Retired Lt. General Tom McInerney appeared on Fox News to offer his own proposal for making air travel safer: strip search all Muslim men between 18 and 28. That’s right, strip search every Muslim male at the airport.
Here is how the General explained how we need to “be very serious and harsh about the profiling:” “If you are an 18 to 28-year-old Muslim man then you should be strip searched. And if we don’t do that, there’s a very high probability we’re going to lose an airliner.”
I think that the General has the right thought but the wrong conclusion. What does every airline bomber have in common? Clothes. No clothes means by definition no shoe bombs, no underwear bombs, no explosive vests. People could appear naked at security points and be given those paper gowns used by hospitals.
Of course, Osama Bin Laden could still fly without stripping as would Richard Reid. It would delay things for such athletes as Ramzee Robinson (Cleveland Browns), Abdul Raheeda Hodge (Cincinnati Bengals), Usama Young (Saints), Husain Ibn Muhammed Abdullah (Minnesota Vikings), Kareem Brown (Jets), and others. Congressman Keith Maurice Ellison and Elias A. Zerhouni (Director of the NIH) made it over the line and can keep their clothes on.
There’s a simple solution to part of the problem – at major Canadian airports you cross through US customs at the Canadian airport, not the US. This lets the flights land at any domestic (US) airport instead of having to go to the international gates.
You could easily do the same thing at other countries with heavy US-bound traffic. Travelers to the US have to go through the host country’s security process first, then go through US security before entering the US-bound secured area. We can then set up our own rules on screening.
Why would people be willing to go through the hassle? See the first paragraph – flights that go through this process could land at a US DOMESTIC gate. No hassles at US customs at the end of a long flight. You just pull up to a gate like any other flight.
At this point it’s probably more cost-effective to plan to NOT blow up a plane. That requires a lot of effort and training, sacrificing some of your best people, etc., and even then there’s no guarantee of success.
Just find some true believer who can get on the plane and give him just enough to get attention. Not something that will actually take down the plane, killing witnesses, just enough to make a bang and some smoke. The fearmongers will take care of the rest.
Maybe I am wrong on this,but why is terror and terrorist defined by airplanes and airports?
When I say that I am thinking about terrrorist acts done by those from our own country done to our own citizens?
Timothy McViegh,Scott Roeder to name a few.
“ter·ror (trr)
n.
1. Intense, overpowering fear. See Synonyms at fear.
2. One that instills intense fear: a rabid dog that became the terror of the neighborhood.
3. The ability to instill intense fear: the terror of jackboots pounding down the street.
4. Violence committed or threatened by a group to intimidate or coerce a population, as for military or political purposes.
5. Informal An annoying or intolerable pest:
rafflaw 1, January 4, 2010 at 10:34 pm
I think we should strip search any and all conservative Republicans in Washington…..wait a minute, most of them would like that!
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They’d form a line at the Airport in Minneapolis/St. Paula.
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rafflaw 1, January 4, 2010 at 11:19 pm
Mespo,
I was thinking that Craig would be wearing a TuTu while going commando!
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That is an awful image conjured up when first awakened….
Mespo,
I was thinking that Craig would be wearing a TuTu while going commando!
One has to wonder if the United States is deliberately fighting blowback with more of the interventionist and military policies that encouraged resentment, hatred and blowback in the first place. There are tremendous incentives for the government and defense complex to do so. Some years ago I would not have believed that this could be true but now I am not so sure.
Although most here probably read it, I would point out Glenn Greenwald’s recent comments on what we know about the motivations behinds these attacks and the likelihood that our continued involvement in the region will only worsen our national security position (my words). The statement given by Richard Reid at his sentence appears to be accurate and truthful. Yet we ignore it:
“With regards to what you said about killing innocent people, I will say one thing. Your government has killed two million children in Iraq. Okay? If you want to think about something, 20 against two million, I don’t see no comparison. Okay?
Your government has sponsored the rape and torture of Muslims in the prisons of Egypt and Turkey and Syria and Jordan with their money and with their weapons. Okay? I don’t know, see what I done as being equal to rape and to torture, or to the deaths of the two million children in Iraq. Okay?
Thirdly. So, for this reason, I think I ought not apologize for my actions. I am at war with your country. I’m at war with them not for personal reasons but because they have murdered more than, so many children and they have oppressed my religion and they have oppressed people for no reason except that they say we believe in Allah.”
rafflaw:
“I think we should strip search any and all conservative Republicans in Washington…..wait a minute, most of them would like that!”
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Imagine the line on Pennsylvania Avenue if we included body cavity searches too. Larry Craig has already volunteered to assist! He sent this telegram: “Tap, tap, slide, slide, pirouette.”
I think we should strip search any and all conservative Republicans in Washington…..wait a minute, most of them would like that!
This lady is totally awesome. “But then again I’m not a government official”, well maybe that’s one of the problems in politics.
Just spitting and nothing sticking. Sounds like life is back to normal in LA.
AY,
Just spitting flurries now. It’s going to die out it looks like. Nothing stuck.
We should extend the war when the children of chickenhawks start enlisting. That requirement would enable us to maintain the status quo indefinitely. It could even be used a s acriterion for whether to stay in iraq or Afghanistan.
And another side heard from. Buddha, Are you still having snow in west LA?
This is a very interesting perspective from al jazeera:
“Almost immediately after it was learned that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian accused of trying to blow up a US airliner using explosives concealed in his underpants, received training in Yemen, US politicians called for Barack Obama, the US president, to expand the ‘war on terror’ – which remains very much a war despite the administration’s official ban of such vocabulary – to that country.
The president obliged, declaring that the US would strike anywhere to prevent another attack.
Such calls were in fact unnecessary, as the US is already involved in Yemen, supervising attacks on militants that have been credited by analysts with helping to further inflame anti-Americanism and support for al-Qaeda in the country.
Indeed, far from heralding a more successful US effort to stamp out Islamist terrorism, the soon to be deepening footprint in Yemen is a sure sign of America’s defeat in the war against violent extremism in the Muslim world.
‘Boots on the ground’
Think about it. One angry young man with about three ounces (around 80 grams) of explosive material, $2,000, and a pair of specially tailored underwear has completely disrupted the US aviation system.
It does not even matter that he failed to blow up the plane.
The costs associated with preventing the next attack from succeeding will measure in the tens of billions of dollars – new technologies, added law enforcement and security personnel on and off planes, lost revenues for airline companies and more expensive plane tickets, and of course, the expansion of the ‘war on terror’ full on to yet another country, Yemen.
And what happens when the next attacker turns out to have received ideological or logistical training in yet another country? Perhaps in Nigeria, which is home to a strong and violent Salafi movement, or anyone of a dozen other African, Gulf, Middle Eastern or South East Asian countries where al-Qaeda has set up shop?
Will the US ramp up its efforts in a new country each time there is an attempted attack, putting US “boots on the ground” against an enemy that is impossible to defeat?
Such a policy would fulfill al-Qaeda’s wildest dreams, as the US suffers death by a thousand cuts, bleeding out in an ever wider web of interconnected and unsustainable global conflicts.
The European connection
As with the 9/11 attacks, Europe figures prominently in the current attacks. Then it was Germany, this time it was London, where Abdulmutallab studied and apparently began his descent into extremism.
Europe’s role is not surprising, and in the case of London, particularly apt.
After centuries as a primary purchaser and transporter of slaves to the Americas from west equatorial Africa, the British used the abolishment of the slave trade to interfere ever more into the economy of the Niger Delta until it assumed increasing colonial control in the mid third of the 19th century, creating the modern state of Nigeria as part of the process (the British gained control of Aden and surrounding areas of Yemen around the same time).
The rampant poverty, corruption and violence that today plague Nigeria are an inheritance of British rule, which itself was built up on centuries of slave raiding and trading – among the most corrupt and violent of activities – by the indigenous elites of the region with Europe, a devil’s bargain that haunts this part of the world to the present day.
Should the US be invading London for providing material support to terrorism?
It took decades after the end of the British empire for the impact of British colonialism in South Asia and Africa to blow back onto British soil. The US has not even finished her imperial moment and it has already arrived.
The US will now become ever more deeply involved across the arc of instability beginning in Nigeria and stretching across Africa, the Middle East and into Central Asia.
In the process, it will deepen the mistakes that have made attacks such as the one attempted by Abdulmutallab inevitable.
Poverty and oppression
This is clear from the New York Times’ New Year’s eve editorial about Yemen, which warned of the importance of “heading off full chaos” in the country.
“Yemen’s government is corrupt and repressive,” the paper intoned. “But President Ali Abdullah Saleh seems to want to cooperate.”
The world’s paper of record is utterly clueless as to the intimate link between the corruption and oppression of the Yemeni government and its willingness to “cooperate” with the US, and the roots of radicalism in Yemen.
The New York Times, along with the rest of the mainstream media, have also ignored the role growing up so privileged in a country such as Nigeria had on Abdulmutallab, who likely saw the “moderation” (in Western eyes) of his wealthy banker father as a sign of his participation in a system that violated the most basic ethical premises of his religion and helped support poverty and oppression at home and across the Muslim world.
If the mainstream press, and with it no doubt the Obama administration, are unwilling to recognise the inextricable ties between oppression, poverty, corruption and violence by governments like Nigeria and Yemen, and the rise of religiously grounded extremism and violence there, then its increasing foot- or boot-print there will strengthen rather than weaken al-Qaeda and similar movements.
Strategy of shame
As I stood in the security line at JFK airport waiting to be frisked before boarding a New Year’s day flight home, another goal, or at least consequence, of the most recent attack became apparent, one deeply tied to the obsession with physical and sexual honour in radical Islamist ideology: With this one failed action, the movement will succeed in routinising the systematic physical violation of airline travellers by our own security personnel as a part of the price of air travel.
Invasive frisking of the most intimate areas of the human body and revealing full body scans represent from a hardcore Salafi perspective an almost unbearable indignity -one they will surely relish seeing millions of the enemy routinely suffer, especially when such violations mirror the daily indignities and sexual humiliation infamously suffered by inmates in Guantanamo and other US-run prisons.
Call it a politics or strategy of shame – another weapon in the al-Qaeda arsenal that the West will have a hard time finding an answer for and which will erode support for the ‘war on terror’ from within even as Western governments strengthen their ties to oppressive front line states.
Osama bin Laden could not have planned it better if he tried.
Mark LeVine is currently visiting professor at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Lund University, Sweden. His books include Heavy Metal Islam: Rock, Resistance, and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam and Impossible Peace: Israel/Palestine Since 1989.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.
Source: Al Jazeera
Byron,
“We drink Naked so why not fly naked.”
Wind burn.
‘Nuff said.
sheeit, lets cut to the chase and make all flights naked. We drink Naked so why not fly naked.
To keep us safe we will all need religious identity cards–god, empirecookie, how can you not see what we need to do?!
I remember a Movie called Castle. Robert Redford was in a military Prison. Maybe it should and could be viewed by the people to see what even inmates are capable of.
empirecookie. That was the letter A and it means Adventures in Nationality Traits. AINT.
empirecookie,
Shame on you! Didn’t you know the Tommuy can tell a persons religion by scent? 😉 He’s a real genius that one. I’m thinking they should have retired him before he was a Lieutenant Colonel. That’s the thinking of a Private.
And you are exactly right. What the retired disgrace to his uniform is suggesting is that all brown people be searched, plain and simple.
Ahh, FOX. I can smell the racism and bigotry from here. Maybe he can team up with Hume and tell all the brown people of the world the only way to not be considered a terrorist is through Jesus.
We won’t mention that McVeigh thing.
Much.
Did General Tom explain how airport security people are supposed to know who is Muslim and who is Hindu and who is a Sikh and who is an athiest, etc? Will Muslims be required to wear a red M on their foreheads? Or is anyone with brown skin fair game for a strip search?