Strip Scanners vs. Terrorism at Airports

By the end of 2009, a man who intended to blow up a passenger plane of the Amsterdam-Detroir line was bravely taken down, not by airport security, but by a Dutch passenger... in midair. Afterwards, Washington put together a list of nations which allegedly promote terrorism and reinforced screenings at US airports. Flight security, however, continued to be unstable. This week a passenger’s laptop triggered airport alarms in the city of Munich for it was presumably loaded with explosives.

The man escaped and authorities are still looking for him. If he had wanted, he could have carried a Tomahowk missile with him and no one would have realized it.

The incident took place in one of the most technologically advanced airports in the world and coincides with a meeting held in Toledo, Spain, in which European Union ministers of the Interior and US Secretary of National Security Janet Napolitano are considering the use of body scanners at airports. These machines can detect if passengers are carrying guns, explosives, sables, harquebuses, scimitars, etc, but they also show those body parts for which cloth was invented.

Since there are 27 ministers attending the meeting, it will be hard, of course, to reach an agreement. Italy, France and Holland plan to install the scanners right away, while Germany and Spain have preferred to wait for the results of research on the radioactive effect these machines may have.

In Berlin, Minister of Justice Sabine Leutheusser-Schanerrenberger of the Liberal Party, said that the use of these scanners is against “human dignity and intimacy.” Minister of the Interior Thomas de Maiziere said that at first the use of scanners should be voluntary for passengers, so that they can get use to them. (Yeah right: “Good morning, sir. How would you like to develop cancer today?”) For her part, the US secretary of National Security said that her country will begin to use the machines.

I think that even better than catching terrorists at the end of the tunnel —when they have managed to get around security checks at airports, like in Munich— is avoiding their proliferation by not invading other countries and telling their people what to do. After almost a decade of war in Afghanistan the only results are rampant corruption and a flood of cocaine. And what if a Al Qaeda militant blows a fuse on board a plane or in a bus, as happened in London in 2005?

What’s the next step? Installing scanners on buses as well?