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.
Ask yourself: when did you last hear of a budding terrorist being arrested trying to take a bomb on board a plane? They get arrested afterwards, like Abdulmutallab himself, or the hapless shoe-bomber Richard Reid. Or, they get arrested long beforehand, in murky swoops on murky bits of East London. But actually at the airport? If it happens, it doesn’t get reported. If airport security has any results, then it can only be as a deterrent. If, that is, one accepts the idea that there are people who are prepared to blow themselves up, but would draw the line at being arrested. Yes, airport security prevents one from brazenly getting on board with a gun, or a sword, or a big round Dangermouse-style metal bomb. But it did that before 9/11, anyway. How has the situation improved?
In a fantastic article in the Atlanticist last year, the American journalist Jeffrey Goldberg took a comprehensive look at post-9/11 airport security. Granted, anybody called Jeffrey Goldberg is going to have a different experience than somebody called, say Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, but his findings, nonetheless, were astonishing. Goldberg passed security with fake boarding passes, so as to illustrate the fallibility of no-fly lists. He boarded planes in a fake plastic beer belly full of liquid. He carried penknives. When his hand luggage was searched, it was stuffed full of matchbooks from hotels in Beirut and a Hezbollah flag featuring a slogan in Arabic and a logo of a man clutching an AK-47. Eventually, he was allowed to board a flight to Washington with no photo ID at all, while wearing a T-shirt sporting the legend ‘OSAMA BIN LADEN, HERO OF ISLAM’. Think of him next time you fly to the US, when they confiscate your nail clippers and your Highland Spring.
What’s the big deal with aeroplanes, anyway? If you want to get a bomb on to the London Tube or the Madrid train network, even now, then you can leave your bottom alone and just carry the damn thing. Never mind restaurants, or cinemas, or the public bits of airports themselves. Tell me that shadowy counterterrorism operations have made the world a safer place since 9/11, and I’ll take your word for it. But airport security? Before the World Trade Center came down, flying was a breeze, and there was a tiny chance you might get blown up. Now it’s a nightmare, and there’s still a tiny chance you might get blown up. In what way is this progress? Our attitude towards getting onto aeroplanes is starting to look weird. It’s like a disorder. It’s like they’ve won.
Stuck in the snow last week. It was pretty desperate. I was en route back down south from Edinburgh, and the roads were white all the way to Newcastle. You know that feeling you get when something bad is going to happen? I had that. In a blizzard, and somewhere slightly shy of Morpeth, I needed fuel. So I indicated, slowed down, and pulled into the layby that led off to a tiny, steaming petrol station. As it turned out, it was hosting something of a snowdrift. Wrrrrfthfth. The wheels spun and spun. Couldn’t go forwards, couldn’t go backwards. They aren’t built for snow, Skoda Fabias. And, as the blizzard got worse, I started to panic.
‘Hell,’ I thought. ‘I’m stuck in the snow. I knew something bad was going to happen. It’ll take the AA hours to get out here. If they even can! I’d better call the office and tell them I won’t be in tomorrow. Wait. No signal! That’s it. Stranded! Do I have enough warm clothes? Can I survive until morning? Do people ever die of hypothermia on the A1?’
After a good five minutes of scrabbling around in the back for a blanket, I calmed down enough to realise that the petrol station would probably have a telephone. So I opened the door and stepped outside. And then I realised that, while I was indeed stuck in the snow, I wasn’t stuck in very much snow. About seven inches. So I thought for a moment, and then I got down on my hands and knees and pushed it away. It took about three minutes. And then I drove off. I’ve never felt like such a Londoner in my life.
Hugo Rifkind is a writer for the Times.
Comments