Liddle America

Are biscuits a terrorist threat?

19 August 2006

Why can’t you take biscuits on board at JFK, when computer games are fine at La Guardia? Rod Liddle, in the US, is mystified

family-size packs of Nicorette chewing gum which I need for flights of more than two hours. The rules were at least straightforward, even if they seemed absurd: no hand baggage, nothing, nada. OK, maybe a sanitary towel or two, but even then make sure you carry it in a transparent plastic bag.

Since then I’ve been through a further four airports, all in the US, and each time the rules have changed. Everybody is still pretty worried about liquids, especially liquids of a medical or pseudo-medical nature, or hi-energy drinks — but those other taboos change by the minute. At JFK you were not allowed to board a plane with biscuits, even if they were in an unopened packet. I assume that stricture went for all biscuits: I tried with some Hobnobs, but you may have better luck with, say, Morning Coffee. Whereas eight miles away, at La Guardia, baby milk and — bizarrely — computer games were considered perfectly safe. At O’Hare, in Chicago, you were suddenly allowed to carry Gatorade, and at Pittsburgh the staff were so bored I don’t think they’d have cared if you had a particle accelerator in your backpack.

There is the feeling, over here and back in Britain, that the authorities don’t really know what they’re doing. The constantly shifting rules on what can be taken on board planes is one sliver of evidence of this; these terrorists are ingenious — one day they may try to kill us with some Lucozade and an MP3 player, the next day, who knows? Hobnobs and a Game Boy? The chaos and confusion at Heathrow, and the palpable anger of the airlines, is another indicator. So, too, the mystifying status alerts: are we about to be killed right now, or merely quite soon in the future? Is the threat substantial, imminent and substantial, critical? The deployment of these words seems to me a sort of whistling in the dark; the truth is, nobody really has a clue.