Of IUDs and IEDs

I’ve mostly been amused by the hoo-hah over the installation of body scanners in airports, most especially the ruling in Britain that they can’t be used on travelers under eighteen because of child pornography laws. (Doesn’t this just guarantee that the next airline bomber will be a youngster with melting chocolate eyes?) But in today’s Wall Street Journal, the war scholar Edward Luttwak discusses a more important drawback to body scanners: the ones now being deployed won’t work for the simple reason that every human being has at least one body cavity large enough to contain explosives that can bring down an airliner.

As for the metal detectors now in place, he scoffs: ‘At enormous cost, and by inflicting enormous inconvenience, [the technology] almost guarantees the detection of any explosive device—so long as it is firmly attached to a nail clipper.’

There is of course a simple, cheap, and effective alternative, though it would rouse up the Good People in righteous anger—especially those Good People who have transportation laid on for them by the US Air Force, hence aren’t inconvenienced by Homeland Security lines—and that is … profiling! ‘To screen passengers as persons instead of their bodies and belongings has an overwhelming advantage: It can detect a would-be terrorist even if the specific technique he tries to employ is not previously known. To inspect all shoes after a shoe bomber almost succeeded, or to pat down passengers after the underwear bomber almost succeeded, provides no defense against the next techniques that could be tried at any time.’ Mr Luttwak has some sensible suggestions as to how this might work in practice. We can only hope that Homeland Security adopts them before somebody explains to Osama bin Laden how easily an IUD could be converted to an IED. Blue skies! – Dan Ford