[Infowarrior] - Fear of Flying? No. It's a fear of airports

Wed Oct 10 12:46:11 UTC 2007

Fear of Flying?
No. It's a fear of airports.
by Reuben F. Johnson - Weekly Standard
10/10/2007 12:00:00 AM

http://tinyurl.com/ysj2b4

LAST MONTH IT was reported that a 54-year-old veteran FBI official, Carl L.
Spicocchi, had been jailed in Arlington County several weeks earlier for
abducting, holding and physically assaulting his girlfriend. Specifically he
is accused of dragging her around by the hair inside of her apartment,
physically striking her, and threatening to kill her alternatively with both
a knife and his handgun--all over a period of six hours. It appeared that as
a result of this incident he was probably looking at some jail time (as of a
hearing last week when he was denied bond for a second time he had been
behind bars over a month) and his FBI career could well be finished.

The incident took place on 23 August, but was kept under wraps by local and
federal law enforcement for three weeks until it was reported in the
Washington Post on 13 September--having only been made public knowledge
because of his first court hearing. If the descriptions sworn to in court
are accurate, Spicocchi's actions are egregious no matter who might have
committed them. But they deserve particular condemnation when they are the
actions of a federal agent who is supposed to be using his training and
right to carry firearms to decrease the level of violent crime rather than
contributing to it.

My cynical comment to the Post blog at that time was that if Spicocchi had
committed all of these abusive acts against an ordinary citizen while inside
of an airport he could have gotten away with it all and more--even
murder--and would not have suffered the slightest punishment or judicial
process. He might have even received a commendation, I thought acidly at the
time.

These observations may seem slightly exaggerated and, yes, they are indeed
the product of the frustration that comes with the increasingly agonizing
experience of being a regular air traveler. I do a tremendous amount of
flying commercially, most of it internationally, and there is almost nothing
about air travel that promises the convenience and relaxation it had many
years ago. But, beyond all of this unpleasantness it is today painfully
obvious that an air passenger--once inside the confines of an airport in any
part of the world--has no rights whatsoever.

This includes not even the right to be protected from security and law
enforcement personnel who do not seem to understand any force other than
deadly force. Security, police, and passenger screening personnel in any
airport have near-dictatorial powers and almost limitless discretion to
decide who needs to be put into a chokehold and thrown into a windowless
room until someone can decided what set of ridiculously overblown charges
need to be leveled against them.

A case in point being the 42-year-old female Secret Service agent, Monica
Emmerson, who this past June was threatened with arrest and surrounded by a
phalanx of Transportation Security Agency (TSA) officers for the heinous
crime of having spilled on the floor at Reagan National Airport ordinary
drinking water from her 19-month-old toddler's sippy cup. One website
commenting on the incident stated that "I guess because they didn't beat her
to a pulp, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) claims that its
'Officers' did not 'Hassle Female Passenger with Toddler at Reagan National
Airport over Sippy Cup.' Perhaps the agency needs a dictionary with 'hassle'
defined in one-syllable words that even its cretins can understand."

Now, I thought this was all a bit harsh, but little did I realize how
spot-on some of these comments by myself and others would turn out to be.
Specifically, I refer to the incident at Phoenix airport that led to the
death of Carol Gotbaum on 30 September. The 45-year-old mother of three was
late for a flight to Tuscon and when she demanded to be let on board the
airplane, which had not yet pulled away from the gate, she was manhandled to
the ground and handcuffed--all the while screaming "I am not a terrorist. I
am not a criminal. I am a sick mother. I need help." What she got was the
kind of help that I used to receive as a freshman during college fraternity
hell week.

Law enforcement officials contend that she was out of control and had to be
restrained but witnesses interviewed by the family's attorney, Michael C.
Manning, tell a different story that seems like a script from a T.J. Hooker
episode. According to accounts in the New York Times "the police approached
her, according to witnesses, made no effort to speak to her, calm her or
assess the situation Two of them immediately took her to the ground."
Gotbaum was taken off to a holding cell and left alone with her hands cuffed
behind her back while she screamed to be released.

After a period of 5-10 minutes (curiously, no one seems to be able to pin
down the exact time in this case despite the fact that there was a death
involved), and after she had stopped shouting, police looked into the
holding cell and found Ms. Gotbaum with the metal chain used to attach the
handcuffs to the cell bench stretched across her neck. She was unconscious
and all attempts to revive her at this point failed. Her cause of death is
still being investigated, but a private investigator who also attended the
exam performed on Gotbaum by a private pathologist hired by the family
stated that her body exhibited signs of "very serious trauma," including
bruises and a mark on her neck from the metal chain. In other words, these
are injuries not consistent with the description of events given by the
Phoenix authorities.

It is easy to just chalk this up as an isolated incident, but mounting
evidence suggests that airport personnel have their reaction modes locked in
the "overkill" position and the ferocity of their response seems to increase
disproportionately as the perceived threatening or aggressive behaviour of a
passengers decreases.

Back in August a 41-year-old Australian citizen, Sophie Reynolds,
disembarked from a commuter flight in Pittsburgh only to be immediately
pulled aside by no less than three uniformed police officers. The
fully-armed police were spring-loaded with threats of filing federal charges
against her. Given the size of the police full-court press one would think
she had threatened the crew and passengers on board with a 14-inch,
razor-sharp Crocodile Dundee bush knife during the flight.

But, nothing quite so dramatic was at hand. Reynolds's dreadful offence was
that when she was told during the beverage service pretzels were not
available her response was "fair dinkum," an Australian slang expression
that means--in the vernacular of most US city dwellers--"for real?" US
television watchers have only been exposed to this phrase for about 20
years--it having been one of the lines from Paul Hogan's adverts promoting
Australian tourism in the 1980s. More recently it was used in 2003 by US
President George Bush on a trip to Australia as a compliment to Australian
PM John Howard. "I called him a 'man of steel,'" Bush said as he addressed
the Parliament in Canberra. "That's Texan for 'fair dinkum.'"

But the two concepts of "shoot first and ask questions later" and "you are
guilty for no other reason than the fact you are a passenger" are too far
engrained in the minds of those who work the airlines and police the
airports for them to bothered with trying to comprehend cultural
differences. The Delta flight attendant was so certain she had been cursed
at with profane language that she radioed ahead to have the paddy wagon
waiting at the gate. Reynolds was allowed to go free only after authorities
had consulted with a "linguist expert" who confirmed her language was in no
way offensive.

What makes the plight of the average passenger even more frightening is the
by-now famous "war on shampoo" liquids ban, which means passengers have no
right to safeguard their health and administer life-saving medications.

Last October the Australian carrier QANTAS apologised to a diabetic who fell
into a coma after staff refused to let him take his insulin on board a
flight from Auckland to Christchurch. Tui Russell, a 43-year-old
Auckland-based chef, was told by check-in staff that he could not take the
clearly-labeled medication on board because it was "dangerous." Without his
insulin he suffered a severe attack on the flight and was hospitalised for
two weeks after falling into a coma shortly before landing at Christchurch
Airport. Auckland to Christchurch is a short--compared with international
destinations--domestic flight within New Zealand. Were it a lengthier
flight, it is doubtful he would have survived.

The following month a Swedish woman, Lidia Holsten, went into allergic shock
and lost consciousness for half an hour on a flight from Paris to Stockholm.
The reason was that her medication had been taken away during a security
check at boarding. Holsten's medicines were clearly labeled as prescriptions
with her name printed on them, but were taken from her by personnel who only
spoke French. The protestations she made to airport personnel that she
suffered from severe asthma and that she needed her medication in-flight
were ignored. "We don't speak the language and the airport staff refused to
speak anything other than French. They only pointed at a sign, threw our
things away in a bin," she recounted.

You do not have to be an alarmist to come to the conclusion that the risks
to the life and general well-being of passengers seem to increase every time
the list of items that cannot be carried on, what cannot be said/done, etc.,
gets longer. Each new restriction seems to give the security services a
renewed sense that all of the passenger's constitutional protections were
suspended as soon as he or she walked into the terminal, so the usual rules
do not apply.

But this is only half of the story. While the rent-a-cops are confiscating
your asthma meds, your child's baby formula, and that homecoming present of
grandma's homemade preserves, just look at what they are missing:

* March 5, 2007: A passenger packed 13 handguns, an automatic weapon, and
eight pounds of marijuana in a suitcase and was able to board Delta flight
933 at Orlando International Airport bound for Puerto Rico. Puerto Rican
police arrested Thomas Anthony Munoz, 22, as he was collecting his baggage
at the Luis Munoz Marin International Airport in San Juan. A number of
questions are raised by this incident--namely was Munoz's baggage X-ray
scanned before it was loaded? Munoz, it turns out, was a customer service
agent at the Delta subsidiary of Comair, a job that allowed him to work both
the check-in counter and the area where aircraft are loaded and unloaded.
Munoz, knowing the holes in the system, used his Comair Airlines
identification card to sneak the weapons on board. The weapons had been paid
for by an accomplice in Puerto Rico who had wire transferred the money to
him in order to purchase the weapons.

* October 25, 2006: Passengers waiting for the Naples-Milan early flight
were told that the flight was delayed and then would be cancelled. Hysteria
and anger ensued among the passengers, who were then told that the reason
for the delay was that the airline crew, in their minibus on the way to the
airport, had been held up and robbed. The passengers, who in any country are
used to being lied to by airport personnel, thought this was another bogus
excuse being put up by their failing national airline, Alitalia, and came
fairly close to rioting. However, in this case the story was true. The
entire crew had been robbed just before dawn by a gang of eight criminals,
who made off with their watches and other valuables. Needless to say, if you
can target, spot, and rob an airline crew on their way to the airport you
can--in a classic terrorist scenario--also tie them up and leave them in a
hotel room, take their uniforms and ID badges and cruise into the airport to
do whatever damage you want.

* October 27, 2006: Screeners at Newark Liberty International Airport failed
20 of 22 security tests conducted by undercover U.S. agents the week before,
missing an array of concealed bombs and guns at checkpoints throughout the
hub's three terminals, said federal security officials familiar with the
results. "We can do better, and training is the path to improved
performance," said Mark Hatfield Jr., Newark Airport's federal security
director, declining to address specifics. (What a surprise.) "Test results
are not a grade or a scorecard; they are a road map to perpetual
improvement; any other characterisation is simply misleading. We have to
challenge ourselves to do better every day and be relentless in that
pursuit." (That makes me feel so much better.)

No liquids, no gels, no creams, no toothpaste and no shampoo, but "bombs and
guns, come on through," seems to be the message.

But, my favourite detail of them all is that the famous liquid bomb plot
that started in the UK and has made London/Heathrow (LHR) and other UK
airports the most miserable on the planet turns out to have been a terrific
farce.

In December of last year a Pakistani judge ruled there is not enough
evidence to try the key suspect in the alleged airline bomb plot on
terrorism charges. The case of Rashid Rauf, a Briton, was moved from an
anti-terrorism court to a regular court, where he faces lesser charges such
as forgery. The BBC's Barbara Plett in Islamabad reported at the time that
the judge's decision has reinforced the already widespread scepticism there
about the airliner 'liquid explosive' plot. Several commentators stated that
this threat was deliberately exaggerated to bolster the anti-terror
credentials of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf.

Given that the threshold of what constitutes credible evidence in a place
like Pakistan is much lower than it is in most western democracies "lack of
evidence" means no evidence at all in this case. Also, in another tell-tale
sign that the entire "plot" was a send-up designed to scare the public,
British authorities have shown little interest in extraditing Rauf to the UK
to actually question him themselves and act as though they hope everyone
will forget who was the supposed "mastermind" of this plot in the first
place.

This theory is bolstered by what was discovered--or rather by what was not
discovered--back home in jolly old England.

After the liquid bomb plot scare broke at LHR, the Thames Valley police
spent five months combing the woods near High Wycombe--where the liquid
bomb-making materials were supposed to have been hidden--and never found
anything. The exercise was so fruitless and the basis for that search
apparently so unfounded that the Thames Valley department told the UK Home
Office on December 12, 2006, that they would discontinue their activity
unless the central government was prepared to pick up the costs for all of
their extra manpower overtime and resources expended. Apparently, they see
no benefit in continuing to try and locate any evidence of these liquid
explosives.

Which says that the view of local UK law enforcement is that this liquid
bomb plot was a myth to begin with. Police departments tend to not take real
threats to public safety lightly and have been known to deploy countless
personnel for weeks to find one, single murderer. When the terror plot
originally was "unmasked" it was billed as a plan for carnage several times
worse than the 9/11 attacks. Thus, it strains credibility to believe that
the Thames Valley authorities would think of abandoning their search for
even a second if they thought this liquid bomb plan had turned out to be
anything other than a complete red herring.

Simply put, the War on Shampoo seems to have had little effect other than to
make the life of the post-9/11air traveller even more miserable than it
already was. One wonders why the no liquids ban remains in place.

But, I am not the only one asking that question. Some EU officials feel the
same way. The European Parliament has called the security measures for
carry-on luggage at European airports "arbitrary." London airports are the
worst offenders here, having instituted a one carry-on only rule that no one
in UK officialdom will now own up to having ordered in the first place. EU
officials have also criticised how the rules were implemented and question
their necessity. The issue of transit passengers having duty free goods
confiscated at connecting airports in the EU has also come under scrutiny.
European Parliament Deputies (MEPs) warned that "Brussels" is responsible
for "lakes of perfume and whisky" and piles of shaving foam, toothpaste, and
lipstick building up at European airports. Some reports indicate as much as
20 tonnes of duty free goods are confiscated weekly at Frankfurt, 1,500
liters of alcohol and perfume at Amsterdam and 10,000 items a week at
Madrid. MEPs also challenged the democratic legitimacy and accountability of
the Commission regulation, some of which is kept secret.

I keep looking for a silver lining in this story, but I cannot find one. The
air travel industry is one of the most strategically important businesses
worldwide and yet our government institutions seem to be doing their best to
sabotage it. Airlines last month in the United States had some of their
worst on-time performance yet, personnel are quitting in droves, and the
well-heeled businessmen (who generate most of the revenues for the airlines)
keep finding ways to escape airline hell. One of the biggest selling
products now is a new line of mini business jets, the Phenom models, made by
Brazil's Embraer. Business travelers can now fly from one municipal airport
to another on one of these small minijets and bypass the whole sippy-cup
Gestapo.

This is fine for them, but it spells doom for the airlines. You cannot make
enough money to keep an airline running if you are never on time and your
only passengers are the people flying on bargain fares.

Some of the big European carriers have their own problems. Internationally,
people have already begun to shun the UK airports and other major hubs that
have become impossible to transit through and are clogged with passengers
forced to undergo increased security checks and scrutiny, but with no
increase in personnel or equipment to process them. "We are no longer the
hub of Europe, a blind man could see it," said a British Airways ground
services agent on one my last flights through LHR. "People are fed up with
the way they are being treated here."

I have a lot of friends who ask me--as an almost constant international air
traveller--how I feel about flying in the post-9/11 world. My answer is,
"no, I am not any more afraid of flying than before, but I am a lot more
afraid of what can happen to me on the ground in an airport than I could
ever have previously imagined." One hopes that some of this will change
before the air travel system worldwide becomes completely broken, but at
present I see little cause for optimism.

Reuben F. Johnson, a defense and aerospace correspondent for THE WEEKLY
STANDARD, was a 13-year Gold Card holder with British Airways until he
decided he could not tolerate another flight through London/Heathrow.