Focusing our defences
by George Jonas
National Post
December 30, 2009
Travellers who had to take to the skies in the last few days know only too well about a Nigerian youth who tried to set off an incendiary-explosive device as his transoceanic flight was about to land in Detroit. Not surprisingly, as a response to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's alleged attempt to destroy a passenger jet, the authorities tightened security. If they tighten it much further, depending on how they go about it, terrorists may be able to retire. Our security bureaucrats will have paralyzed air transportation for them.
It's too early to say whether Abdulmutallab failed because he was inept or because he got cold feet. He might have bungled his attempt to blow himself up, consciously or subconsciously, because he thought better of dying at 23, regardless of the number of virgins he could expect as a consolation prize. But the young fanatic may have been supplied with dud explosives by what he reportedly described as his al-Qaeda contacts in Yemen.
If Abdulmutallab was given duds, it was most likely because al-Qaeda's bomb-makers hadn't perfected their new explosives yet. It's possible, though, that his sponsors considered bringing down an aircraft less important than making a terrorist gesture. The masterminds of jihad may have figured that dispatching insufficiently trained and equipped saboteurs would still do the trick, because security authorities can be counted on to multiply the effects of terrorism by their anti-terrorist measures.
Simply put, our security bureaucracies have a way of maximizing disruption by refusing to focus their defences.
Doing economic harm by discouraging travel is one of terrorism's aims. Ironically, few things discourage travel more than the methods we employ to make it safer. Many refrain from flying, not so much because they worry about a remote chance of being blown up, but because they want to avoid the near-certainty of being unnecessarily inconvenienced, hassled and humiliated at the airport.
Another aim of terrorism is to demoralize people in target countries. Again, terrorists can rely on the authorities to do much of the demoralization for them. To mention one example, a contemplated measure of not allowing passengers to use washrooms or leave their seats for any reason in the final hour of a flight would demoralize and demean travellers enough to outweigh any security benefit that might be derived from it.
Are security measures in general futile and more demeaning than they're worth? It depends. Building explosion-proof cargo holds or having an armed sky marshal on board probably isn't. Requiring elderly Canadian couples to remove their shoes in case they hide bombs in them probably is.
The most effective and least disruptive security measure is selective screening. It means screening people with access to the aircraft in proportion to the threat we have reason to think they represent. Selective screening entails profiling -- obviously, for the whole point of the process is the well-founded assumption that some categories of people are more likely to be terrorists than others. This approach, instead of being indiscriminate or random, embraces racial, ethnic and religious profiling along with the consideration of psychological, physical and situational clues. Ethnic or religious profiling is politically incorrect, of course, but so is (one hopes) blowing up airplanes. Political correctness carries a price tag we can less and less afford.
The more selective the screening process, the more effective and less disruptive it's likely to be. Examining 20 people from head to toe takes less time than examining 200 people superficially, and it offers more security benefits. In contrast, requiring old ladies from Ohio to leave behind their liquid toiletries before boarding a domestic flight does zip all for security and only makes for delay and congestion. Much of what passes for security actually does the terrorists' work for them.
In the case of Abdulmutallab, profiling might have made a difference. Described by a former teacher as "keen, enthusiastic, very bright, very polite," the young Nigerian was known to be a supporter of the Taliban at the British International School in the Togan capital Lome which he attended. Religious profiling might have flagged the fact that -- reportedly -- his own father had warned the authorities about his son's radicalization. While this wasn't enough to put him on a "no-fly" list, it did put him on a terrorist watch list, and ought to have made him a candidate for a strip search.
Whether a strip search, manual or electronic, would or would not have detected the explosives on Abdulmutallab's person, assuming he did carry them as alleged, is a separate question. It is an important question, though, as it has to do with the training and intelligence of the generally ill-paid security people to whom we entrust our lives. Our tendency of spending millions on scanning equipment at airports, then have state-of-the-art machines operated by seven-dollar-an-hour people, is in the same league as much of the rest of our security endeavours. Luckily we have God watching over us, at least whenever s/he remembers, as s/he must have when Northwest Airlines' "November 820 November Whiskey" started its descent into Detroit this Christmas Day.