Airport security: the example of Israel
Yesterday a discussion began with commenter “Irene” asking an important question about a photo of one of the Istanbul suicide bombers at the airport, taken some time prior to his self-detonation:
What struck me right away was that, in all the photos, most men were wearing short sleeved shirts”¦except the suicide bomber who was wearing a black, long-sleeved, zipped-up puffy jacket.
Istanbul had a high of 84 and low of 72 yesterday. Anybody walking around dressed the way the suicide bomber was should have been pulled aside by security and asked to unzip his jacket.
Irene’s question highlights several issues vital to decisions on security: what to look for, when to look for it, and what to do about it. In the case of the Istanbul airport, security had already been pushed back to an earlier point than where it begins at many airports in the US: for Istanbul, curbside or the entrance to the airport itself. It wasn’t enough, although it may have helped prevent the bombers from detonating themselves in even more crowded areas than that, and causing even greater loss of life.
My guess is that at whatever point the bomber in the jacket had been noticed by Istanbul security and asked to unzip his jacket, that would have been the moment he would have detonated his explosives (or alternatively, if he also had a gun, as some of the Istanbul terrorists had, he would have shot the security guard if there was enough time to draw and fire). This is one of the risks guards take, of course; to be willing to sacrifice themselves in order to save some lives. If a terrorist is forced to detonate himself prematurely, away from crowds, lives are saved although the terrorist may indeed take the guard with him/her.
But try to imagine the extent of the security apparatus and personnel it would take to spot, and stop, everyone wearing inappropriate clothing on a hot day at every airport. And imagine the inconvenience to the public and the resultant outcry. In addition, it would only work on hot days—in other seasons, heavy garments are not suspicious. What’s more, airports are places where people carry bulky packs and suitcases all the time, and bombs and weaponry can be stored there.
This was my response to Irene. After pointing out that the first Istanbul terrorist attacked right before the first security checkpoint, I mentioned Israel:
In Israel I’ve heard they start their security before the airport, on the road into it. But they are a much smaller country and there’s only one big airport, Ben Gurion. To give you an idea of the comparative figures, Ben Gurion served about 13 million people in the year 2012.
The Istanbul airport is the 11th busiest in the world and served about 61 million people in 2015. For more perspective, Logan in Boston, which is only the 17th busiest airport in the United States, serves about 2 and a half times as many people as Ben Gurion.
You see the dilemma. The sort of screening that Israel is able to put in place is much more problematic at larger airports in larger countries. From what I can see, Istanbul has more security than most airports in terms of number and placement of armed guards.
I saw on the news that in the wake of Istanbul the US has stepped up the number of armed guards at airports (some probably undercover). But I’m unaware of any US airport that has a security checkpoint anywhere in the airport except at the gates, because US security is more concentrated on protecting airplanes than on the airport itself (at least, that’s been the focus of the security we can see; perhaps there’s more that we don’t see). In the past in the US that made sense because the airplanes were the focus of the terrorists, too (9/11 being the prime example).
For Israel it was different: they experienced the Lod Airport massacre of 1972, which I wrote a post about a few years ago:
You may never have heard of it””or of Lod airport, for that matter, which is in Tel Aviv and was later renamed Ben Gurion Airport after Israel’s founder and first prime minister. But the Lod massacre remains one of the most terrifying in the long list of terrorist attacks that have followed, and at the time it was perpetrated (1972) it was especially horrific. Masterminded by the PLO (specifically, its hard left wing the PLFP), it was also a prelude to the much-more-famous Munich Olympics massacre that gripped the world just a few short months later.
The PLO was involved in both, but the Lod massacre featured unusual perpetrators for that organization, and that was part of its shock value: leftist Japanese gunmen. This is the way it went down:
”¦[T]hree inconspicuous Japanese men dressed in business suits disembarked Air France Flight 132 from Rome and strolled into the baggage claim area. After retrieving what appeared to be violin cases, the men pulled out machine guns, opened fire and threw grenades indiscriminately at the crowds of people”¦
The gunmen killed 26 people: 17 Christian pilgrims from Puerto Rico, one Canadian citizen, and eight Israelis, and 80 people were injured”¦
It probably wouldn’t happen exactly that way today, because the guns might be caught by security in the checked baggage, depending on whether all bags are X-rayed. But it could happen in a way similar to what occurred at Istanbul.
In response to the Lod incident as well as others, Israel has put in place a very different approach [hat tip: commenter “Aesop Fan”] :
Israeli authorities have long since recognized that security procedures at the airport, however stringent, can only be partially effective if there’s a great gaping hole of vulnerability before travelers get anywhere near the terminal building. And therefore, at Ben Gurion Airport, all vehicles entering the wider airport area are subject to a first check. It may appear cursory; indeed, it is cursory. But simply asking drivers to lower their windows and lobbing a question or two at them affords the security personnel a first opportunity to register anything suspicious. There’s a second, again relatively cursory check, on everybody entering the terminal ”” another opportunity to pick up on something untoward. And then there’s the vexing issue of passenger profiling ”” a sensitive matter; an ordeal for some passengers. But a process that enables Israeli security to focus its attention on potentially more problematic travelers and thus to reduce the risk to all travelers.
Diverse factors are at work in Israeli passenger profiling techniques. Thirty years ago, at Heathrow Airport, El Al security found a bomb in the baggage of a young Irish woman traveling to Tel Aviv; it had been hidden in the false bottom of her bag by her Jordanian boyfriend. No amount of questioning would have prompted Anne-Marie Murphy to disclose the bomb’s existence, because Nezar Hindawi hadn’t told her it was there. She was carrying his child and he was sending her, his unborn baby and the rest of the passengers to their deaths. But she merited particularly close inspection because she was traveling alone, had never previously been to Israel, and had purchased the ticket a short time before the flight.
There’s probably a lot more to Israeli security than that, but you get the idea. But, as I pointed out in my comment yesterday, Israel is a country so small that such things are easier. It’s also a country that’s been dealing with the problem for a long time and is especially interested in survival. It is willing to commit the resources, and its population is hyper-aware of the dangers and for the most part willing to put up with the inconvenience and the expense. It seems necessary.
Speaking of expense:
In Israel’s case, a generous state budget allows for some 2,000 personnel to work exclusive in airport security roles, and many of those workers are undercover, according to Pini Schiff, CEO of Israel Security Association, one of Israel’s top aviation security experts. Passengers are also checked via radar, cameras and other equipment well before they enter the airport and laws allow for ethnic profiling, he said.
What do people in the US think is necessary at this point? What are they willing to put up with? There is no consensus. It’s my impression, though, that people want the security measures they do undergo to be effective ones rather than empty exercises. With things like removing your shoes at the security checkpoint, it’s hard to see that it helps unless you think that it may have prevented terrorists from using that route. Of course, they can always try another route—the possibilities for wreaking havoc and many and varied, limited only by terrorist imagination. How can security keep ahead of all the possibilities? It can’t.
And then there’s profiling. That is, of course, extremely controversial in this country. It’s not even clear that some of it isn’t done, at least clandestinely (and “profiling” needn’t just be limited to race, as the example of the Irish woman traveling to Israel illustrates).
Commenter “Artfldgr” makes another point, which is that security lines and checkpoints can often act to cluster and concentrate people in a way that makes greater numbers of them more vulnerable to attacks there. That’s part of the reason earlier checkpoints are sometimes instituted. I suspect, for example, that the toll at Istanbul with three well-equipped bombers was somewhat less than it would have been had they managed to make it to lines at the major security checkpoints inside the airport.
And in Israel, the security questions begin with cars approaching the airport. Of course, even that can present a target, because there is the security guard and there is probably a line of stopped traffic for that checkpoint. But again, the damage would be likely to be more limited, since people in cars are both more protected and more spread out than a crowd of pedestrian travelers would be.
The bottom line is that if there are enough terrorists participating in an attack, and they are smart about their approach, they can do a lot of damage. All that security can do is make it harder for them. Israel makes it very, very, very hard.
[NOTE: Of course, the other thing to do is to have better intelligence about terrorist networks in this country and around the world. But in this post I’m focusing on security measures other than prevention.]
Until we take away the incentive, i.e. paradise & its 72 virgins and, hold Islam itself accountable for its terrorism, nothing will change.
1. What makes Israel’s approach difficult to scale up is its dependence on face-to-face interactions – you are repeatedly asked relatively straightforward questions (such as “Did you pack your luggage yourself?” and “were you given anything to take as a gift?”) by several different, very well trained people. In addition, you are being observed by undercover people.
No technology yet developed can match human intuition and ability to pick up cues from other humans – the result of millennia of evolution, honed with training.
Obviously this is difficult to scale up. But maybe it would give all those bien-pensant “humanities” majors some real jobs – combined with a much needed wake-up call. At the very least it would encourage them to focus outside themselves for 8 hours a day…
2. Profiling most definitely happens in the USA – covered with an absurd veneer of political correctness. Anyone who has flown to Israel – even for a one-off tour – will find themselves “randomly selected” for security screening for the next few years…
My brother in law flies back to the States annually to interview college students for 1-year programs in Israel, and he always goes to the counter and asks if they can get the “random” screening over with so he can head to the frequent-flyer lounge – to be answered with a wide-eyed American stare and insistence that it’s “completely random, sir”….
“yes I know but I’m pretty certain I’m going to be *randomly* picked..”
“oh no sir it’s *completely* random..”
“What struck me right away was that, in all the photos, most men were wearing short sleeved shirts…except the suicide bomber who was wearing a black, long-sleeved, zipped-up puffy jacket.
Istanbul had a high of 84 and low of 72 yesterday. Anybody walking around dressed the way the suicide bomber was should have been pulled aside by security and asked to unzip his jacket.”
Anybody trained in store or mall security, on the look out for shop lifters, loss prevention, would have picked up on this.
Our airports are in the best of hands.
Political correctness is killing us.
Geoffrey Britain said:
“Until we take away the incentive, i.e. paradise & its 72 virgins and, hold Islam itself accountable for its terrorism, nothing will change.”
Unfortunately we can’t take that incentive away. But we can make the process extremely painful.
Steve 57:
Yes, but if you read my post you’d see that’s not the point. The question is when would he be noticed, how would he be stopped, and when would he detonate his vest? He was actually noticed by Istanbul security at some point before entering the airport; the exact circumstances are somewhat sketchy—but it’s possible they felt he was suspicious. With a suicide vest, though, it could be detonated at any point.
He got out of a cab at the cabstand and exploded himself in that same area, apparently. So, when should he have been noticed earlier? When could he have been noticed? What could have been done differently?
A mall is quite different—there’s ordinarily no crowd at the entrance, unlike an airport.
At the 1:04 point in this BBC video of CCTV coverage inside the terminal, you can see some passengers running away from a blast or gunfire. Two them are wearing zipped-up jackets, not puffy ones though.
The PRIMARY threat is the world wide jihad that’s fulsomely under way.
So the FIRST step towards security is to simply stop Muslim immigration.
Global citizens don’t have a birthright to enter America — let alone become residents or citizens.
It really is that simple.
Sixty-years ago such travails were unknown.
Lest we forget, the first wave of immigrant Muslims were hugely skewed by those FLEEING Islam.
Only their paperwork labelled them Muslim.
The source of the jihad is the MOSQUE.
Since EVERY mosque in America is STATE SPONSORED — the vast bulk by the King of Saudi Arabia — every cleric is on his payroll — these institutions are gross violations of the First Amendment to the US Constitution.
For not only is the US government prohibited from sponsoring a religion — so too must all alien state powers.
Mosques – unlike churches or temples — are NOT self-funding.
They are ‘stood up’ by ALIEN finance. The passing of the hat you see is a subterfuge to fool the kafir. Any and all hat-collected funds are diverted towards jihad.
{ As in Hamas, et. al. }
What we are doing to defend ourselves from Islamic terror attacks is a bit reminiscent of the Great Wall of China. The wall required a huge expenditure of money and manpower, but it was, in fact, cosmetic. There were gates in the wall and there were traitors among the keepers of the gates. The Great Wall, well built as it was, wasn’t really all that great.
Against such an enemy as the jihadi terrorists, who depend on surprise, cunning, and talking advantage of our weaknesses, the best defense is a great offense. We were on offense during the Bush years. There were no successful attacks on our soil after 9/11 during those years. Obama has gone back to playing defense and treating terrorism as a law enforcement issue. Four successful attacks on his watch. Is there a message there? I think so.
The TSA has always been about security theater. Without profiling they are pretending to do the job. I am surprised that the terrorists have been so long in realizing that the pre-screening queue areas are the most vulnerable. I have been in the Denver airport which has a winding back and forth line to the security check area. There were at least 400 people in an area the size of a small basketball court. One bomb and we’d all be dead. Even worse, the security check area in Denver is overlooked by an easily accessible mezzanine from which several grenades, or even RPGs, could be sent into the crowd from above.
What effect would a series of five attacks on shopping malls in major areas during the height of Christmas shopping have? A major effect on economic activity, IMO.
What kind of outrage will it take before we go back on offense and stay on offense until Salafi/Wahhabi/political Islam is ground up and discredited as a theological path for Muslims? As long as the democrats are in charge, a nuclear attack might not be enough. PC, multiculturalism, and open borders are their thing and are going to get a lot of people killed.
Nothing will be done until we realize sharia is the heart of the problem. That goes for us infidels and muslims. The destruction of sharia begins in the mosques and ends with the rest of the world harshly banning[exiling any and all who support sharia.
“Unfortunately we can’t take that incentive away.” Steve57
Well, not completely, no. But we can greatly reduce that incentive. To the point where recruitment basically evaporates. The methodology to do that is clear enough, it is the will that is lacking. The incentive for the jihadists is paradise with its 72 virgins. That belief is entwined with other beliefs, most relevantly with the ideological tenet that an ‘unclean’ Muslim may not enter paradise. And, as with all of Islam’s tenets, they believe it has been declared by Allah himself, so there’s no possibility of changing it.
So, ensure that as many killed and captured jihadists as possible are unclean when they die and by their own ‘religious’ beliefs, they are eternally barred from paradise.
So, it has been declared by both Allah and Muhammad that, ANY contact with any part of a pig renders a Muslim unclean. And while moderate Muslims may discount that tenet, jihadists, the most faithful of Muslims cannot dismiss that belief.
The sincere though fanatical Imams and Mullahs, who drive Islamic terrorism believe the same thing. Targeting them with retribution that renders them unclean, accomplishes the same result. Whereas, those who are not sincere and are in it for the wealth and power, value their precious hides above all else.
Again, changing the risk-reward ratio for ‘radical’ Muslims isn’t particularly difficult, its the west’s political correctness wherein the problem lies.
With regard to the efficacy of profiling – we are doomed.
http://libertyunyielding.com/2016/06/27/muslim-woman-lax-threatens-bomb-america-walks-terminal/
parker,
Sharia is simply the ‘legal’ codification of Allah’s commands in the Qur’an and Muhammad’s assertions in the hadiths. To reject sharia is to effectively reject Muhammad and therefore to reject Allah’s veracity, which rests entirely upon Muhammad’s veracity.
The only Muslim society that can reject sharia is one ruled by a dictator, strong man. Which is why Turkey started to drift back to sharia with the death of Ataturk and why Saddam’s ouster guaranteed that Iraq would either become theocratic or install another strong man.
And yes, that implies that had we stayed in Iraq for another 20 or even 50 years, as soon as we left, the same dynamic would have started to reassert itself.
Muslim majority societies cannot adopt Western norms and remain Islamic because Islam cannot tolerate democracy nor separation of church and state. As they are both anathema to Islam’s tenets.
Blert:
Were or are these mosques state sponsored?
Image result for what is the oldest mosque in america
The Mother Mosque of America, once known as The Rose of Fraternity Lodge and also known as Moslem Temple, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, United States, is the longest standing mosque in North America. Built in 1934, it is the second oldest after the mosque built in tiny Ross, North Dakota, which was built in 1929. (Google)
All this talk about 72 virgins and defilement of the Muslims (i.e., unclean conditions at death) didn’t seem to stop the 9-11 hijackers flying planes into buildings and having their remains mixed in with those of the kuffar. Doesn’t seem to stop suicide bombers. If you haven’t caught on yet Islam appears to exceptions for the “martyr” if the goal is killing the kuffar.
Goodness, Neo! It’s a red letter day for me. 😉
Islam views the 9/11 highjackers and suicide bombers as an honorable death. It sees nothing unclean in fulfilling Allah’s will. It is when a Muslim is already in an unclean state or where contact with the unclean occurs just prior to death where Allah forbids entrance into paradise.
That is not personal opinion. That is what Islam unequivocally declares to be Allah’s will.
Anne-Marie Murphy, the Irish young woman unknowingly carrying a bomb in her luggage courtesy of her lover, brings to mind THE LITTLE DRUMMER GIRL syndrome, which I’ve expected to see more of (and probably now will).
I view the MSM and PC as the 5th column. I look back at Michael Hastings, for instance, who brought down Gen. Stanley McChristal by means of an article in Rolling Stone wherein he repeated things said loosely when McChristal’s staff was drunk — and one guy took Hastings aside and said, “If you fuck us over we’ll kill you.” Hastings died in a flaming car MVA after his article did its damage and if anyone could get away with something like this it would be Special Forces and I personally hope to God they did. My friend at ABC said, “No way, man.” But then, he’s come to follow the CW (Common Wisdom) on everything for some while now.
In order words, reporters and Human Rights Watch and Amnesty Int’l and the entire feminist “War Without Anyone Getting Hurt” PC orthodoxy is as much our enemy as the Islamic motherfuckers.
Because there will be collateral damage. The Muslims know this is our big vulnerability (along with the PC weakening of the Armed Forces under Obama).
Geoffrey Britain Says
Islam views the 9/11 highjackers and suicide bombers as an honorable death.
“Let say, rather, inciter of public interest,” by phobia
The case of Israel deferent from other world, by provoking the other side let read this very recent
http://www.smh.com.au/world/netanyahu-vows-that-israel-will-never-give-up-golan-heights-20160417-go8lia.html
JJ:
“We were on offense during the Bush years.”
Bush’s counter-terrorism strategy, including and especially the Iraq intervention, was fundamentally correct. Strong-horse American leadership of the free world is the requisite foundation to win the War on Terror.
When critics of the Bush counter-terrorism strategy – from the Left and Right – claim that there’s no military solution, they elide that the military piece is operative in the context of everything else, such that the military piece allows for the structuring, anchoring, and empowering of every other transformative social cultural/political piece.
A major takeaway from this explanatory forum on ISIS by Columbia University subject matter experts from the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies is that the COIN Surge and resulting establishment of the US as the strong horse in the epic direct confrontation with the Saddam/AQ terrorist alliance should have been the beginning of the end of the jihadists, including Saddam/AQ derivatives like AQI and ISIS, as a significant international threat.
Obama’s mocked ‘jayvee’ characterization was in fact correct: by 2009, the terrorists, while not eradicated, were a defeated, broken, marginalized lot. bin Laden had put all his eggs in one basket with Iraq – and lost … or so he thought.
Except Bush’s successor, instead of following up the Bush gains like Ike followed up FDR and Truman by cementing strong-horse American leadership of the free world in post-WW2, deviated course from Bush.
Obama’s deviant sequence, instead, re-positioned the US as a feckless weak horse in Iraq and the subsequent Arab Spring that betrayed the Iraqi nationalists and Arab Spring reformers who counted and depended on strong-horse American leadership, and re-credited Russian-supported, terrorist-sponsoring autocratic regimes along with Sunni and Shia jihadists.
Of course, Obama reversed America’s hard-won gains under Bush and revitalized the enemy upon the prevailing yet demonstrably false narrative of the Iraq intervention that the GOP has irresponsibly refused to re-litigate for the public to set the record straight.
Eric:
But when Obama called ISIS the “jayvee” it was January of 2014, and he was certainly not correct.
Obama’s mocked ‘jayvee’ characterization was in fact correct:
Evil is never correct.
didn’t seem to stop the 9-11 hijackers flying planes into buildings and having their remains mixed in with those of the kuffar.
Killing khafirs and getting blood on their hands purifies them of all sins, including the sexual ones.
Not understanding Islam is a big problem when they have been Christianity and the West’s enemies for 1400 years.
…and in fact it was also incorrect when it was uttered, which was in January of 2014, as I wrote here.