Posted on 12/26/2001 9:46:17 AM PST by JIM O
Naked Air
Commentary by Thomas L. Friedman for The New York Times
In the wake of the attempted bombing last week of the American Airlines flight from Paris by a terrorist nut with explosives in his shoe, I'm thinking of starting my own airline, which would be called: Naked Air. Its motto would be: "Everybody flies naked and nobody worries." Or "Naked Air — where the only thing you wear is a seat belt."
Think about it. If everybody flew naked, not only would you never have to worry about the passenger next to you carrying box cutters or exploding shoes, but no religious fundamentalists of any stripe would ever be caught dead flying nude, or in the presence of nude women, and that alone would keep many potential hijackers out of the skies. It's much more civilized than racial profiling. And I'm sure that it wouldn't be long before airlines would be offering free dry-cleaning for your clothes while you fly.
Well, you get the point: if the terrorists are just going to keep using technology to become better and better, how do we protect against that, while maintaining an open society — without stripping everyone naked? I mean, what good is it to have a free and open America when someone can easily get on an airplane in Paris and bring a bomb over in the heel of his shoe or plot a suicide attack on the World Trade Center from a cave in Kandahar and then pop over and carry it out?
This is America's core problem today: A free society is based on openness and on certain shared ethics and honor codes to maintain order, and we are now intimately connected to too many societies that do not have governments that can maintain order and to peoples who have no respect for our ethics or our honor codes.
Remember the electronic ticket machines that were used for the Boston-New York-Washington shuttles? Ever use one? Not only were you automatically issued your ticket with a credit card by pressing a touch- screen, but they asked you — electronically — "Did you pack your bags yourself?" and "Did any strangers give you anything?" And you answered those security questions by touching a screen! Think about the naïve trust and honor code underlying those machines.
If I had my way they would now take all those machines and put them in a special room in the Smithsonian museum called: "Artifacts From America Before Sept. 11, 2001."
We're not alone. I just flew in and out of Moscow, where you now have to fill out a detailed customs form. It asks the usual questions: Are you carrying any fruits, plants, large amounts of foreign currency, special electronics or weapons? But there was one box that unnerved me a bit. It asked: Are you carrying any "radioactive materials?" Hmm, I wondered, how many people (i.e. smugglers) are going to check that box? Can you imagine going through Moscow customs and the couple in front of you turning to each other and asking: "Dear, did we pack the nuclear waste in your suitcase or mine?" Or, "Honey, is the plutonium in your purse or the black duffel?" I don't think so.
Which is why we are entering a highly problematic era, one that we are just beginning to get our minds around. We are becoming much more keenly aware of how freedom and order go together (see the Ashcroft debates). For America to stay America, a free and open society, intimately connected to the world, the world has to become a much more ordered and controlled place. And order emerges in two ways: It is either grown from the bottom up, by societies slowly developing good democratic governance and shared ethics and values, or it is imposed from the top down, by non-democratic, authoritarian regimes rigidly controlling their people.
But in today's post-cold-war world, many, many countries to which we are connected are in a transition between the two — between a rigid authoritarian order that was imposed and voluntary self-government that is being home-grown. It makes for a very messy world, especially as some countries — Afghanistan being the most extreme example — are not able to make the transition.
"The problem with top-down control is that more governments around the world are fragmenting today, rather than consolidating," said the Israeli political theorist Yaron Ezrahi. "At the same time, America's technologies are being universalized — planes that go faster and faster and electronics that are smaller and smaller — but the American values and honor system that those technologies assume have not been universalized. In the hands of the wrong people they become weapons of mass destruction."
So there you have our dilemma: Either we become less open as a society, or the world to which we are now so connected has to become more controlled — by us and by others — or we simply learn to live with much higher levels of risk than we've ever been used to before.
Or, we all fly naked.
Having to look at Thomas Friedman naked.
Or, we allow more weapons on planes for the good guys. And we quit telling our enemies such things as the fact that we will not be able to screen all bags and passengers for explosives for some time (it is not wrong to deceive the enemy in wartime, we should have thousands of beagles roaming around pretending to be bomb dogs, with a few trained ones mixed in - and not tell the world that we are being misleading). There are lots of options other than the extremes promoted by Friedman here.
Well, I'd be worrying.
This combines two recurrent nightmares I've had since childhood.
It's bad enough looking at his mug shot...
A free society is based on openness and on certain shared ethics and honor codes to maintain order, and we are now intimately connected to too many societies that do not have governments that can maintain order and to peoples who have no respect for our ethics or our honor codes.
Amazing! You're very, very close, Mr. Friedman! Now make it simple: Free societies depend on Civilized people. But Civlized people don't NEED the government to "maintain order" except at a minimal level; they do it all by themselves!
Clue: This is why the Bobbies never used to have to carry guns. (Note the "Used To" part).
So I say bomb them all into submission!...and shoot all extremist!
Just think of all the blankets and flight socks they are going to have to store.
When the Marines quit laughing, the result would had been the same.
Simple fact of life: If the enemy wants to hit a target bad enough, there is nothing you can do to prevent it. Just ask any member of our Special Forces as to how effective prevention will keep them out.
What you can do is to make it so difficult, that the enemy will want to find an easier target. Personally, I know of no better method, than to allow each and every person on an aircraft the ability to defend them selves and turn an easy target of sheep into a den of wolves.
I bet that you could surgically implant a 3 pound sheet of C-4 encased in silicon between Nadler's adominal muscles and his body fat using a roll line to conceal the incision. Once healed, even the dogs couldn't smell it. Because of the loose lips admonition, I won't go into detination scenarios here.
Anyway, so now they are checking shoes. Yawn. There is no way a bureaucracy can get ahead of these folks. It's gonna take roadrunners to catch roadrunners. Airport security is just a bunch of hapless coyotes.
Unbelievable, would cut air traffic substantially(in half?), but if 2 or 3 dozen planes go down in the next year, could be a possibility.
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