Screening for liquid bombs isn’t possible with existing scanners, The New York Times reports:
Since September 2001, the federal government has hired tens of thousands of government screeners and upgraded its metal detectors and X-ray machines. But most of the equipment is still oriented toward preventing a metallic gun or other easily identifiable weapon from being carried aboard; it cannot distinguish shampoo from an explosive.
But the feds knew this as far back as 1995, when the Manila bomb plot was thwarted:
James Jay Carafano, senior fellow at Heritage Foundation in Washington and an expert on domestic security, said that in the last year, officials at the highest levels of the department recognized the seriousness of the threat posed by liquid explosives and had been pushing aggressively to introduce equipment that could help.
But no such devices are ready to be rolled out.
This is not a case of them being caught like a deer in the headlights and saying, Oh my God we never expected this, Mr. Carafano said. In fact they expected this threat.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
http://www.zefrank.com/theshow/archives/2006/08/081006.html
What would happen if we stopped being afraid?
Transcript of video from above link:
Good afternoon, Sports Racers, it’s Thursday, August 10th.
My server went down, so I lost a whole bunch of crap. But luckily I read all the comments, and one of them said, “Ze, you’ve seemed down lately. Is anything the matter?”
Thanks. Yeah, I have been down. This is really hard. Like when some dude writes and says that the show sucks and I should do top ten lists, sometimes I want to say,
“Ten! Go suck a goat’s balls! Nine! That way the goat could stop licking your balls and finally have something to eat! Eight! I’m not your little wind-up toy, dickweed!”
But that doesn’t really get me anywhere, and besides, there’s other things going on. Like apparently, the Brits caught some douchebags who were going to blow up some planes.
Now, the way I see it, you can’t have terrorism without terror. The strategy of terrorism is to use isolated acts of violence to instill fear and confusion into the population at large. A small number of people can incapacitate a society by leveraging our inability to understand risk.
Airline industry stocks plummetted today, while the industry braced for a rash of cancellations. This, despite the fact that even with the risk of airplane bombings it’s still more dangerous to drive your car. Or smoke cigarettes.
As long as a small group of people can inflict mass panic across a large population, the tactic itself will remain viable. One way to deal a blow to the effectiveness of terrorism is to deal with the terror itself.
London’s police deputy commissioner Paul Stevenson said that the plot was “intended to be mass murder on an unimaginable scale.” No, it is imaginable: between three and ten flights out of thousands would have resulted in the terrible loss of human life.
Bush today said this country is safer today than it was prior to 9/11. Personally, I don’t think he knows. Whether we like it or not, terrorist attacks on Americans are now part of the global reality. They will continue to happen. Many places around the globe have had to deal with a similar reality for years. India, Ireland, England, Spain, Russia, to name a few. In many cases, these societies have pulled together and not allowed isolated acts of violence to tear at their fiber. Like disease and the forces of nature, it’s a risk that we have to rationally come to terms with. The government’s responsibility is to make sure that fear and terror are not disproportionate to the reality of the situation.
Today the President said, “This nation is at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom to hurt our nation.” Generalized statements like this which instill nebulous fear without specific information are exactly in line with the goals of terrorism.
Sorry to be such a downer. This is Ze Frank, thinking for me.
>Screening for liquid bombs isn’t possible with
>existing scanners, The New York Times reports:
Wrong, Bull Sh*t period. There are methods to detect such explosives. I will give a F to New York Times for doing no such research. David Axe, you also have not done enough.