Every time I go to the United
States (I have just returned from two weeks in
Washington), I am astonished by the antic
security, by the proliferation of admonitions and
alarms and inchoate fear. Now it is illegal to
carry toothpaste on airplanes. I find myself
wondering: Is this just another spasm of periodic
hysteria, like Prohibition, the Sixties, and a
Commie Under Every Bed? Or is it calculated
political programming?
Most of it impinges at best
lightly upon reality. For example, measures for
security at airports are largely useless—if their
purpose is to increase security. Think about it.
Time and again the public-address system warns
that vehicles left unattended in passenger-loading
zones "may be ticketed and towed.” Why? By the
time anyone notices that the truck is unattended,
by definition the driver will be somewhere else.
He will certainly be able to walk a hundred yards
before the tow-truck arrives—and push the button.
Boom. In the case of a suicide bomber (which is
what we are worried about, no?), it doesn’t matter
anyway. Boom.
For that matter, at any airport
you can drive up, load a hundred pounds of
suitcases containing god knows what onto a baggage
cart, and go into a crowded waiting area. Boom.
You probably couldn’t get them onto an airplane.
Why would you need to? Terroristically, killing
two hundred people in the airport is as good as
dropping an airliner.
Most of security is just
theater. Over and over, the PA system tells you
not to leave baggage unattended or it may be
destroyed by security personnel. This doubtless
serves to make legitimate passengers watch their
luggage. Who cares? A suitcase full of bras and
socks isn’t perilous. But none of this keeps a
terrorist from leaving a baggage cart and walking
for two minutes, far enough to be outside the
blast radius.
No, I’m not giving ideas to
terrorists. Everything in this column is obvious
to anyone with a three-digit IQ.
It gets sillier. If you ride
Metro, Washington’s subway, you will incessantly
hear things like, “Passengers! Look up from your
papers occasionally. Be alert! Report any
suspicious behavior to Metro employees.”
Yeah, sure. As a security
measure, this is worthless. Why? First, a
terrorist would be careful not to look suspicious.
Second, what is suspicious behavior on an urban
subway? You’ve got rastas, Goths, spike-haired
young in leathers, semi-derelicts, blacks from the
slums, people from India, Guatemala, Morocco,
drunks, stoners, people talking to Mars through
the transmitters the CIA put in their teeth, and
swarthy men speaking languages you can’t identify.
What’s suspicious?
So how do report any of this?
You could get off the train at the next stop, go
up the escalators, and find the Metro kiosk by the
exit gates. You find a bored guy inside waiting
for his shift to end.
“Hey, I saw this suspicious guy
on the train!” you say.
“Yeah? What was he doing?”
“He had a backpack, and he was
looking around a lot like he was nervous, and I
think he was sweating.”
Oh. By now the train you were
riding has left. The attendant has two choices. He
can call in an emergency, have the train halted at
the next stop, tie up the whole system at rush
hour, and have police search the train, for a guy
who looks like he might be sweating. Now, that’s a
career-enhancing move. Or he can brush you off.
Real world: Which?
Have you ever been on an urban
subway at rush hour—which of course is when a
terrorist would strike? They are madhouses. People
are packed so tight they can hardly move.
Everybody is thinking, “Come on, come on,
get this damned thing moving.” Suppose you are
aboard, and you see what appears to be a forgotten
briefcase. What do you do?
The train is now sailing through
the tunnel between Rosslyn Station and the
Pentagon. Nobody can move an inch. You could
scream, “Bomb!” However, the odds are
much better than 999 to 1 that it isn’t. Years
have passed since 9/11, with no terrorism on
Metro. People leave things on trains all the time.
Let’s say that you do scream. Chaos results,
people very possibly are crushed to death in the
panic, and someone pulls the Emergency Stop
handle. You have just shut down Metro in rush
hour. Further, you are in mid-tunnel. Oh, good.
The briefcase turns out to contain two sandwiches
and a report from Agriculture on locust
infestations in Chad. You probably go to jail.
And of course a terrorist would
leave the briefcase on a timer to give himself a
few minutes to leave Rosslyn Station and be
walking innocently up Wilson Boulevard when the
thing went off. Say, five minutes. Real world:
What are the chances that anyone will notice the
briefcase, take it seriously, and clear the train,
in five minutes? Zero.
It’s theater. If people actually
reported strange behavior however defined, or if
Metro cleared trains for forgotten briefcases
until the bomb squad arrived, trains would never
run.
Are security measures going to
keep terrorists out of the US? I just finished
reading De Los Maras a Los Zetas, by a
Mexican crime reporter. (I don’t think it is
available in English.) He talks mostly about the
drug trade, but mentions the smuggling of illegal
immigrants. In particular he tells of a tunnel
going under the border (estimating that at any one
time about forty such tunnels are active) through
which, he says, about 150 illegals a day passed.
All it takes is $2000 or so, and you are in the
US. There is no border security, boys and girls.
Not against anyone serious. There really isn’t.
Now, yes, we may well see more
terrorist attacks on the United States. We
certainly ask for them. Or they may be prevented
by other means. But dramatic announcements on the
subway are going to prevent nothing. Nor are
color-coded terror alerts that you hear about
every five minutes in airports. What does anyone
do differently when the level is orange instead of
green? Cancel reservations? Wear body armor?
On examination, most of the
measures purportedly taken to stifle Terror don’t.
Opening mail without a warrant? It’s pointless
once the terrorists know you are doing it, but
effective in intimidating honest citizens. The
same is true of warrantless wiretaps and searches.
Does the gutting of habeas corpus make us safer
against terrorists? Or merely suppress dissent by
citizens?
The whole business looks
remarkably like malign vaudeville, like mummery
intended to accomplish two things. The first is to
persuade the foolish that the nation is At War.
Actually, only the president is at war. The
second, and I would like to be wrong about this,
is to train the public to obedience. The formula
is simple: Keep ’em scared, and you can do
anything. It works. Americans are rapidly becoming
accustomed to Soviet-style surveillance, to the
state’s power to search and spy without restraint,
to being barked at and ordered about by low-level
federal employees. People deserve what they
tolerate.
Fred Reed has worked
on the staff of the Army Times, The
Washingtonian, Soldier of Fortune,
Federal Computer Week, and The Washington
Times, and has been published in Playboy,
The Wall Street Journal, The Washington
Post, Harper's, National Review,
Signal, and Air&Space. He has served
in the Marines, worked as a police writer,
technology editor, military specialist, and as an
authority on mercenary soldiers.
See Fred's
homepage,
Fred On Everything.
