonably basic training, to weaponize almost anything on an aircraft and without giving too much away, on an international flight, 5 minutes in a toilet and I could have emerged with an extremely lethal weapon and yet, I did not take one single dangerous item on board.  Ingenuity and invention can be harnessed for lethal intent:  in short, you can expand the list of forbidden items, strip search passengers and use intrusive scanning and somehow, a wannabe terrorist can slip through.  Such was the case with Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the “underwear bomber” at Christmas last year.  In fact, that case was much more of a disaster than has ever been admitted.  The failure to develop an analytical computer program to check names of passengers using all combinations of spellings doesn’t exist.  I would rather like to know why this is so because during the Cold War (you know, that ideological struggle that dominated most of the 20^th century and is now been airbrushed out of history)

The U.S. intelligence community had a program which analysed Russian names and eliminated all the possibilities caused by the different forms of transliteration from Cyrillic to English and believe me, some of the quite innocent transliterations were so far removed from the spellings generally used and compiled by the U.S. Board of Geographic Names (BGN).  The European transliterations produced the most difficult for native English speakers but the computer program sorted out the names and the western intelligence communities used the BGN system to advantage.  However, when it comes to the mishmash of Arabic names there appears to be no similar system in place, even with the TSA watch list (the so-called Viper List). Therefore, it is understandable that Abdulmutallab and his bomb made it to NW Flight 253 and but for either a technical malfunction or last minute failure of will, that aircraft could have been destroyed.

It takes very little PETN to make an explosive device capable of rupturing the structural integrity of an airliner.  Nervous Nellies don’t fly and when you come to think about it, depending on the flight, you are in the company or anywhere from 50 to 450 other people in what is basically a rather thin metal (or in the case of the new Boeing 787 Dreamliner) composite cylinder travelling at high altitude for most of any a fairly long journey.  Even shuttle and commuter flights such as New York to Washington or Boston, San Francisco to Los Angeles or for people in my part of the world Melbourne or Sydney to Canberra or in the UK from Edinburgh or Glasgow to London, the aircraft achieve altitudes where pressurization is required.  While travelling by air is incomparably safer than in the pioneer days, it is usually said that the take-off and landing are the most dangerous parts of any trip by air, although improvements in avionics and computerised systems generally have reduced the risk.  What is infinitely more dangerous is explosive decompression at altitude.  It is quite possible for aircraft to survive explosive decompression and still fly and land.  Sufficient tests have shown that despite a certain amount of disbelief, most explosive devices discovered in recent years would have punched a hole in that thin skin of the aircraft, causing massive structural failure and probably disastrous loss of life.  It’s not a subject I contemplate very often because I enjoy flying but nevertheless it cannot be ignored.

A major and well-recognized problem concerns passenger luggage in the hold or on the person.   I take it as a “given” that a determined person can create a weapon on board.  It would appear that detection of substances like PETN is rather difficult and although it is possible to laugh, an Islamic terrorist tried to kill a member of the Saudi royal family by secreting a PETN device in his rectum a few years ago and while the device was detonated, the target was not killed: rather considerable damage was done to the Royal Palace and the collateral damage consisted of a large crater and the death of the would-be assassin.  It’s easy to smile at the butt bomber if you possess a black sense of humour.  What this means in everyday practice is that some once seated next to you could have something in their body which passed intrusive inspection.

The Achilles heel of air travel is very often what is carried in the cargo compartments or passenger luggage.  In the West generally, the inspection regimen has long been privatized and baggage handlers, not being terribly well paid, tend to be migrants with uncheckable backgrounds: it is quite possible to manufacture false identities and documentation which pass the scrutiny of companies employed to load baggage.  The Lockerbie bombing 1988, the so-called ‘Bojinka operation’ of 1995, 9/11, Richard Reid – the shoe bomber – the foiled plot to bring down multiple airliners over the Atlantic or more recently the Al Qaeda Yemen dispatch of PETN laden printer cartridges proves that this is still a weak point in the system and probably one of the hardest to solve because it involves regular rigorous security checking and paying workers who are doing what is often regarded as a routine and dirt job considerably more than at present.

Then we come inevitably to the problem of screening of passengers and air crew.  I did not believe that I can add anything of any great worth to the current debate, taking into account the cultural differences between the U.S. and other western countries.  I would like to leave aside the 4^th Amendment to the U.S. constitution and any other that pertains to individual rights as a passenger in the US, largely because these intrusive scanners are present around the globe in 58 airports, in countries such as the UK, France, Germany, the Netherlands and understandably, Nigeria, the country of origin of the underwear bomber.   And these instruments are not cheap – the estimated cost is $130-170, 000 for each unit.

Over the years, aircrew have complained about being subjected to the same searches as passengers, with some justification but where is the line to be drawn?  Bending the rules is not unknown but I would hesitate to suggest that the pilot of any aircraft that I was embarking had just slipped through in a category of their own. So what do we look for – the bomber or a bomb?   Unfortunately, I believe the answer is both and I’ve heard and read many articles on this subject and remain sceptical because the initiative almost inevitably lies with the bomber.

Recently, I read a series of articles and thought it desirable to repeat the central tenets of thought on airline security and attempt to analyse in context, the threat, the concerns about civil liberties and the nature of counter-measures.  I am not selecting any particular writer for special mention or attention but it is vital to look across a spectrum of views. This warrants an extension of this essay to another part.

* Dr. Christopher J. Ward is an empirical social scientist with an interest in immigration; the assimilation of migrants and associated cultural problems.