The focus on airline passengers' genitalia has been renewed thanks to John Tyner, whose trip aboard an airline was aborted but who soared into history by warning a TSA employee to not "touch his junk." (The Time Capsule commentary on this matter belongs to Charles Krauthammer and his wildly enjoyable WaPo column entitled "Don't Touch My Junk.")
In January, I wondered whether bomb-sniffing dogs would be deployed to sniff out explosives in our undergarments, and whether Muslims (who consider dogs to be unclean) would claim a religious opt-out from close contact with a dog. Right on cue, the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations is advising Muslim women wearing the hijab that TSA is not allowed to subject them to a full or partial body pat-down, that TSA only allowed to pat down their head and neck area, and that Muslim women can request to perform their own pat-downs of their head-and-neck area. (When a CNSNews.com reporter asked Janet Napolitano whether she would require Muslim women to go through full body pat-downs prior to boarding airliners, she dodged the question, promising that "with respect to that particular issue, I think there will be more to come.")
In the meantime, while Muslim women are claiming the prerogative to pat themselves down, breast cancer survivors are being forced to remove their prosthetic breasts and show them to TSA staff, bladder cancer survivors are being drenched in their own urine after talentless, clueless, careless TSA staff break the seals on their urostomy bags, and women are claiming sexual assault after having their labia touched by TSA staff.
Richard Reid tried to bring down an airliner with a shoebomb in 2001 and we've been taking off our shoes at security ever since; thanks to the Pantybomber it's going to be open season on our private parts in the security line for the foreseeable future, or at least until the Muslim world realizes that American elected a transformative young President who is going to make the world love us again.
The next frontier is, inescapably, the body cavity search. In August 2009, al Qaeda operative Abdullah "Butt Boy" Asieri made it past airline security and Saudi palace security with a pound of explosives and a detonator concealed in his rectum. The Butt Bomb was detonated via a text message (OMFG!), but the Saudi prince who was the target of the assassination attempt sustained only minor injuries.
So far as we know, Butt Bombs have not been used to try to bring down an airliner; the TSA being an entirely reactive operation, they will not address the body cavity threat until a Butt Bomb is deployed against American interests. In other words, not until it is too late.
The backscatter porno scanners currently in use cannot detect items concealed within the body, and the TSA pat-downs are not penetrative; the only way to detect internal explosives is by a body cavity search, or by a medical-grade x-ray.
The medical x-rays will be time-consuming and expensive, and frequent exposure will create independent health risks for frequent flyers. And I cannot under any circumstances imagine families traveling home for the holidays or business travelers headed to a meeting in Cleveland agreeing to bend over and spread 'em in order to board an aircraft.
Body cavity bombs are the next frontier in airline security, and the only two screening options available are complete nonstarters. The threat posed by body cavity bombs, and our complete inability to detect them by any reasonable physical means at our disposal, should serve as a wake-up call that our reliance on physical screening is not making us safer, and that we need to embrace behavioral screening.
It should, but it isn't. The TSA is still focusing on the last threats, in shoes, underwear, and water bottles.
I only pray that my next post on this matter begins with a reference to a terrorist who tried and failed to bring down an airliner with a body cavity bomb.
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