[Vision2020] Only on Fox News . . .

[Ron Force]

________________________________
A blogger had an appropriate insight:

The Staggering Cost of Playing it "Safe"
by Devilstower
Sun Jun 21, 2009 at 02:00:08 PM PDT

On
December 22, 2001, a 28-year-old minor thug and former gang member from
South London climbed onto a Boeing 767 bound for Miami.  On the
sparsely booked flight, he settled into a window seat in an otherwise
empty row. Ninety minutes into the flight, with the plane well out over
the Atlantic, a flight attendant noticed smoke coming from his area.
She informed him that as the flight was an American flight, no smoking
was allowed. A few minutes later, he was hunched over in his seat when
the attendant saw that he wasn't trying to light a cigarette. He was
trying to light his shoe. The flight attendant, aided by passengers,
acted quickly.  Richard Reid never got another chance to light his shoe
bomb.  

Thanks to the immediate action of the the those on board, there was no damage to the plane.  No injuries or loss of life.  

Since
that day in 2001, every passenger entering a commercial airliner has
been required to remove their shoes for inspection and X-ray. A
precaution that is... massively, even breathtakingly idiotic.

Why? Well, first off the volume of a shoe sole is not all that
great. Reid managed to cram about 100 grams of high explosive into his
shoe. Had he been successful in setting off the explosion, it's
unlikely that the plane would have been so damaged as to crash, but
almost certain that there would have been deaths in the passenger
cabin. If the bomb had worked, it would have been a serious problem. So
why is making people take off their shoes before entering a plane a
crowning bit of stupidity? Because that 100 grams might have fit almost
anywhere. Anything that will fit in a shoe sole will also fit in a back
pocket, or under a shirt, or in a pair of extra comfy undershorts, or
in a bra (as a comparison, the average breast implant weighs three
times as much as much as Reid's shoe bomb -- and that's just on one
side). There is absolutely nothing magic about shoes. In fact, as a
place to store explosives like the ones that Reid carried -- which can
be quite shock sensitive -- packing them into your shoes has to rate at
the bottom of the list. But here we are years later, still showing off
our holey socks to the world and making business for the folks at
Tinactin.  

Assume that each airline traveler spends an additional minute in
line because of removing, scanning, and replacing their shoes. Just one
minute. In the United States, there are about 830 million domestic
airline passengers a year. That's about 1,600 man years of time spent
each year on removing shoes that are no more threat than any other
piece of clothing.  If you put a $10/hr value on the time of the
average air traveler,  that's about $33 million / year worth of shoe
time. Better than $300 million worth since Reid got tackled in business
class.

Which has to make Reid and those like him very, very happy.

So
why do we go through the shoe ritual? First the fear factor around
shoes was bolstered by other events. Only a few months after Reid's
failed attempt, an airliner went down in Queens. Immediately, the rumor
circulated that the plane had been the victim of another shoe bomber --
a theory that seemed to be confirmed by "cooperating" terror suspect,
Mohammed Jabarah who was feeding information to the CIA from inside an
al-Qaeda cell. Jabrah claimed that the plane had been destroyed by an
unnamed "12th hijacker" using a shoe bomb, as part of a "second wave"
of airliner attacks. Thing is, Jabarah was lying.  The flight that came
down in Queens failed because of problems with the plane's rudder, and
Jabarah was later rearrested after it turned out he was giving plenty
of real information to al-Qaeda while feeding fairy tales to the US.
This came after a period in which Jabarah was the "subject of some
interrogation which was improper" while a prisoner in Oman (i.e.
torture doesn't work, and it's a really bad way to start your
relationship with your new double agent). Similar suggestions of other
shoe bombings made by imprisoned terror suspects have never turned out
to have any basis in fact.

The bigger reason we did something is because the response of
politicians is always to do something. Even if that something makes no
sense -- even if that something is actually counterproductive. The
reason you're tiptoeing along the concourse in your Haines (and tossing
that Coke in the trash) has more to do with why jails are overpopulated
than it does with stopping terrorists. When politicians see something
on the news, and when pundits are screaming for action, the inclination
is to provide that action. If that means a million gallons of Head n'
Shoulders in airport trash cans or a life sentence for stealing a
pizza, so what? What counts is that action was taken.

Dave Kilchen in his new book The Accidental Guerrilla describes
terrorism in the terms of an auto-immune disorder.  Like lupus, where
the systems of the body designed to protect against infection turn on
healthy tissue, our response to problems can often result in far more
damage than the problem itself. It's not the terrorists that do the
real damage -- it's how you respond to the terrorists. Certainly, if
you look at all the ways that the United States has responded to the
threat of terrorism since 9/11 we've damaged our overseas relationships
and reputation, tossed much of our own constitution in the dumpster,
and spent millions for every dollar that our enemies have spent. The
self-inflicted wounds have been deeper, more serious, and more
lingering than anything that was done from the outside.



      
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