Saturday, Sep 6, 2008
Setting the record straight on security. Plus: Annie Jacobsen lives!
Dec 16, 2005 | In response to last Friday's cover story on security and the shooting at Miami International Airport, nearly 50 letters have been posted on Salon. As is wont to happen in an open readers forum, the comments took on a life of their own, feeding off one another until most were simply letters about other letters. The main points of the article became somewhat lost in the fray -- garbled, misconstrued or outright misrepresented.
For one thing, I never contended that the presence of air marshals on commercial flights was, in itself, a bad idea. Neither did I say the marshals in Miami made the wrong conscious decision in firing on Rigoberto Alpizar. The story ran under the headline banner of "a horrible mistake." That was an editorial choice of Salon's editors. I agree that it was a horrible mistake, although the wording, and its prominent placement, tends to imply that the marshals had fired in error, or had broken protocol. I don't believe they did. It appears the men did exactly what they were trained to do. My problem is less with the shooting per se, though obviously it raises important questions, than with the system that set off the chain of events in the first place: our irrational obsession with the Sept. 11 template; our unhealthy fixation on terrorism in general; and the unabated growth of a security-industrial complex that already infiltrates too much of daily life.
We've also been watching too many movies, and often have highly unrealistic expectations of what a terrorist might or might not do. Consider this e-mail (edited slightly for clarity) from Salon reader "Oedipus," and his defense of the Alpizar shooting:
"Wouldn't it be ironic if the next terrorist plot involved a husband and wife team in which the husband acts erratically and runs towards the cockpit? After hearing pleas of mercy from the exasperated wife, the air marshals, along with all 98 passengers onboard, are torn to shreds by the 6.5 pounds of Semtex the husband detonates in his suitcase bomb -- the extra time bought by his wife allowing him to press the button."
It's true we shouldn't underestimate the cleverness of an adversary, which is the underlying point of Oedipus' letter. However, the entire scenario is needlessly theatrical. Do Palestinian suicide bombers jump up and down making spectacles of themselves before they blow up a bus? They don't have to, and neither would a man with a suitcase bomb. They board quietly, then surreptitiously detonate their explosives. There have been dozens of bombings against civilian airliners over the years. Not once has there been any need for the perpetrators to buy time before igniting their stash.
Next is this (edited for clarity) from Jonathen Versen:
"I am a firm believer in protecting our civil liberties; nevertheless I fail to see how being allowed to bring any and all sharp objects aboard a common carrier [an airline] is a civil liberty ... And you say, 'If the Sept. 11 terrorists had been unable to bring boxcutters aboard, they would have fashioned weapons from something else.' Okay, like what?"
The article contained a few examples, but the list is virtually endless: plastic or composite assault knives, broken bottles wrapped with tape, toxic chemicals -- almost anything. To put it bluntly, and at risk of repeating myself to the point of mantra: The 2001 attacks had nothing to do with airport weapons or airport security, and everything to do with our understanding and assumptions of skyjackings at that time.
An attack in the style of Sept. 11 is no longer a serious credible threat. We shouldn't drop our guard, and indeed we've adopted several beneficial protective measures, such as the armoring of cockpit doors, the allowance for crews to carry weapons, and so forth. But the greatest safeguard against an airborne takeover is the intangible one: a radical shift in the skyjack paradigm. People used to commandeer airplanes, and sometimes gain entrance to cockpits, merely by making threats, without weapons of any kind. Take me to Cuba, and all that. Crews were versed in what their training manuals called "passive resistance." Until 2001, it was a strategy that historically saved lives and avoided catastrophe. The reason Sept. 11 went off without hitch is because it was virtually guaranteed not to fail. The opposite is now true.
"The TSA restrictions on knives and tools are a dog-and-pony show designed to make the law-abiding feel better," comments Tom (last name withheld), an airline pilot trained in martial arts. "I could fashion a weapon and dispatch someone quite easily using my shoe laces, a credit card, a wine bottle, or even my ring. But the days of taking airliners by force are gone."
As for civil liberties, nobody said it was a person's right to carry sharp objects onto an airliner (though maybe, as I'm sure will be argued by a number of readers, it is). But because something can be banned doesn't mean it ought to be. Not when millions of dollars and millions of wasted man-hours are in the balance, and could be better spent elsewhere.
Assuming, that is, the American public actually hungers for reasonable and effective security, or is content with pretensions of it. "I agree with your point of view about security theatre," submits e-mailer Dave Jacque," but the majority of people equate intrusiveness with effectiveness."
Do they?
"One of the problems with security is that a successful approach yields a negative result -- nothing to show for your efforts," voices Joe d'Eon, an airline pilot and author of the "Fly With Me" podcast series. "By prohibiting small sharp objects, the kind many travelers are likely to be carrying, the agency can demonstrate that it is 'taking action'. The other job of the TSA is to make the public feel safe. While the confiscating of scissors may have no effect on actual safety, it may have an effect on public perception. There is some value in that, I suppose."
Are Jacque and d'Eon right? As for the alleged psychological value in rummaging through carry-ons for X-Acto knives, it's exceedingly difficult to have faith in the idea of coddling wrongheaded public perception, particularly when it involves millions of squandered tax dollars and colossal amounts of wasted labor. The future, maybe, is bleaker than I thought. All the vigilance in the world won't change one simple fact: It is only a matter of time before somebody, using one means or another, again attacks a jetliner. Already we're at full-security tilt. What will our reaction be then?
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