[Infowarrior] - The Staggering Cost of Playing it "Safe"

[Richard Forno]

The Staggering Cost of Playing it "Safe" by Devilstower

Sun Jun 21, 2009 at 02:00:08 PM PDT

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/6/16/743102/-The-Staggering-Cost-of-Playing-it-Safe

  On December 22, 2001, a 28-year-old minor thug and former gang  
member from South London climbed onto a Boeing 767 bound for Miami.   
On the sparsely booked flight, he settled into a window seat in an  
otherwise empty row. Ninety minutes into the flight, with the plane  
well out over the Atlantic, a flight attendant noticed smoke coming  
from his area. She informed him that as the flight was an American  
flight, no smoking was allowed. A few minutes later, he was hunched  
over in his seat when the attendant saw that he wasn't trying to light  
a cigarette. He was trying to light his shoe. The flight attendant,  
aided by passengers, acted quickly.  Richard Reid never got another  
chance to light his shoe bomb.
Thanks to the immediate action of the the those on board, there was no  
damage to the plane.  No injuries or loss of life.

Since that day in 2001, every passenger entering a commercial airliner  
has been required to remove their shoes for inspection and X-ray. A  
precaution that is... massively, even breathtakingly idiotic.

Why? Well, first off the volume of a shoe sole is not all that great.  
Reid managed to cram about 100 grams of high explosive into his shoe.  
Had he been successful in setting off the explosion, it's unlikely  
that the plane would have been so damaged as to crash, but almost  
certain that there would have been deaths in the passenger cabin. If  
the bomb had worked, it would have been a serious problem. So why is  
making people take off their shoes before entering a plane a crowning  
bit of stupidity? Because that 100 grams might have fit almost  
anywhere. Anything that will fit in a shoe sole will also fit in a  
back pocket, or under a shirt, or in a pair of extra comfy  
undershorts, or in a bra (as a comparison, the average breast implant  
weighs three times as much as much as Reid's shoe bomb -- and that's  
just on one side). There is absolutely nothing magic about shoes. In  
fact, as a place to store explosives like the ones that Reid carried  
-- which can be quite shock sensitive -- packing them into your shoes  
has to rate at the bottom of the list. But here we are years later,  
still showing off our holey socks to the world and making business for  
the folks at Tinactin.

Assume that each airline traveller spends an additional minute in line  
because of removing, scanning, and replacing their shoes. Just one  
minute. In the United States, there are about 830 million domestic  
airline passengers a year. That's about 1,600 man years of time spent  
each year on removing shoes that are no more threat than any other  
piece of clothing.  If you put a $10/hr value on the time of the  
average air traveller,  that's about $33 million / year worth of shoe  
time. Better than $300 million worth since Reid got tackled in  
business class.

Which has to make Reid and those like him very, very happy.

So why do we go through the shoe ritual? First the fear factor around  
shoes was bolstered by other events. Only a few months after Reid's  
failed attempt, an airliner went down in Queens. Immediately, the  
rumor circulated that the plane had been the victim of another shoe  
bomber -- a theory that seemed to be confirmed by "cooperating" terror  
suspect, Mohammed Jabarah who was feeding information to the CIA from  
inside an al-Qaeda cell. Jabrah claimed that the plane had been  
destroyed by an unnamed "12th hijacker" using a shoe bomb, as part of  
a "second wave" of airliner attacks. Thing is, Jabarah was lying.  The  
flight that came down in Queens failed because of problems with the  
plane's rudder, and Jabarah was later rearrested after it turned out  
he was giving plenty of real information to al-Qaeda while feeding  
fairy tales to the US. This came after a period in which Jabarah was  
the "subject of some interrogation which was improper" while a  
prisoner in Oman (i.e. torture doesn't work, and it's a really bad way  
to start your relationship with your new double agent). Similar  
suggestions of other shoe bombings made by imprisoned terror suspects  
have never turned out to have any basis in fact.

The bigger reason we did something is because the response of  
politicians is always to do something. Even if that something makes no  
sense -- even if that something is actually counterproductive. The  
reason you're tiptoeing along the concourse in your Hanes (and tossing  
that Coke in the trash) has more to do with why jails are  
overpopulated than it does with stopping terrorists. When politicians  
see something on the news, and when pundits are screaming for action,  
the inclination is to provide that action. If that means a million  
gallons of Head n' Shoulders in airport trash cans or a life sentence  
for stealing a pizza, so what? What counts is that action was taken.

Dave Kilchen in his new book The Accidental Guerrilla describes  
terrorism in the terms of an auto-immune disorder.  Like lupus, where  
the systems of the body designed to protect against infection turn on  
healthy tissue, our response to problems can often result in far more  
damage than the problem itself. It's not the terrorists that do the  
real damage -- it's how you respond to the terrorists. Certainly, if  
you look at all the ways that the United States has responded to the  
threat of terrorism since 9/11 we've damaged our overseas  
relationships and reputation, tossed much of our own constitution in  
the dumpster, and spent millions for every dollar that our enemies  
have spent. The self-inflicted wounds have been deeper, more serious,  
and more lingering than anything that was done from the outside.

The extent of the damage is often hard to judge. Since 9-11, self- 
inflicted wounds have turned up almost everywhere, even in subjects as  
distantly related as environmental law.

In 2008, the failure of a containment area released about 300 million  
gallons of water and coal ash mixed in a slurry. This is just the  
latest and largest of several huge spills which have flooded  
communities, ruined rivers, destroyed homes, taken lives, and all the  
other fun stuff that happens when a wall of black goop goes raging  
through a valley. While the physical damage caused by the floods is  
clear, the long term damage from the heavy metals and other chemicals  
in the slurry is less clear. Some agencies said fly ash slurries were  
serious problems.

A draft report last year by the federal Environmental Protection  
Agency found ... that the concentrations of arsenic to which people  
might be exposed through drinking water contaminated by fly ash could  
increase cancer risks several hundredfold.

Similarly, a 2006 study by the federally chartered National Research  
Council found that these coal-burning byproducts “often contain a  
mixture of metals and other constituents in sufficient quantities that  
they may pose public health and environmental concerns if improperly  
managed.” The study said “risks to human health and ecosystems” might  
occur when these contaminants entered drinking water supplies or  
surface water bodies.

Other agencies didn't agree.

The Tennessee Valley Authority has issued no warnings about the  
potential chemical dangers of the spill, saying there was as yet no  
evidence of toxic substances. “Most of that material is inert,” said  
Gilbert Francis Jr., a spokesman for the authority. “It does have some  
heavy metals within it, but it’s not toxic or anything.”

Attempts to more strictly regulate the storage of ash were met with  
opposition from coal companies and utilities. Which, as anyone  
watching the current health care debate might predict, squashed any  
thought of changing the regulations.

Senator Barbara Boxer has led an effort to at least put together a  
public database of ash storage sites so that people can judge the risk  
to the areas where they live.  However, even this effort has been  
blocked not by coal companies or utilities, but by the DHS. How could  
it possibly be a national security interest to cover up the location  
of material that's "not toxic or anything?" It's not. In fact, even if  
the ash turns out to be as bad as its worst critics fear, blocking the  
database is far more dangerous than revealing the location of these  
sites. Not only has there not been any threat against these sites by  
terrorists, and no workable scenario by which they might cause a  
problem, coal slurry impoundments are already failing with regularity,  
dousing parts of America with millions of gallons of this material. It  
doesn't take terrorists to make this happen.

Blocking the release of this information doesn't protect the citizens  
of the United States in any way. It's just another example of the same  
creeping secrecy that makes cities more difficult to manage because of  
secrecy over facilities. The same creeping secrecy that "blurs"  
national monuments from images and puts intentional gaps in public  
information. The same creeping secrecy that increasingly elevates the  
most unlikely attack -- the shoe bombers of the world -- above our  
right to know what's going on around us so that we can make informed  
decisions. The same secrecy that defends torturers.

It's worth remembering that the United States made it more than 170  
years without any recognized need for a "national security" argument  
that acted as a trump card over any law. It wasn't until a Supreme  
Court ruling in 1953 that national security was enshrined as an all- 
purpose reason to deny access to information.

After the B-29 Superfortress crashed near Waycross, Ga., in 1948,  
killing nine of the 13 men aboard, the widows of the Philadelphia-area  
engineers sought damages against the Air Force in federal court. ...  
Arguing that the widows' claim that Air Force negligence was  
responsible for the crash was unsupported -- and that the release of  
any information on the aircraft or its mission would pose a threat to  
national security -- the government appealed. Though the government's  
appeal was defeated in the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the  
Supreme Court overturned the district court's verdict, ruling in  
United States v. Reynolds that even federal judges were not  
necessarily entitled to access sensitive information if national  
security could consequently suffer.

That ruling established the pattern that we've seen so often of late  
-- the use of "national security" to crush any other concern. It was  
not until decades later that the crash report on the B-29 became  
available. When it did, the results went unnoticed for years longer.  
It took the children of one of those dead engineers to discover  
that... the government was lying. The crash report revealed no  
national security concerns, but it did reveal a long history of  
maintenance issues, mechanical problems and pilot error. It revealed  
exactly what the widows of the dead engineers had said it would  
reveal. In that very first example of national security being used to  
deny information to the public, the government was doing nothing less  
than protecting itself and military contractors from legitimate  
scrutiny.

Which makes it a very good example of the vast majority of such  
assertions of national security since then.