Fear of Flying

Did you ever read the Batman comics? One of his enemies was that lawyer who liked to flip a coin, Twoface.[1] He had two completely different personalities and used a coin to decide which one he was going to be … until the next time he decided to flip the coin. It’s unclear exactly what his superpower was, but that’s Batman for you. There is now ample evidence that airport security policy around the world is being created by this guy, except his two personalities are Terry Gilliam and George Orwell.

Security News

Exhibit A

Total RecallThis article, TSA’s revealing X-ray screening raises privacy concerns, has some sketchy information about the next generation of customer satisfaction technology coming to an airport near you. “Raise privacy concerns?” It’s an 11-year old’s dream come true: it sees through your clothes. Minimum wage-slaves around the world are seeing brighter days in their future as they completely randomly decide who will be subjected to the closer scrutiny of their new machine. It remains to be seen whether the sheeple will meekly subject themselves to this further invasion or whether they will take a stand and stop flying. At a certain point, the airlines and the governments that love them will invent something so horrible that people would rather be blown out of the sky[2] than be subjected to it.

Exhibit B

Flatulence, not turbulence forces plane landing in Nashville brings us an embarrassing tale of woe, in which a woman lit a match to cover the by-product of her medical condition, causing an emergency landing in Nashville, Tennessee. Presumably, after bomb-sniffing dogs discovered the spent matches, the searchers figured out “who dealt it” when one of said dogs threw itself on the floor when it passed her, pawing frantically at its nose and mewling like a pup. After beating a confession out of her, they paraded her to the front of the cabin, introduced her as “Farty McSmellyPants” and threw her off the plane. Since it’s illegal to strike a match on a plane—no matter what the reason—a spokeswoman smugly noted, “American has banned her for a long time”. Another job well done; America is safer.

Friendly Skies

So there you have two recent, heartwarming tales of good-old American camaraderie combined with old-fashioned customer service. Mix in big dollop of terror and let sit for five years.

How the Hell Did We Get Here?

This change in attitude towards human being and their rights didn’t happen all at once; it happened incrementally, conceding a bit of freedom here and there; waiting in line five minutes longer every time; restricting yet another personal item from your luggage. Until, one day, you’re standing in line for 3 hours to be virtually strip searched and begging to be able to put a couple of drops in before they confiscate your Vi-sine bottle and destroy it in a bomb-proof chamber.

Gimme Your Scissors

The latest wave of airport restrictions began after September 11th, with any metal object that may puncture skin if enough pressure can be brought to bear was banned. This is where the “if a terrorist used it, we’ll ban it forever” approach, which would be later refined to “if someone we suspect of not being 100% with us in the war on terror once had a daydream involving this particular household item, we’ll ban it forever”. Out went box-cutters, pen-knives and anything else one might find in an overnight kit. Stuff was confiscated by the ton—and never given back.

Gimme Your Shoes

Rick After Going the DistancePhase two began with a certain crazy motherfucker named Richard Reid, who was such a highly qualified superspy/terrorist/cold-blooded killer that he couldn’t even figure out how to set his own shoes on fire, to which he had ostensibly affixed explosives, which, inextricably, would not combust. Desperate, he was clever enough to improvise and start asking around the cabin if anyone had any matches. In spite of his astounding display of terrorist acumen, people around the cabin caught on to what he was trying to do and pounded the ever-loving crap out of him (see image to the right). Though interrogations quite quickly led investigators to the conclusion that this guy was seriously cracked and nothing he said could be trusted, the world was happy to accept that he was clearly a super-agent sent directly by the white-cat stroking head of Al-Qaida, under whose aegis every terrorist act is planned and executed.

Since such a successful—and clearly nigh-undetectable—attempt at blowing up a plane was bound to be tried again, it became incumbent for every traveler hoping to set foot on exalted American soil to first take their shoes off and put them through an X-ray machine, while padding silently through on stocking feet. Security personnel the world over rejoiced.

Other Plots

”Wait, Aren’t You Scared?” (Kung Fu Monkey) is an awesome rant on this topic of fear, which includes a few other, less-publicized plots that amounted to absolutely nothing, but whose lingering memories are still used to instill fear in people, to give them the impression that we’re always just one slip-up away from being blown away in a “mushroom clouds” (thanks, Condie).

“The great Canadian plot that had organized over the internet, was penetrated by the Mounties on day one, and we were told had a TRUCK FULL OF EXPLOSIVES … which they had bought from the Mounties in a sting operation but hey let’s skip right over that. Or how about the “compound” of Christian cultists in Florida who were planning on blowing up the Sears Tower with … kung fu?”

So far, there have been two highly publicized cases along the Canadian border: one in Oregon and one in Buffalo. In both cases, there were no convictions and no apologies from an overzealous—and frankly criminally negligent—press. Perpetual Fear by William Blum (CounterPunch) has more information on some of these plots, including the famous quote from the FBI about the Florida group, describing them as “more aspirational than operational” and “social misfits”.

In a famous case in Britain, the police drummed up some plot about someone using ricin (a contact poison) to target government officials. After making some arrests, it was revealed that there was “not only no plot, there was no ricin.” The Brits, however, kept the lid on that story for two years before finally admitting they’d made the whole thing up and arrested several people on false pretenses (which is probably not illegal in Britain anymore either).[3]

The people generally rounded up in these scares are patsies, confused and angry at the world they see around them and shouting a bit too loudly into the wrong ears late at night in a pub. Like Joseph “the dirty bomber” Padilla, who loudly proclaimed one night that he thought someone should nuke us since we seemed so happy to babble on the nightly news about nuking other countries. Over four years later and Mr. Padilla is still in custody, with access to a lawyer having been granted only recently—and still no official charges against him.

Anti-terror units don’t always step in so quickly as was the case with Mr. Padilla. Sometimes they put a little more effort in, in order to make the sting more worthwhile. If someone deemed a potential terrorist isn’t realizing their potential according to law enforcement, it’s time to step in and make something happen.

“Soon a government agent provocateur appears, infiltrates the group, and then actually encourages the individuals to think and talk further about terrorist acts, to develop real plans … and even provides the individuals with some of the actual means for carrying out these terrorist acts [like the Canadian case above] … And because of the role played by the agent provocateur, we may never know whether any of the accused, on their own, would have gone much further, if at all…”

These days, in the war against terror, we no longer have the luxury—as a society—of calling this practice “entrapment”, which it oh so clearly is. It is a powerful tool in the law enforcement arsenal, magically transforming Orwellian thought-crimes into “close-enough” crimes into long, long stretches in a maximum security American prison or even an overseas flight to a deep, dark Syrian prison with plenty of car batteries.

Gimme Your Shampoo

The latest phase in high-tech security measures came about in reaction to a foiled terrorist plot in England. A hypothetical plot. A very hypothetical plot. Ok, the British police dreamed it up and wanted to look cool, especially since too many people were still talking about how they were hunting and killing brown people in the Tube tunnels. At least in the first two stages, there was clear intent: in the first case, the box cutters were used to actually hijack planes and fly them into buildings. Banning knives on aircraft is a rational step at preventing this from happening again. In the second case, a nut-case had to tell people what he was trying to do (blow up the plane) because it wasn’t immediately obvious from his actions. Making the world take off its shoes is an overreaction, to put it mildly; it’s not likely that this has prevented a single terrorist act (else we’d have heard of it).

In early August, the British police shut down airports around the world with the announcement that they’d foiled a terrorist plot. Initial reports suggested that planes laden with terrorists and their smuggled weapons had already trundled halfway down the runway on their way to America. Ensuing reports toned down the rhetoric a bit and let us all know that actually there had been no terrorists on planes yet. Thankfully. A day later, it was clear that the terrorists hadn’t even been anywhere near the airport, but had planned the attack and were nabbed right before they were heading to the airport: the police had infiltrated the cell and waited until the last moment to make sure they caught as many ringleaders as possible. The next reports admitted that the attack had still been mostly in the planning stages, what with no one having purchased an airline ticket yet or most of the materials they allegedly were going to use to blow up the plane—many “reportedly did not even have passports” (Blum). Just a little further along and it was suggested that the agents/infiltrators were kind of the ringleaders in that it was through their suggestions that the cell even got as far with planning as it did.

Finally, it was revealed that the bomb they’d planned to make was just ludicrous. Laughable. Even if they believed it would work (most likely because the infiltrator told them it would), it wouldn’t. Not in a million years. Cold-blooded, professionally trained killers to the last, we were assured. Efficiency personified. Bent on the eradication of Western civilization. Just not fucking smart enough to get their pants on the right way round 5 out of 7 days of the week. And they hadn’t actually done much beyond blowing a lot of hot air in basement meetings. Which is probably why they none of the arrests stuck; even against the supposed ringleader, the ominously named Rashid Rauf, they could only drum up forgery charges.[4]

Because of this threat, people around the world sit up the night before a flight dripping shampoo with a pipette into a 100ml bottle. Mass murder in the skies: was the plot feasible? by Thomas C Greene (The Register) has a lot of interesting technical information about the liquid explosives that would have been used, taking us step-by-step through the process of preparing the materials, undetected, on a plane.

“Now for the fun part. Take your hydrogen peroxide, acetone, and sulfuric acid, measure them very carefully, and put them into drinks bottles for convenient smuggling onto a plane. It’s all right to mix the peroxide and acetone in one container, so long as it remains cool. Don’t forget to bring several frozen gel-packs (preferably in a Styrofoam chiller deceptively marked “perishable foods”), a thermometer, a large beaker, a stirring rod, and a medicine dropper. You’re going to need them.

“It’s best to fly first class and order Champagne. The bucket full of ice water, which the airline ought to supply, might possibly be adequate − especially if you have those cold gel-packs handy to supplement the ice, and the Styrofoam chiller handy for insulation − to get you through the cookery without starting a fire in the lavvie.”

On the implausibility of the explosives plot wonders why stop at confiscating shampoo (whose smell could never be mistaken for concentrated sulfuric acid)? In fact, for the properly trained and somewhat resourceful, everything is a possible weapon. Concentrated alcohol? Start a fire. Coke can? Make a shiv. Books and magazines? Impregnate them with nitroglycerin and let it dry. You don’t even have to get that fancy either; if the terrorists out there are really as crazy, brilliant and dedicated as we’re told they are, you could just do what a drug mule does, except with plastique instead of heroin, filling up those capacious body cavities with more than enough explosives than is needed to make a large hole in a plane.

But they’re not doing any of those things. Or they’d have done it already. Don’t you see? There are myriad ways to wreak havoc that would easily slip through all but the slowest and most invasive security systems; none of them have been even tried by our psychotic, tireless and nebulous enemies. If Al Queda actually existed as it does in fevered neo-con dreams, they’d at least have sacrificed one more Richard Reid-like warrior to be caught trying to smuggle explosives in his underpants. The TSA would come to the logical conclusion and make us all dream of the days when we only had to take our shoes off at the airport.

The media and our governments want us to think Al Queda works like the Wondermark cartoon below:

Wondermark #220

What Is Frightening

“This is terrorism’s A-game? Sack up, people.”

The big terror scare outlined above hit London—and the rest of the world—at the same time that Israel was bombing the ever-loving crap out of Lebanon: back to the proverbial stone age, as it were. Robert Fisk, author of The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East (Amazon) and 30–year resident of Beirut wrote The Real Reason the British Should be Frightened (CounterPunch) at the time. He evinced skepticism—to say the least—at the terrorist plot and asked:

“…how many of the suspects–or “British-born Muslims” … as the BBC defined them in its special form of “soft” racism (they are surely Muslim Britons or British Muslims, are they not?)–are still in custody in a couple of weeks’ time.”

Fisk adroitly plucks out the subliminal message inherent in calling the plotters British-born Muslims: it alienates them from their British heritage and places all terrorists squarely in the Muslim camp. This tactic is meant to get people thinking that a true Brit would never do something like that. Fisk rightly points out that there are places in the world—places that that terrorist threat was meant to help us ignore—with far greater threats to life than even a real terrorist plot would offer a westerner. Being blown up in your own home by an Israeli/US cluster bomb? Shit-your-pants scary, especially when you can hear them flying overhead 20 times a day. For Westerners, the threat of dying in a terrorist act is below negligible. As Perspective: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Get a Grip by DarkSyde (Daily KOS) tells us:

“Heart disease and cancer will claim about 1.5 million American lives each and every year. As far as accidental deaths (~100,000/year), motor vehicle accidents far and away lead the pack (+40,000/year), with accidental poisoning and falls in place and show1. You can play with those stats all kinds of ways. But the bottom line is that over the course of a civilian lifetime, the odds of falling victim to Al Qaeda rank somewhere between falling off a ladder to your death and being struck by lightning inside your home.”

The Kung Fu Monkey rant above points out for those slower on the uptake that “[t]aking something seriously, and panicking over it are two different things. I do not assign all dangers and risks equal value.”
A little bit of calm consideration is usually enough to pop the balloons of terror lofted by our masters, but there’s clearly not enough popping going on.

With that much panic at their disposal, government have quite an easy job of keeping the majority under their yoke. The Real Losers in Britain’s Great Anti-Terror Victory by Christopher Deliso (AntiWar) also begins by mentioning the extraordinary coincidence that the British stop a plan of “mass murder on an unimaginable scale” at the same time that the Israel army was busy enacting one of its own. Assuming the threat was in any way real, what is the explanation for the sheer bombast with which the plan was stung and revealed? Why shut down airports around the world, stranding tens of thousands and terrifying countless others? Why, in other words, did Britain take a terror plan that had meager hopes of ever terrorizing anyone, and enhance it into a terror campaign of their own? Because they can and because they want to make terror work for them.

“Shutting down the world’s busiest airport, and in so doing knowingly incurring huge global economic losses and stranding thousands, would have been calculated not only to terrify the public with dire images of al-Qaeda attacks, but even more so, to demonstrate the awesome power of the state to control its subjects at will.”

Why do we all buy these fake fears? Exactly what is it about “waiting in an interminable line, having my flight canceled, or being told I can’t have any carry-on luggage” (Blum) that is so alluring that people are willing to put up with it for the most untenable and unprovable allegations? In the end, we’re letting terrorists get the most out of their terror dollar, as pointed out in What the Terrorists Want by Bruce Schneier:

“Our politicians help the terrorists every time they use fear as a campaign tactic. The press helps every time it writes scare stories about the plot and the threat. And if we’re terrified, and we share that fear, we help. All of these actions intensify and repeat the terrorists’ actions, and increase the effects of their terror.”

But it’s not the Al Qaeda terrorists who benefit; it’s our very own terrorist governments. So knock it off and stop shitting your pants “every time two [brown people] stand together checking their watches”. It’s not even about showing some sack; it’s about showing some brains. It’s about approaching the world rationally and not letting cheap politicians and huge corporations use your lack of a coherent world-view to consolidate their power. If not for your sake, then do it for the rest of us, who just want to get on a damned plane and fly where we’re going without spending two days at the airport and giving up every last shred of human dignity, to boot. Oh, and if you could hurry it up and dismantle this Brobdingnagian security apparatus by the 2006 Christmas flying season, that would be great.