Even if this were a legitimate attack, isn't this sort of response a bit overkill? I have trouble thinking of a threat to a large airport on US soil requiring "heavy weapons" and "armored cars" as a response.
Any and all passenger screening would be worthless if you could just walk on the tarmac and have access to the planes fuselage and or fuel tankers.
You can't make security policy decisions based on hypothetical horror stories alone. If you don't balance fear with reason you end up with ridiculously expensive policies that do absolutely nothing to increase safety.
Exactly! I've seen 500+ people at security checkpoints at Chicago O'Hare. A couple people with AK-47s could likely kill far more people than a shoe bomb on a plane.
That this sort of thing hasn't happened seems an indication of just how impotent Al Qaeda is these days.
Responses like car searches coming into the airport with guns pointed at you and other things that will make our current wait on getting to an airplane look like a distant dream. And picking people up at the airport will become more painful than a dentist visit.
India has a history of terrorist attacks from islamic extremists (largely originating in pakistan). The US has no such history.
PS I did not get lucky with google and ninja baine. Is that some new hipster meme?
The mention of my concern refers to the subjective feeling I have about personal safety only. That is simply because risk has in fact been greatly reduced beyond the gate, but in many airports around the world, not before that point.
As to not catching all scenarios, I know a spook who trains in the fight against bad guys, and he got through a number of security checks before being pulled up in transit at a US airport with something standard issue. He forgot he had it in his carry on.
I'm aware of the potential of breaches. However, terrorist acts are often designed with a view to terrorising. This leads me to a different calculation of probabilities.
Events like this one are problematic because they can have an affect on public confidence. I may be wrong, but I think that might be just as much a consideration as failure of purpose in this situation.
> the ninja baine reference was an admittedly
> weak attempt at alliteration
If we learned anything from 9/11 it's "they're going to crash this into a building, might as well take them on - there's 100 of us, they can't shoot us all before we get to them.
It also implies that these people are dishonest and could probably be bought for a not-overly-large investment. Why even try to smuggle your bomb through the TSA checkpoint when you can have a TSA agent hand deliver it to you?
It already is, because the system leaks information that would make it trivial to find a way to sneak guns/bombs/etc. onto a plane. All you need is a sufficient number of people willing to go to jail (and actual terrorists are willing to die for their cause). You just keep throwing different approaches to packaging/disguising your bomb/gun/whatever at the TSA checkpoints until you find a reliably repeatable mechanism. Game over.
It gets better though... you could cut down on your search costs by taking advantage of the fact that - at some airports -the screens the X-Ray machine techs are reading, are sometimes (such as O'Hare, Terminal 3, last Friday night) aimed so that anybody inside the secure area can see them. So, just send somebody through, and have them film a chunk of TSA screening with a cellphone camera, and send it back. Once you know what the TSA goons are seeing, it should help you figure out how to craft a package that won't attract their attention.
Never mind that there are about a zillion other ways to get a package into the secure area of an airport, which don't involve going through security screening. Like, pay off a TSA agent (how much do they make, again?), or an airplane mechanic, or somebody else who has access to the inner workings of the airport.
Not to imply that the jet skier was a terrorist - he wasn't - but that the action of AlQaeda is in the over-reaction to any "terror threat", real or imagined, by the US.
"All that we have to do is to send two mujahedin to the furthest point East to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaeda, in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits for their private companies.
This is in addition to our having experience in using guerrilla warfare and the war of attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers, as we, alongside the mujahedin, bled Russia for ten years, until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat... So we are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy."
From OBL speech, full text at http://www.worldpress.org/Americas/1964.cfm