Is airport security just a modern Maginot Line?
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By now you may have heard about this:
All travelers flying into the U.S. from foreign countries will receive tightened random screening, and 100 percent of passengers from 14 terrorism-prone countries will patted down and have their carry-ons searched, the Obama administration was notifying airlines on Sunday. – Politico, Jan 3/10
Okay. Predictably, the reactionary response to the Christmas Day bombing attempt on Northwest flight 253 that caused massive delays in its first few days will only expand, and now includes a form of what might best be described as national profiling. But will it work? According to an Israeli airport security expert, the long line-ups and crowded airport hallways are fresh invitations for terrorism.
“If you have a suicide bomber or somebody who wants to make an impact, he doesn’t have to bring down a plane. He can just explode in the middle of this huge crowd that is waiting for security.”
The inherent problem with the North American approach to aviation security is that it spreads its resources by treating every passenger equally, [Rafi] Sela says. That means the rare passenger who is a potential threat gets screened for the same short time as the vast majority of travelers who are not dangerous.
So it appears as though the new regulations are meant to combat this tendency. By focusing on individuals from certain countries, airport security will now devote more time to those people who could be the biggest threats. Just another extraordinary measure to fight terrorism, right?
In today’s Guardian, Gary Younge writes,
The trouble is that even by their own shabby standards, none of these “extraordinary measures” have ever worked. No new laws were necessary to stop 9/11. If the immigration services, the FBI and the CIA had been doing their jobs properly, the attacks could have been prevented.
One might argue the same in the case of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who had been red-flagged by everyone from the British and U.S. governments to his own father. But if and when those first lines of defence fail, (as they did) is airport security the last stand? It would seem the answer is yes, but then…
There will always be a way to get around security because it’s only as good as its weakest point. In the case of Abdulmutallab, that weakest point was in any number of spots, but none larger than the on-going failure of decades of foreign policy. The fundamental problem in the on-going global grapple with would-be terrorists hardly starts at an airport.
Younge continues,
“If there’s a 1% chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaida build or develop a nuclear weapon,” [Dick] Cheney once said, “we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response. It’s not about our analysis … It’s about our response”. But it’s precisely because their analysis has been so deeply flawed that their response has been so faulty.
What the reactionary security enhancements at airports do is deter a direct attack, and force anyone wanting to cause havoc to look elsewhere, exposing areas that aren’t part of the security wall. It also gives those of us not from one of the 14 listed nations of interest the false sense of a problem being solved, when in reality it’s sort of evidence of the exact opposite.
When the French built the Maginot Line – a massive, fortified security barricade – after the end of the First World War, it was because they expected a future attack from Germany to be the same as the last one. That wasn’t the case – it rarely is. And as Frederick Taylor writes in his book, The Berlin Wall,
The French built fairly desultory defences along the Belgian border and continued to proclaim the Maginot fortifications’ impregnability to one and all. Many were impressed, above all the French public.
We, too, seem to be suffering from a “Maginot mentality.”
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Has no one in the TSA read Foucault? These security lines will only breed future modes of resistance. The TSA assumes a consistent terrorist—having tried the shoe-bomb, they conclude, so shall the terrorists try again. To say nothing of the swelling security lines or general inconvenience of flying, terrorists will forever locate and exploit nodes of resistance in the I. Berlin-esqu Hedgehog of TSA’s ineptitude.
Well said, and I’d like to think that everyone would benefit from reading a bit of Foucault, whether it’s on this or something like the meaning of torture…
In response to another comment. See in context »Exactly what I was thinking, right down to the metaphor. The French government could have done any number of things that would have cost less money and might have genuinely reduced the risk of war, like investing in their neighbor’s limping democracy and saving the Deutsche Mark from collapse, thus reducing poverty and diminishing the allure of fascist extremism in Germany. But that wasn’t the point: cynical French politicians wanted something to point to and say “We made this to keep you safe!” and a delusional population was glad to see it. And that’s more or less where we are right now.
Exactly.
In response to another comment. See in context »Oddly, the need for the Maginot Line as a defense against Germany was to defend themselves from the consequences of the war reparations from the Treaty of Versailles. Those reparations against the Germans were in turn retaliation for the reparations of the Franco-Prussian War against the French. President Wilson fought against reparations and lost- and then we had WWII and the Holocaust, and then the Cold War to follow.
Moral of the story? Attrition and retaliation is an endless cycle. No level of incarcerating and torturing terrorism suspects is going to change that, and no Chinese Wall or Maginot Line is going to keep them out. It’s time to try something different.
In response to another comment. See in context »I’ve always been fond of the phrase “security theater”. It’s all for show.
Military planers have always been accused of re-fighting the last war. Maginot was built over the memory of Verdun, the war fought by attrition between traditional enemies using conventional means, perhaps the bloodiest battle in human history. It’s a useful metaphor for overcompensating for prior failures, and one that central bureaucracies seem destined to repeat.
It is also worth mentioning that it was France in the post-Versailles era that invaded and occupied the Ruhr, tried to stage a coup in the Rhineland, and prevented Vienna and Berlin from forming an economic union to fight-off the emerging Depression. To top it all off, it was France that declared war on Germany. It takes two to tango.
In short, France spent all its time focusing on Germany the enemy, rather than Germany the friend. Perhaps there is a similar lesson to be learned here, in terms of the West and the Rest.