I’m by no means a conspiratory theorist, but one has to draw suspicion at the speed in which the introduction of body scanners has been passed. It is with frightening efficiency that contracts will be signed, scanners bought and staff trained.
Body scanners are not cheap, at over 140,000US a piece. The staff training, contracts, maintenance etc will run into millions over just a few years.
The events on Christmas day were also notably strange. From what I can gleam from collective news articles:
i) The UK refuses to re-admit a Nigerian because he applied to study in the UK at a bogus university. The said individual is also known to have aquaintances with fundamentalist fragments of the Muslim community. The UK tells the US of their suspicions about this individual.
ii) The CIA listens in to telephone conversations in Yemen in August that spoke of “The Nigerian”.
iii) A Nigerian banker goes to the US Embassy and states that his son is in Yemen, receiving training from Muslim maniacs.
iv) A Nigerian, using his own name, a name that was already known to the US and UK authorities, buys a one-way ticket to the US, with cash, and turns up with hand-baggage only.
v) This Nigerian, who has supposedly received training in how to blow up an airliner, then tries to detonate his bomb, not at altitude where it might have succeeded in bringing the airplane down if it had exploded properly, but at low level where the airplane is barely pressurised, thus rendering a successful downing of the airliner unlikely, even if the bomb had worked.
The outcome: The security “industry” receives massive new funding for full-body scanners, huge budget increases for additional staff and untold new powers.
Now call me a cynic, but I really can’t see that if Al Quaeda had trained this Nigerian chap, that he would have been trained such as to detonate a bomb on finals to an airport in a city which is by no means as glamourous as New York, Chicago or any other of many US cities, causing minimal damage - if the aircraft had actually crashed - on an approach path to Detriot which I believe consists of mostly industrial and brown-field sites anyway.
Something clearly doesn’t look right here.
To me now, the risk to me seems not airside, but landside. Now we have queues and queues of passengers lining up in zig-zags in order to pass security control. They are all packed together in a departures building - thousands of them - more than could be put on the planes that were used on 9/11. This is where the danger lies - take out one terminal in any international hub around the world, or several consecutively and you have panic, chaos and unimaginable knock-on effects around the world for weeks, if not months.
Again, this seems to be a knee jerk reaction by our collective governments, or worse still, a pre-planned stunt to make the public conform and accept the neccessity of these expensive, intrusive body scanners in order to make a fast buck. It’s called disaster capitalism - and seeing as the public have been generally opposed to intrusive body scanners ever since their idea was conceived, the powers that be now deem it necessary to introduce them “for your own safety.”
Seeing as a trained sniffer dog, a trained handler and enough Pedigree Chum to last for at least a fortnight would cost less than a tenth of the amount for one new scanner alone to install - and which is far more effctive at sniffing out explosives shoved up ones rectum, it makes you wonder which politicians have connections to which companies within this particular saga. We really do live in an insane world and I can’t believe so many people are falling for this scam.
In short, these body scanners are expensive, intrusive and not nearly as effective as proper passenger profiling and sniffer dogs.
Forget trips to the UK or “The land of the Free.” A stress and hassle free vacation in North Korea sounds just the ticket.
[/quote] Save for the element of choice, and the potential for abuse. Both rather big deals.