Ask the pilot

Who, exactly, is responsible for terrorizing the American public over the past month? Was it the failed London cabal, or the U.S. government, with an eye toward elections?

By Patrick Smith

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Sept. 15, 2006 | Truth be told, I had every intention of ceasing and desisting from further talk on terrorism and security. After a month of criticizing the Transportation Security Administration, the airlines and the traveling public for a mostly mindless response to the liquid-bomb scare in London, what's left to say?

Plenty, actually. Plenty, that is, that probably should have been said all along, for the story that won't go away is the story that never made headlines to start with -- one that ought to outrage, and to some degree frighten, every American. How would you feel, and how would all of the recent madness affecting air travel -- the long lines at airports, the banning of liquids and gels, and the thickening mood of fear -- look if you were told that allegations surrounding the London liquid-bomb conspiracy were in fact substantially exaggerated?

Consider yourself told.

In an Aug. 28th article in the New York Times, senior British officials admitted that public statements made following the arrest of suspects plotting to destroy airliners using liquid explosives were overcooked, inaccurate and "unfortunate." Revelations in the nearly 3,000-word story are startlingly out of sync with the doomsday rhetoric we promptly heard, and continue to hear, from the media and government. We learn the conspirators had been known to law enforcement officials for at least a year, and were under round-the-clock surveillance for quite some time. The plot's leaders were still in the process of recruiting and radicalizing would-be bombers. They lacked passports and airline tickets and, most critical of all, they had been thus far unsuccessful in producing liquid explosives.

"Questions about the immediacy and difficulty of the suspected bombing plot cast doubt on the accuracy of some of the public statements made at the time," the article concludes. That's a convoluted way of saying the plotters were likely months from pulling off the massive, synchronized attack we've been told was only days away. "The reactions of Britain and the United States," the story continues, "... were driven less by information about a specific, imminent attack than fear that other, unknown terrorists might strike." As for the scope of the attack, British investigators described the widely parroted report that up to 10 U.S. airliners had been targeted as "speculative" and "exaggerated."

Why then did U.S. and British government spokespeople, up to and including our respective heads of state, trumpet an evidently incipient scheme as having brought us to the very brink of catastrophe? Homeland Security czar Michael Chertoff spoke of the conspirators having been "really quite close to the execution stage."

"There may have been too much hyperventilating going on," offered Michael Sheehan, former deputy commissioner of counterterrorism for the New York Police Department, speaking in the Times.

The Times reporters are not the only ones to expose fallacy in the London scare. Among first to express serious skepticism about the bombers' readiness was Thomas C. Greene, whose essay in the Register, published a week after the arrests in London, explored the extreme difficulty faced in mixing and deploying the types of binary explosives purportedly to be used. Greene is the Register's associate editor and has written extensively on security issues. In researching his story, he conferred with professor Jimmie C. Oxley, an explosives specialist at the University of Rhode Island who has actually synthesized the same type of deadly cocktail coveted by the London plotters, and has studied it closely.

Greene concedes that the threat of liquid explosives does exist, but that it cannot be readily brewed from the kinds of liquids we have devoted most of our attention and resources to keeping away from airplanes. Certain benign liquids, when combined under highly specific conditions, are indeed dangerous. However, creating those conditions poses enormous challenges for a saboteur.

"The notion that deadly explosives can be cooked up in an airplane lavatory is pure fiction," Greene tells Salon. "A handy gimmick for action movies and shows like '24.' The reality proves disappointing: It's rather awkward to do chemistry in an airplane toilet. Nevertheless, our official protectors and deciders respond to such notions instinctively because they're familiar to us: We've all seen scenarios on television and in the cinema. This, incredibly, is why you can no longer carry a bottle of water onto a plane."

"I would not hesitate to allow that liquid explosives can pose a danger," Greene adds, recalling Ramzi Yousef's 1994 detonation of a small amount of nitroglycerin on Philippine Airlines Flight 434. One passenger was killed and a hole blown in the plane. "But the idea that confiscating someone's toothpaste is going to keep us safe is too ridiculous to entertain."

Greene's summary in the Register highlights the inanity of our banning of liquids and gels, shows us where other, more urgent dangers may lurk, and underscores the futility of relying on airport security to begin with as a useful antiterror instrument. One of his primary assertions is similar to my own: Thwarting terror attacks is not, and never has been, the responsibility of airport screeners. It's the job of law enforcement and intelligence professionals. In the meantime, if you're going to have a large-scale security apparatus at airports, for heaven's sake let it be trained and equipped with some common sense in mind.

"TSA has spent the past five years enacting an elaborate rain dance for public consumption," says Greene, "and making a mockery of effective transportation security."

Be that as it may, why, in light of such startling revelations, have we seen a void of accountability? Why isn't Chertoff being held accountable for scaring and harassing millions of travelers? Why has the Transportation Security Administration, under his control, been granted carte blanche to proceed with an indefinite set of carry-on luggage prohibitions that experts concede are ineffective? I previously chided both the airlines and a somnambulant traveling public for failing to express outrage over the senseless new luggage rules. That was before considering that the gantlet of prohibitions might have been cooked up in response to something that never really existed in the first place. Perhaps it's not wholly fair to criticize fliers when, after all, they believed the threat to be genuine and imminent. Assuming it was not, I'll tender the same basic question put forth in this space a week ago: Where's the outrage?

Next page: Many airline employees are quietly delighted at the decrease in carry-ons