Terminal frustration

Is air travel safer since 9/11? Yes, there have been some effective changes. But most of the so-called security measures have been irrational, wasteful and pointless. When will we learn?

Editor's note: This article continues a Salon series exploring the impact of 9/11 five years after the attacks.

By Patrick Smith

Read more: Terrorism, Opinion, P. Smith, September 11th , 5 Years After

Sept. 6, 2006 | Of all the aspects of American life touched by Sept. 11, 2001, perhaps none has been more obviously and tangibly affected than the experience of travel by air. This is hardly surprising for two reasons. First, commercial aviation has always been a fast-acting barometer of the nation's moods. Few businesses are more cyclical, with peaks and valleys that tend to mirror whatever spell of growth or malaise we happen to be going through. And second, the attacks themselves were exacted with the direct and unwitting assistance of the airlines, instantly propelling them into chaos.

Half a decade later, air travel in the United States is a manic paradox: Never before has flying been so inexpensive and accessible, yet we have an airline industry still in the throes of its worst-ever stretch of fiscal devastation. At the same time, fears of additional attacks have spawned a security apparatus of maddening inconvenience.

Within the theater of security -- and I use the word "theater" intentionally -- has come the first and most noticeable paradigm shift, one that has left all of us reeling. The industry's sagging economics wield considerable influence over just how unpleasant flying has grown. However, for all of the airlines' struggles and well-earned demerits, a journey by air does not begin and end inside an airplane, it begins and ends inside the terminal. And much of what happens there is beyond any carrier's control, directed instead by government agencies -- mainly, in this case, the Transportation Security Administration. Ask a traveler what the gravest inconvenience of flying is, and he or she is liable to answer without pause: airport security. This was true enough prior to the recent revelation that a group of suspected terrorists in Britain had been on the verge of launching synchronized attacks against U.S. jetliners over the Atlantic.

The specific changes have been drastic, and largely of two kinds: those practical and effective, and those irrational, wasteful and pointless. The first variety have taken place almost entirely out of view. Armored cockpits and explosives screening for checked luggage have been the most welcome and, frankly, the longest overdue implementations. The latter remains something of a work in progress, with a goal toward comprehensive scanning of all checked bags, as was introduced in Europe on the heels of terrorist bombings in the late 1980s. Until that time, partial scanning is better than none, and we are safer for the effort.

The same cannot be said, unfortunately, for the madness going on in plain view on concourses all over America. After enduring pointless pat-downs and the senseless confiscation of pointy objects for more than four years, passengers now face the prohibition of liquids, gels and even cosmetics.

To understand what makes these measures so absurd, we first need to revisit the morning of Sept. 11 and grasp exactly what it was the 19 hijackers so easily took advantage of. For regular readers of my column this will make your ears ring, but for the benefit of newcomers, here's a review.

Conventional wisdom says the terrorists exploited a weakness in airport security by smuggling aboard box cutters. This is bollocks. What they exploited was a weakness in our mind-set -- a set of presumptions based on a decades-long track record of hijackings. In the past, a takeover meant hostage negotiations and standoffs; crews were trained in the concept of "passive resistance." All of that changed forever when American Airlines Flight 11 collided with the north tower of the World Trade Center. What weapons the 19 men had in hand mattered little; the success of the attacks relied fundamentally on the element of surprise. And in this respect, their scheme was all but guaranteed not to fail.

In 2006, for several reasons -- from hardened cockpit doors to, especially, the awareness of passengers -- just the opposite is true. "Any hijacker will face a planeload of angry and frightened passengers," says Ross Johnson, a former Canadian intelligence officer and aviation security consultant. "And he will be badly injured or killed by the mob. That introduces significant doubt into his plan." Say what you want of terrorists, but they cannot afford to waste time and resources on schemes with a high probability of failure.

We, by comparison, are more than happy to waste billions of taxpayer dollars and untold hours of labor in a delusional attempt to thwart an attack that, in some sense, has already happened. No matter that a deadly sharp object can be fashioned from almost anything found on a plane -- from a wine bottle to a piece of plastic moulding -- we are nonetheless asked to queue for absurd lengths of time, subject to embarrassing pat-downs and confiscation of our belongings, lest anybody make it onto an aircraft with a pair of pointy scissors or a screwdriver.

With respect to the newly introduced rules banning liquids and gels, the folly is much the same. Regardless of how many hobby knives and shampoo bottles we confiscate at the X-ray machine, there will remain an unlimited number of ways to smuggle items onto a plane. We are not fighting materials per se, we are fighting the imagination and cleverness of the would-be saboteur who would make them dangerous. These people are the target.

As security expert Bruce Schneier has remarked, "Terrorism needs to be stopped at the planning stages. That's where our security can do the most good." Few would argue the value of keeping firearms, for instance, out of people's carry-ons, and there's something to be said for the deterrence factor that results from visible inspection. But reliance on airport X-ray screeners as a front-line anti-terror measure is at best naive.

"Hand-searching passengers who can be pre-screened and positively identified beforehand only diverts resources," says Johnson.

It's not very glamorous, but according to Johnson, the grunt work of rooting out terrorists relies on pre-gathered intelligence and, as a last resort, the on-site use of what experts call "behavioral profiling."

Next page: It's entirely possible the airline industry in 2006 would look the way it does had the attacks never happened