Airport security is a giant exercise in arse-covering — and it doesn’t work (obviously)

9 January 2010

Hugo Rifkind gives a Shared Opinion

Christina Lamb mentioned Abdullah al-Asiri on these pages a few weeks ago, but she was rather coy on detail. Allow me to be less so. Al-Asiri was the al-Qa’eda operative who — following a sojourn in the bogey-country de jour of Yemen — had defected back to Saudi Arabia, on the condition that he be debriefed personally by the Saudi anti-terrorism chief Prince Mohammed Bin Nayef. Thereafter he was frisked, passed through two rounds of airport-style security, and sat down, presumably quite gingerly, with the Prince himself. Then, after some small talk, he detonated a pound of explosives that he had hidden in his bottom.

A pound of explosives sounds like quite a lot to hide in a bottom. Such, I suppose, is the zeal of the jihadi. Plus, the bomb was triggered by a text message, which means he must have had a mobile up there, too. A wrong number would have been a blast, eh? The Prince wasn’t badly hurt, mainly because al-Qa’eda had severely underestimated the insulating power of the jihadi bottom which is, by all accounts, considerable. One doubts the shit even hit the fan. Still, with aeroplanes in mind, security experts take little comfort from this. Sooner or later, they point out, a jihadi is going to think of taking the explosives out of his bottom first. Then what? Combating this sort of threat, one expert told CBS, ‘would require people to strip naked at the airport’. A baffling statement. Maybe I’m missing something. Maybe there’s usually an aerial.

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who tried to blow up a US-bound aeroplane on Christmas Day, obviously hadn’t clicked on the whole ‘take the bomb out of your bottom’ thing, so he tried exploding pants instead. Now, as a result of his abortive attempt, Gordon Brown has decreed that there must be full-body scanners at every British airport. Nobody seems entirely clear as to whether these would detect pants bombs — let alone bottom bombs — but that isn’t really the point. Airport security does not exist to make airports secure. It exists to make airports feel secure. It is a giant exercise, if you’ll forgive the danger of an unpleasant mixed metaphor, in arse-covering.

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stephen maybery

January 8th, 2010 1:24pm Report this comment

I know I am crude, mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, but I can not help it. That must have been the mother of all farts.

Kennymac825

January 9th, 2010 5:00pm Report this comment

They know airport screening is ineffective, otherwise, in the USA, you would be able to get up and go to the toilet with less than an hour to go in the flight. Of course these security Einsteins believe that terrorists are too stupid to get up one hour and five minutes before the end of the flight and do their dastardly deed. The lessons from the shoe-bomber have been forgotton or ignored. I don't know how we can feel safe anymore.

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