Madness In The Air

Peter Hitchens writes:

Air travellers are being punished for the failure of the ‘security’ services who claim to be protecting us from terror.We now see how useless this expensive and self-important industry is. Not only did they fail to act on a specific warning about Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab delivered by his own father. They even knew that underpants-borne bombs of this type were being made in Yemen, because on August 28, 2009, Abdullah Hassan al-Asiri, who had also been in Yemen, used a near-identical device to try to kill the Saudi Deputy Interior Minister, Prince Mohammed bin Nayef.

While it makes sense to use more body-scanners (I have reached the age when I am quite flattered that the Government wants to know what I look like naked), the other measures in response to the Detroit incident are actually mad. Maddest of all has been the ban on the in-flight maps that let us know how much longer we have to endure in the air. Why not black out the windows, and confiscate our watches and blindfold us, so as to be sure we don’t know where we are?

But denying pressurised, bursting passengers the use of the lavatory for an hour is a cruel and unusual punishment and a flailing over-reaction. Simple vigilance would be far more effective anyway. Normal commercial flying is rapidly becoming a slightly milder version of extraordinary rendition.

There is also a question that never gets answered. How competent are these terrorists? How real is the threat? The would-be murderer al-Asiri managed only to kill himself. Abdulmutallab, like the shoe-bomber Richard Reid, couldn’t get his bomb to go off. The liquid bombers were caught before they could get near a plane. Could they really have built a workable bomb on board? I have seen no knowledgeable discussion of this, nor heard any evidence that it could have been done.

I suspect the spooks exaggerate the dangers almost as much as they exaggerate their own ability to defend us from them.