It Does Happen Here

It was late in that awful day, September 11, 2001, and as media mouths were speculating what terrorist attacks we might expect next, I said (and have a witness who remembers this) that whatever this terrorist group would try to do, it wouldn't again involve boarding airplanes and turning them into missiles aimed at particular targets. The success of that intention required surprise, which was effectively over when the passengers, having learned of the Twin Towers, brought down their hijacked airliner over Pennsylvania.

But for the next six years ordinary airline passengers were forced to take off their shoes and (more recently) turn over their shampoo, and undergo various other humiliations and inconveniences beyond sane screening and precautions. And to question any of this--especially on the spot--could get you arrested, blacklisted on a no-fly list, and might even get you disappeared.

So it took six years plus for the truth to quietly emerge in a study: that none of this has made any damn difference in making flying safer or it catching terrorists. "Can you hide anything in your shoes that you can't hide in your underwear?" is one of the pertinent questions.

A week or so after this study was reported in December, an oped by a commercial pilot (and now a writer for Salon) appeared in the New York Times, laying out the reasons why these actions and restrictions are folly, and have always been. He has no new data--all this was known at the time each idiocy was instituted.

But no one wanted to hear this, just as for years they didn't want to hear how improbable being the victim of a terrorist attack in the U.S. would be, compared with much more common ways we get hurt and/or die. Easing fears may have been part of the intent of these "make work" procedures, but they also institutionalized Fear. So we got Bushwhacked in 2004, and Rudy would like to repeat it in 08.

Humiliating people, stripping them of their clothes in public, where have we seen this before? Making people vulnerable makes them passive. It's one step towards a police state. It trains citizens to be docile and authorities/police/soldiers to be aggressive, and pretty soon arrogant in the use of power, the threat of force and force itself. And I believe there are powerful people in this country who know this, and intend this.

But we sheep don't even bleat. That study, quietly issued a few days before Christmas, changed nothing for passengers. Big companies got big contracts to do all this, and the ease with which news organizations have smuggled devices onto airplanes that could have been bombs, or the vulnerabilities of our ports and shipping, means nothing. As long as we the people take off our shoes and bow before the great authority of the state, and leave our nail clippers at home.