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Liquid Ban

29 Dec 2007 05:40 pm

More reasons to be infuriated with the new airline security regime:

The folly is much the same with respect to the liquids and gels restrictions, introduced two summers ago following the breakup of a London-based cabal that was planning to blow up jetliners using liquid explosives. Allegations surrounding the conspiracy were revealed to substantially embellished. In an August, 2006 article in the New York Times, British officials admitted that public statements made following the arrests were overcooked, inaccurate and “unfortunate.” The plot’s leaders were still in the process of recruiting and radicalizing would-be bombers. They lacked passports, airline tickets and, most critical of all, they had been unsuccessful in actually producing liquid explosives. Investigators later described the widely parroted report that up to ten U.S airliners had been targeted as “speculative” and “exaggerated.” [...]

“The notion that deadly explosives can be cooked up in an airplane lavatory is pure fiction,” Greene told me during an interview. “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.”

But, hey, you can never put too much hassle into air travel.

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Comments (48)

Given the number of rich white people inconvenienced you’d think there would be more push back against the current level of restrictions.

What are the poll results for reducing security among people that actually fly on a regular basis?

Even this article, good as it is, could be written in a way that's clearer and more helpful by saying not, "London-based cabal that was planning to blow up jetliners" but rather, "...hoped to blow up jetliners" or "...planned to attempt to..." since it's more than a bit inaccurate in itself to say that someone is "planning" to do something they probably cannot do and are a long way from being able to do, even if the plan itself were not crazy.

I found this:


...but consider for a moment the hypocrisy of T.S.A.’s confiscation policy. At every concourse checkpoint you’ll see a bin or barrel brimming with contraband containers taken from passengers for having exceeded the volume limit. Now, the assumption has to be that the materials in those containers are potentially hazardous. If not, why were they seized in the first place?

a little disingenuous. Obviously the point is not necessarily to confiscate hazardous stuff, but rather to convince terrorists to abandon their plans to bring hazardous stuff on board.

The only airline security issue that needed to be addressed after 9/11/01 was the use of wide body aircraft as missiles. Narrow body aircraft are insufficiently massive to do the kind of damage we saw at the WTC. The scale of destruction a narrow body jet can cause is similar to a hundred different scenarios that go unmonitored in daily life.

And coming soon, no loose batteries!

Well, the truly rich all have private (or corporate) jets, and don't have to put up with this horseshit. The merely rich, or affluent, or the working Joes and Janes who make up the majority of really frequent fliers (think software techs or entry-level consultants) don't enter into the political calculus.

Airline security as implemented by the TSA is all about impressing Ma and Pa Kettle who travel once or twice a year. "Wow! We can't take liquids past security! We have to take our shoes and belts off! We must be really safe now! Thank you President Bush!" That and a general CYA attitude -- if something happens they can say, "But we did everything we could!"

I wish someone would do a poll of frequent fliers on opinions about security, but if you want anecdotes go to www.flyertalk.com and find the Safety and Security board. These are the people who fly 50,000 or more miles a year, and the general run of opinion is that TSA is all a charade intended to impress the rubes.

I'm not a really frequent flier anymore (did 25,000-40,000 miles per year for ten years but escaped that), but don't get me started on the TSA.

I went to Israel recently, and was surprised and amused to receive metal butter knives with my meals. One might speculate that they're just more serious about this stuff, but on the way back my travelling companion was strip-searched, so my conclusion is that their main concern is to discomfort Arabs. Inconveniencing everybody is just a much lower priority.

I suspect that the TSA's real goal is not to prevent any particular terrorist strategy (although that would be a good thing), but to create a screening procedure that is somewhat unpredictable, somewhat humiliating, and somewhat irrational. Irritate the innocent, but really drive the guilty crazy.

DJ: The policy is primarily supported by those selfsame upper-middle-class white people, because it is so inconvenient. The inconvenience proves to them that Something Is Being Done. So they grouse about it amongst their friends, but do nothing themselves to improve the situation, and come down like a ton of bricks on anyone suggesting actual reform. Psychologists call this phenomenon "cognitive dissonance" -- I just call it more proof that birth control is under-promoted.

You know, this is a really stupid piece. Take this for example:


...not really the job of airport security at all. Rather, it’s the job of government agencies and law enforcement. ... Air crimes need to be stopped at the planning stages.

Sure, but you know what the problem is here? It's not easy to stop crimes at the planning stages. Doh. At least if your country is not a police state. So - unless you're willing to let the government install video cameras in your bedroom, kitchen and bathroom - just get on with the program, fella, like everybody else.

Shouldn't we encouraging terrorists to attempt making TATP on board? From what I've read the most likely outcome is one dead terrorist and a refurb of the lav.

Obviously the point is not necessarily to confiscate hazardous stuff, but rather to convince terrorists to abandon their plans to bring hazardous stuff on board.

I can't think of a better way to screw up the TSA security theatre than to try something before the screening cordon. Back when Atlanta pushed screening out to the atrium, you had long snaking lines that were a prime target for anyone wanting a mass casualty event. Of course, as a commenter at NYT point out, mentioning this at the time would get you fast tracked for a cavity search.

If the nation is full of terrorists aiming and plotting to attack us at any moment, why are there no terrorists attacking the millions of easy soft targets they could hit any time?

I mean, I'm a big one for airport security maneuvers on principle, not just for particular conceptions of the terrorist threat.

But if the swarthy hordes are continually meeting in basements to plan their attacks, why are they all presumably intent only on complicated plans in risky secured locations?

This may be overly cynical of me, but I wonder how much the liquid/gel ban has increased the profits of airport retailers and the major soft drink corporations. With tens of millions of air travelers no longer able to bring in their own water, the potential for increased revenues was enormous. Could this be the real reason behind the ban?

I know it's overly cynical and conspiratorial, but the benefits of the ban to soft drink companies and airport retailers has to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Next time I fly I want to try to bring a frozen water bottle with me. The ban is on liquids, and ice is a solid, right? So I should theoretically be okay. Honestly though, I'm sure the average TSA person is far too stupid to get the distinction and if I try to argue the point I will end up body cavity searched.

Have you never watched "McGyver"? Plus, our enemies have Tivo.

Sigh.

These issues require a certain minimum amount of knowledge to discuss intelligently.

The shortcoming of the liberal arts curriculum is that it produces graduates whose technical ignorance is deep and vast. At least Socrates ensured that his philosophy majors realized that they were ignorant.

The widely available "Improvised Munitions Handbook" --developed for the CIA and Special Forces -- gives several formulas for easily improvised liquid explosives made from common materials.

Wine bottles also have an interesting attribute -- the deep indentation in their botton resembles the indentation in a shaped charged explosive. In fact, I've seen reports of improvised shaped charges made from wine bottles which penetrated several inches of steel.

An interesting question is whether the intensely hot jet of a shaped charge --detonated in the middle of the plane beside a window seat and aimed at the wing-fuselage joint -- would penetrate into the wing --aka "the half empty fuel tank".

Thank you for flying with Southwest Airlines and we hope you have a pleasant flight.

I always carry an empty bottle through security and re-fill it from a water fountain inside the secured area before getting on the plane.

Here's a good SNL skit on the foolish three-ounce rule.

Ah yes, another tip from the US government. An altimeter switch can be made by soldering one wire to a copper plate which is glued to a partially inflated balloon.

The balloon is placed inside a small cardboard box. The other wire is soldered to a second copper plate and that plate is glued to the underside of the lid which closes the box. Wire 1 goes to a detonator inside an explosive package. Wire 2 goes to a battery. Package is placed on plane. When plane takes offs and climbs to 8000 feet, the lower air pressure causes the balloon to expand upward in the box, the first copper plate contacts the second copper plate, the circuit is closed and boom.

On an unrelated matter, note that recently deceased Benezir Bhutto's father was overthrown and executed by Pakistani General Muhammmad Zia. General Zia later died in a mysterious plane crash --see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Zia-ul-Haq .

DonK: "Well, the truly rich all have private (or corporate) jets, and don't have to put up with this horseshit. The merely rich, or affluent, or the working Joes and Janes who make up the majority of really frequent fliers (think software techs or entry-level consultants) don't enter into the political calculus."

Is this a parody-of-the-left written by Jonah Goldberg?

Only those who fly in private jets "enter into the political calculus."

Every candidate in Iowa and NH replies: We Wish!

Take it from someone who spent ten years planning terrorist attacks in this country.

You're all incredibly vulnerable.

I could reduce any city in this country to a state of panic in a week or two. No problem. All I would need is a handgun, maybe a rifle, some matches or a lighter or a small high intensity butane burner. Kill a few people - especially "important" people - apparently at random and everybody freaks.

Look at the Zebra killings in San Francisco years ago. A few whacked out blacks in a cult threw San Francisco into a panic where any black person on the street was a potential assassin just by shooting a few random citizens.

The TSA is a joke. All it does is "keep out the riffraff", i.e., morons who would actually try to bring a bomb on board on their person or in their carry-on luggage. Those days are over and have been over for decades, since the terrorist air bombings of the 70's. Granted, a lot of Muslim terrorists do seem to be morons. I've got a copy of the supposed "Al Qaeda" manual issued to their terrorist recruits - and it's not terribly bright.

Besides which, any terrorist worth his salt - and fortunately there aren't many of those - would simply study the security procedures, find a hole in them, and use that. As Dick Marcinko said in one of his "Red Cell" books, security people operate on the basis of checklists; terrorists don't. His Red Cell SEAL Team penetrated every known form of military security there is, including Groton nuclear sub base, US Navy nuclear weapons lockers, Air Force One, and the President's cottage at Camp David. And they did it using the exact same techniques terrorists use, because as Dick said, "The only way to do it is to do it."

As I've said before, there are only two ways to stop terrorists:

1) Kill them - which is only feasible if they are a small, localized group with little popular support. For groups not fitting that definition, use infiltration and standard counterintelligence techniques to locate them and take them out.

In my case, operating alone, that would have been utterly ineffective as well. OTOH, I would have fit the first definition - except that, being mobile, I would not have been easily located.

Your worst terrorist nightmare will be a bunch of guys operating totally independently from any central leadership. Trust me, you will NEVER stop that scenario from being effective until you somehow find and kill each and every one of them.

Fortunately, virtually all terrorist groups are just that - groups. So they follow the usual primate hierarchy infrastructures, which makes them vulnerable.

The Al Qaeda "franchise" begins to approach this sort of "distributed" model, but almost all of the "franchisees" still have enough connections to their overall community to be detected, or ratted out.

It's really no different from any criminal scenario. Either you have a "criminal enterprise" - a drug ring or the Mafia - or you have individuals like serial killers. Serial killers are literally no different from "terrorists" in their methods except for their non-political stance (and some serial killers have HAD "political" or social stances in some sense) - and they're harder to catch because they operate alone and unknown to anyone else.

2) Change your policies so they don't target you.

"Security measures" are useless. They should only be done to the degree that they are demonstratively cost effective. Otherwise, they're like the stupid notion of "banning guns" - completely unworkable and totally ineffective.

Richard Steven Hack:
Why do you remind me so much of dwight schrute?

I know it's overly cynical and conspiratorial, but the benefits of the ban to soft drink companies and airport retailers has to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

I agree with this. Not in the sense of why it got passed, but why there is inertia for it to be sustained.

The concessions inside security took a big hit after 9/11 when only ticketed passengers could pass through. The liquid ban would seem to mitigate this decrease.

The only other financial interests that would be opposed to the liquid ban are the duty free guys. Departing from an international arrival at some airports requires you to exit the secure area. So you're totally hosed if you need to get on a connecting flight. I have personally seen people get stuck with a bottle of whiskey and perfume that they couldn't bring with them because of this.

Surprised this is only coming up here now. This has long been laughed at and discussed in the security community. One of the more astute commenters on this and other TSA ridiculousness (which he calls "security theatre") has been Bruce Schneier.

http://www.schneier.com/blog/

Ummm... no, that wasn't meant as a parody. Just saying, the only people whose opinion would carry any weight with the Bush admin on this would be execs and such, and they're largely exempt from the nonsense.

If there were a real groundswell of opinion on these things generating letters to Congress, they might get changed (I believe that's how the silly ban on lighters was dropped), but except for a small minority of people (my previously mentioned computer techs and consultants), it's not really a big deal. Hell, every time I have to go through this (maybe six flights a year now) I gripe about it, but it's still about number 39 on my list of beefs against the federal government. The majority of voters never fly, and I would guess most of the rest do maybe one round trip a year, so it's just not that big a deal. And probably some of them are impressed with how "thorough" it is.

There's just not a big constituency asking for a loosening of the rules, and there probably would be a large constituency of those terrified by Bush & Co opposed to any loosening, so therefore no change happens, so I'll just line up with everyone else, take my shoes and belt off, and keep my mouth shut when around the TSA so I don't get put on the no-fly list.

Had to look up this guy "Dwight" on Wikipedia since I've never seen "The Office".

At first, when I saw this, I said, "No way":

"In a special feature on the Season 3 DVD, Rainn Wilson describes Dwight as someone who doesn't hate the system, but has a deep and abiding love for it."

That definitely is not me. I seriously hate the system.

However, some of the further stuff actually does sound like me. OTOH, a lot of it - actually most of it - doesn't. Of course, any of that stuff could be cherry-picked to sound like almost anybody. Hell, I once found 21 direct comparisons between me and Adolf Hitler in a biography of him. But no brush moustache.

Overall, I gotta say: Naah. Some valid comparisons, but no cigar. Not even close.

When I say Chris Ford is a moron, I base it on the stupidity of what he says, not some imaginary identity I give him in my head about how he lives. Like I don't call SLC an "old, bitter" guy because I don't know how old he is and I don't care. That he's a Zionist thug is obvious from his statements, I don't need to know what his background is.

The bottom line: deal with what I say on the merits, not whose saying it, let alone your imaginary picture of me.

There is an an art to blog comments.

You can't pick out just one comment and know who someone is but there is triangulation in the old radar sense.

SLC is old because he once pounded on the rail about going to a student demonstration to hail the Israeli army during the '67 war.

You could have got there before that, fairly easily. Nothing definitive but good enough.

Maybe I'm wierd, I could care less what's peoples opinion are but I'm fascinated by what exactly made them come to a blog and get fired up and type. The personal details always fill in the story. It's made me quite misanthropic honestly.


Off-topic:

I've got a new post on Ken's Guide To The Bible for all who are interested.

The tragedy of Richard Steven Hack is that he lives his ex-con life overimpressed with himself and his writings, when no one else is.

"It's made me quite misanthropic honestly."

I was misanthropic way before blogs came around.

The tragedy of Chris Ford is that he doesn't even have to be an ex-con to be over impressed with himself and his writings, when no one else is.

On the other hand, since we don't really know him, maybe he IS an ex-con.

Like that old cartoon, "On the Internet nobody knows you're a dog."

Except by what you say.

Based on that, I'd guess Ford wears a white sheet, burns crosses in black neighborhoods, firebombs synagogues, and cusses out his postman - when he isn't beating his wife and kids or getting drunk at the neighborhood bar - or going to remedial education classes for the mentally retarded.

But if the swarthy hordes are continually meeting in basements to plan their attacks, why are they all presumably intent only on complicated plans in risky secured locations?

They're not. The reason air travel security has become so strict is that air travel is extremely important to the global economy. The idea is to make the airport a "risky secured location" from the perspective of terrorists, so that they eschew targeting this sector of the economy.

So far the strategy seems to be working, although, miraculously, we haven't had a Lockerbie-style incident yet. Insufficient screening of airport workers (that is, those with access to planes) and lack of explosives detecting equipment for use on checked luggage provide rich opportunities to terrorists. Sooner or later they'll blow several planes out of the skies, and the days of checking luggage will be gone. Non-rich travelers who need more than modest carry-ons will have to send their luggage to their destinations in advance of arrival, or else have it follow them, or else make purchases after landing.

My daughter was scheduled to leave Heathrow the day the liquid bomb plot (would-be plot) was discovered. I have to say, living here and staring this in the face at a much closer distance than anyone in the US, flying is a much more frightening prospect. Almost everyone who works behind the scenes at UK airports has a dark complexion, and according to the news, is a potential terrorist. We are bombarded with the results of polls that tell us that a certain (rather high) percentage of Muslims living here think it's okay to kill people to accomplish certain aims.

Yet I'm comforted by the fact that even well educated terrorists fail to pull off their schemes. This summer's car bombs were pretty much a bust, despite being carried out by MDs and PhDs.

So even with the huge fear factor (I was scared to fly, even before I'd heard the word terrorist) I'd much prefer to be able to carry a bottle of water on to a plane, and know that the people working on the plane and loading it were properly screened, eliminating at least some of the crap-shoot factor.

Otherwise, I spend the first few minutes on the plane figuring out what the odds are this will be the one that goes down.

Yeah, I'm sure there's plenty wrong with airport security, but obviously it's a complicated issue with many judgment calls and there's a big difference between expert analysis and an ignorant rant, which is what this Patrick Smith guy managed to produce (even though he's apparently a pilot).

"there's a big difference between expert analysis and an ignorant rant, which is what this Patrick Smith guy managed to produce (even though he's apparently a pilot)."

Read the article more closely. He spoke with experts vis-a-vis the explosives issue and the opinion was it's ridiculous. He's also perfectly correct that inadequate security around the aircraft is the real threat.

The fact is that any terrorist group with any smarts at all will be able to penetrate almost any security feasible in a large, crowded facility like an airport with various people in various uniforms and with cargo containers walking around, plus a lot of stuff coming across the perimeter in trucks, vans, and other vehicles.

Hell, fly your explosives and guns in with your private plane at the private end of the airport, if there is one.

Hell, all they have to do is walk up to a checkpoint, pull out some weapons, clean the clocks of the security guards, run onto a boarding plane, and blow it up ON THE GROUND if it isn't allowed to take off.

There's no way to stop a suicide attack. None. Period. Unless you got enough firepower on the perimeter to stop it cold - which no US airport security has.

These cops carry AK's and grenade launchers and submachineguns at US airports? Why do you think every foreign airport you see in the movies has cops with serious guns standing around? Because other countries have to deal with real terrorism.

There's also no way to stop someone with a terrorist background that isn't easily detected getting a job inside the security perimeter.

Jasper has it right - they could easily just blow planes out of the sky with checked baggage.

They could drop landing or taking off planes with air to ground missiles from outside the airport fence if they wanted to. They could run onto the field with explosives, seize a vehicle and plow it into a landing plane - dumb plan, but could work if done correctly.

The result doesn't even have to be a seriously destroyed plane. Just DAMAGE enough aircraft or even threaten to do so and the air travel industry is in deep shit.

For that matter, just attack the airport itself! If the airport is shut down every damn day, whose going to fly to or from it? Hit the tank farms from a distance with simple rockets. The Palestinians hit Israel with Qassems which are little more than toy rockets. Do the same at several US airports every week for a month.

Hell, just one guy walks into an airport with a pocket full of hand grenades. Get into the waiting rooms, pull out the grenades, pull the pins, yell "Allahu Akbar" and toss them. Twenty passengers dead, thirty wounded. A different guy does this every day for a week. No more air travel in the US the following week, I can guarantee you.

Do the same on every local commuter rail line and transit station - in Union Square, in Times Square, at Grand Central, at BART stations here in San Francisco.

Do it with car bombs. This country is MADE for car bombs. Drive into Times Square at rush hour with a van loaded with explosives like they tried to use at the original World Trade Center bombing. A hundred or two hundred dead, five hundred or more wounded, easy. Use two or three trucks to make sure one makes it.

Get a heavy vehicle like a multi-wheel truck, pile it full of explosives, put five guys on it with AK's, plow through the airport security, blow it up at the front door. Airport shut down for a week.

The reality is there simply aren't any terrorists planning such operations.

While such operations could be done and would be effective, it requires repetitive operations - chronic operations. One of the main problems with most terrorist groups is an inability to pull off repeated effective operations.

Doing a 9/11 every five or ten years is like being struck by lightning - it's irrelevant.

You'll know things are really bad when this crap starts happening every month, then every week, then every day.

The only countries who have had to experience this are Italy back in the Red Brigades days, Turkey during the Grey Wolves. And of course, Iraq today. Chronic, day after day terrorism.

Does anybody think US civil liberties would withstand the sort of thing that is happening in Baghdad if it happened in New York at the same frequency?

Count yourselves lucky that the Islamic terrorists can only get over here maybe once every five or ten years.

Richard, he says:


I’m not suggesting that the rules be tightened for non-crew members so much as relaxed for all accredited workers.

He wants less airport security.
It definitely sounds like he wants to trade airport security for more surveillance outside the airport, see the quote I posted upthread.

As far as the explosives experts he talked to, he says:


“I would not hesitate to allow that liquid explosives can pose a danger,” Greene added, recalling Ramzi Yousef’s 1994 detonation of a small nitroglycerine bomb aboard Philippine Airlines Flight 434. The explosion was a test run for the so-called “Project Bojinka,” an Al Qaeda scheme to simultaneously destroy a dozen widebody airliners over the Pacific Ocean. “But the idea that confiscating someone’s toothpaste is going to keep us safe is too ridiculous to entertain.”

Well, it doesn't seem too ridiculous to me. If confiscating my toothpaste will make it more difficult or (hopefully) impossible for a terrorist to make a nitroglycerine bomb on a plane - I'm all for it.

My objection to the security theater is that the use of commercial airliners as gravity bombs was 'solved' the moment it became public knowledge that hijackers weren't necessarily going to give you a free visit to Cuba. Partway through the 9-11 attack, as demonstrated by the one plane that didn't reach it's target.

That problem? Solved. Ain't gonna happen again. Only happened in the first place because we were telling passengers not to fight back when hijacked.

This leaves commercial airliners as direct targets of high value. Frankly, nothing feasible could make them untouchable, but what we can do, and already have done, is make them less cost effective targets than other targets on the ground. Problem also solved.

Frankly, Hack may have a nasty history, but he's being real about this: What's protecting us at this point is mostly the limitations of the terrorists, not the effectiveness of our security. Short of a panopticon police state, we couldn't deal with a large terrorist movement with non-stupid members. Be thankful we're not faced with one, our civil liberties wouldn't survive it.

What's protecting us at this point is mostly the limitations of the terrorists, not the effectiveness of our security.

Yes, but another way to look at it is that by employing all these security procedures you (hopefully) remove the threat of aircraft being attacked by wannabes, amateurs, lone nutcases.

Sure, it's still possible, but now it would be a task for professionals with an organization - and those can be more easily detected and infiltrated by the law enforcement.

"Sure, it's still possible, but now it would be a task for professionals with an organization"

Not so. Any engineer could get a bomb past airport security without much trouble, as the limitations of the explosives sniffers and other scanning technologies aren't precisely secret. It's not the organization that's needed, it's the tech savvy. Terrorist organizations are remarkably lacking in that regard.

To give you an example, I few out to a robotic combat event, Battlebots, not long after 9-11. They put my luggage through an amazing array of examinations, but I was well aware of how little work would have been required to turn that bot into a time activated incendiary bomb. And nothing they would have detected with all their scanners, either.

Destruction is just inherently easier than creation, any engineer can dream up ways to accomplish it with minimal resources. It's just amazing how limited the terrorists have proven to be in this regard.

Still, it has to be an engineer, and probably not just any engineer.

That means that you have eliminated the threat from a whole bunch of wannabe terrorists who are store clerks, nurses, accountants, priests and on and on and on. That ain't bad already.

Or in other words, it means that a store-clerk-terrorist now has to recruit an engineer, which means - an organization. Easier to detect.

"It's not easy to stop crimes at the planning stages. Doh. At least if your country is not a police state."

Actually, yes it is. The FBI had all the information needed to stop the 9/11 attacks--before the Patriot Act made the U.S. a police state.
As is now well known, field agents were sending up alarms left and right, e.g., about Saudi men taking lessons on how to steer but not take off and land wide-body jets.
There was plenty of information to stop the crime at the planning stage - just no will to do it.

Sooner or later they'll blow several planes out of the skies, and the days of checking luggage will be gone. Non-rich travelers who need more than modest carry-ons will have to send their luggage to their destinations in advance of arrival, or else have it follow them, or else make purchases after landing.

It only surprises me that no-one's considered re-introducing the transatlantic steamer in modern form. I've looked seriously at the options to chug across the pond on a container ship, with my possessions on a pallet. Eventually, steerage travel may return.

Of course, the ultra-rich stopped flying commercial airlines some time ago, and I'm sure that the past six years have been a nice little earner for the providers of fractional (or full) private jets. Warren Buffett got into the business quite early. Ah, the irony of James Fallows' piece on using small planes and small airports, published in June 2001.

Get into the waiting rooms, pull out the grenades, pull the pins, yell "Allahu Akbar" and toss them. Twenty passengers dead, thirty wounded. A different guy does this every day for a week. No more air travel in the US the following week, I can guarantee you.

The irony of 9/11, if you can call it that, is that it was so spectacular that a repeat on US soil would be hard to top. Of course, atrocities on a smaller scale, widely distributed, would have a similar effect. Shutting down half a dozen busy airports before security could be crippling. Pick the ones with the longest lines, force another redesign of the architecture, end up with a situation where cars are screened on the way in as if they're crossing the border.

You'll still not find many trashcans in British tube and railway stations, a throwback to the days of the IRA. And though the day-to-day vigilance is fading into memory, when a parked van or abandoned bag was immediately suspect, it's not forgotten.

Other comments discussing layers and layers of stupid security are appropriate. Now there is a NEW RULE that says passagers will be limited to no more than 2 lithium batteries weighing less than 8 grams total from checked luggage or 8 grams total in anything you carry on (certain laptops exceed that and anyone with a laptop and spare battery will be out of luck).

Why? Stupid, stupid people overeacting to reports that shorted lithium batteries of a certain size could blow up and burn - thus making them "ideal" for "Evildoer Terrahists!!".

Add them and inability of many people to work or entertain themselves on laptop in flight, abb1, along with toothpaste, and a 1000 other items with a list of another thousand possible "menaces" to "Perfect Flight Safety" to follow. Just wait until terrorists learn, like drug smugglers have to 30 years, that it is possible to internally pack a person with 4-10 pounds of C-4 as easily as cocaine can be packed into a drug mule. abb1 - "Well, if it means we can be safer, I am all in favor of body cavity searches done by an imperious MCdonalds reject on me. Then the worst that can happen is that person just blowing themselves up amidst thousands of people waiting for the security theatrics checkpoints.

Destruction is just inherently easier than creation, any engineer can dream up ways to accomplish it with minimal resources. It's just amazing how limited the terrorists have proven to be in this regard.
Posted by Brett Bellmore

Those of us with engineering or scientific backgrounds, even those of us who haven't used the degree and professional certs for years because we went into management, consulting, finance are all notorious for looking at technical solutions to defeat safety systems or security as a way of decreasing vulnerabilty - it can just as easily be turned 180 by someone out to harm with similar training. And there is a plethora of jobless, or underemployed well-educated Muslim scientists and engineers.

And we snort and talk to friends or acquaintances as toenail clippers and pocketknives and someone caught with a couple .22 bullets forgotten in a pocket after target shooting are pounced on. One guy noted that white phosphorus is not something the detectors are set for...so if one plasticized it and molded it into a common appliance like a Holy Mujahadeen baby carrier - Poof!
Or noting that the ingredients of thermite are not picked up, what greater reward in the eyes of Allah could some Jihadi who missed martyrdom but got both legs blown off by a US Marine than to get on an infidel plane with 6-8 pounds of thermite ingredients in his prothesises or wheelchair.
The list of ways around security any group of engineers can dream up over a case of beer and bags of Doritos, or stuck in endless lines holding out their smelly shoes to the "Safety from Terrorism people" - is long.

The truth, and Lefties hate this - is that America has 100,000 possible terorist targets. Few can be absolutely defended. Even those can be penetrated by a Red Force SEAL Team testing security - over half the time. The people in charge have decided that since true security is prohibitively expensive to protect all targets and we can't ban Muslims - security will be mainly for show to reassure the clueless in the general public, be enough and unpredictable enough that terrorists will either fail or be detected early or detected on a training "dry run" the Islamoids are fond of.

The real things that form our security and explain the failure of AQ and other radical Islamoid groups to stage adequate (for them) levels of terror attacks are things that set Lefty teeth gritting:

1. People don't give a shit about PC. They are, though government is prohibited officially - profiling like crazy. Muslims at airports or out and about in America are watched as suspicious activity is reported. Various rights groups wail about the "persecution", but the public believes that even if 9 of 10 reports of "suspicious Muslims" are false alarms, its worth it. The people will report, they expect the police to investigate, they expect the shysters and their bogus lawsuits against well-meaning citizens to butt out.

2. Taking the fight to the enemy, rather than waiting for them to come here and do Beslan or Madrid. Lefties hate that as "agression" attacking before we are attacked...but the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the 80 quiet ones elsewhere have decimated AQ and a few other hardcore Islamoid terror groups leadership and staffing, putting them off balance, and fighting for survival in their sandy lands or the Subcontinent or in the infidel countries they have infiltrated. We are on the offensive, not the terrorists - much as Lefties and anti-Westerners HATE that as so mean and unfair to radical Islamists...

3. Hard coercive interrogations that cause Jewish human rights activists, traditional anti-American Left, the Times, Euroweenies, and the ACLU to piss themselves - have worked. Major attacks designed to kill thousands prevented, whole networks of Islamist vipers rolled up. Electronic signals intercept of radical Muslim financiers, ratline operators, weapons people may deeply distress Lefties who call it wiretapping and an infringement of terrorist's "precious rights" - but most people are fine with it, even if they hate Bush. Those who wish to shut down interrogations and electronic intelligence work on terrorsists and wish to shield Muslims who attend Flight School records from agencies unless a judge establishes probable cause that people like Atta intended harm - are way out on a limb. One large mass murder attack that could have been prevented but for their efforts, and the political or judicial careers of those that sacrificed American lives for "terrorist's Constitutional Rights" - will be over.


Abb1, you can't "make" nitroglycerine on a plane. Period. People should really be required to take more high school chemistry.

The explosion on Flight 434 was of nitroglycerine brought onto the plane in a contact lens solution bottle. It killed exactly one person, the person who's seat the bomb was under. No one else was seriously injured, and the plane landed safely.

To bring down a large jet with a passenger compartment explosion would require a much larger container than your lost toothpaste tube.

Don Williams' yawping to the contrary (I guarantee no successful terrorist is ever going to use an altimeter switch made out of a balloon), the article is exactly correct: there is no realistic scenario where benign liquids could be combined within an airplane during flight to make a plane-destroying explosive. Prepared explosives can always be brought on, of course, but the liquid variants are almost always foul-smelling, and the most obvious one, nitroglycerine, is detectable at the security checkpoint with sniffers or chemical swipes.

The real tragedy of the airline security measures is not the thousands of confiscated toothpaste tubes, but the wasted government effort invested in providing no more than the illusion of "doing something".

Bruce, but surely doing chemical swipes on all those toothpaste tubes and water bottles would've required even more effort, no? Again, I'm not an expert, but I can easily imagine how confiscating toothpaste tubes might be the most efficient solution in this case.

1) Chris Ford is wrong. What's being sacrificed are not "terrorist Constitutional Rights" but the Bill of Rights for Americans. What Dick Cheney and George Bush are creating will be a far greater threat to Americans than Al Qaeda could ever have hoped to be.

Al Qaeda, after all, would not exist if we merely restrained the predatory fucking of the Middle East by some of our wealthy capitalists and their buttboys inserted into the US Government.

2) Why do you think that Dick Cheney and George Bush have made no effort to capture Bin Laden? THEY DON'T WANT TO!

Because Bin Laden and Al Qaeda are enormously useful to Big Oil.

They have given George W an excuse to waste the lives of 3700 of our soldiers and $1 Trillion of our tax dollars in order to seize the second largest oil reserves in the world under the guise of the "war on terror".

3) They have given George W an excuse to build military bases in Central Asia and move US Troops there -- allegedly for the "war on terror" but in reality to protect the $1 Billion investment Chevron has made in exploiting the Caspian Sea oil deposits. That's the same Chevron who named one of their oil tankers after our Secretary of State when she served on their Board a few years back.

4) Our superrich are not worried about a few raggedy ass malcontents from minor countries on the far side of the world -- they're worried about the American people. The Department of Homeland Security exists to protect them from the American people --once our stupid citizens finally wake up and realize how they've been fucked.

5) A few months ago, the Director of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff, defined who the threat really is:

"WASHINGTON — The Homeland Security Department said Wednesday it has created a unit to combat the threat posed by "homegrown terrorists" — citizens or legal residents who plot attacks from inside the nation's borders.
"This phenomenon presents a real and serious challenge to our nation," Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told a Senate panel."

See http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2007-03-14-homegrown_N.htm?csp=34

Re BruceR's comment "Prepared explosives can always be brought on, of course, but the liquid variants are almost always foul-smelling, and the most obvious one, nitroglycerine, is detectable at the security checkpoint with sniffers or chemical swipes."
-------------
1) Actually, nitroglycerine is NOT the most obvious one -- it is too unstable.

2) In 2004, my family and I went on vacation to Australia. We suffered long delays in Los Angeles and on our return flight back from post-911 security checks. But when we boarded our large , transoceanic aircraft, our carryon luggage included about 14 bottles of Australian wine. Those SEALED bottles could have held anything. Their labels could have been counterfeited by anyone with a computer.

3) Re BruceR's comment "I guarantee no successful terrorist is ever going to use an altimeter switch made out of a balloon" -- I noted that this altimeter switch is an easily contrived Improvised device. If it is so unlikely, why did the US Government put its design in the "Improvised Munitions Handbook" -- the Government's manual on how to do terr..er.. "Freedom fighting"?

4) As one poster above noted, plastic explosive can be carried on board concealed in body cavities. Men have one hiding place, women have two. Six female terrorists could probably carry on enough explosive to bring down the airliner. The detonator doesn't have to be in a metallic case and microwave scanners can't penetrate the human body (90 percent ?? salt water) anyway.

They would need a battery to trigger the detonator -- probably borrow one from a male passenger's laptop or cell phone.

5) I think the US government has limited concern about 300 passengers being lost in a midair explosion. After all, it would be easy to kill 300 people at crowded shopping malls during Christmas. What I think is the primary concern is an airliner being used as a guided missile.

One of the 911 planes -- the one crashed in Pennsylvania by Todd Beamer and his fellow passengers -- was aimed at the dome of the US Capitol Building.

That , ironically enough, is where the offices of House Intelligence Committee (HPSCI) are located. That's the Committee that chose to throw 25 percent of Intelligence Community personnel out on the street in the late 1990s.


The truth, and Lefties hate this - is that America has 100,000 possible terorist targets. Few can be absolutely defended.

Whereas, um, Righties are happy about this?

"We have a hundred thousand potential terrorist targets, most of which can't be defended. Hooray!"

Further proof that right-wingers hate America, I guess.

Ford is hallucinating again - somebody grab the crack pipe...

"but the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the 80 quiet ones elsewhere have decimated AQ and a few other hardcore Islamoid terror groups leadership and staffing, putting them off balance, and fighting for survival"

Yeah, right. Read Michael Scheuer's piece at Asia Times:

How's al-Qaeda doing? You decide
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/IL21Ak03.html

Al Qaeda is doing quite well, thank you, probably better than ever. Especially since "Al Qaeda in Iraq" isn't even really part of Al Qaeda, as far as anyone can tell.


Comments closed January 12, 2008.

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