Analyst's note: Absolutely must read. If you or your family are going to fly, you should at least know what you're up against in terms of your personal security. You will have the opportunity to "meet and greet" the TSA in some very personal exchanges. This article helps to provide useful insight as to what you face -- at least in terms of the dangers. I'm sorry for the discomfort this article will likely produce. One last note, if you're flying internationally the security is, shall we say, a little lax. Stay alert .... and good luck!
"For Part One, click here.
[....] 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. [....]
[....] 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 20th 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. [....] 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.
In the rack or the hold.
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. [....]
