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Once again the mainstream media has generated an airport radiation hysteria that is not worth the millirads they moan about.
My personal opinion is that when it comes to invasion of personal privacy, most sensible people would prefer a body scan or pat down to being blown into a million pieces or totally vaporized by a terrorist bomb. That is the ultimate invasion of your bodily parts.
Remember the extremist fundamentalist terrorists are your enemy, not the TSA agents.
False Radiation Scare
As noted by Jane Orient, M.D., Executive Director of The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) in a recent column, the radiation dosage is likely the least of the problems with airport screening.
If operating as specified, a scanner delivers about 0.01 millirads of radiation, or 0.00001 rad. You unavoidably get 10,000 times as much from the natural environment every year.
But the worry is not surprising in a nation that has been barraged with anti-nuclear propaganda for decades. Fear mongering has likely caused a $10 trillion loss to our economy by stopping the expansion of nuclear power plants.
Dr. Orient further notes that we must not induce unreasoned fear even to oppose what she considers an assault on liberty.
There is another aspect to the airport scanners. They use an ingenious low-energy backscatter technique, which is apparently wonderful for identifying explosives in cargo.
Since the radiation doesn’t penetrate far, it wouldn’t affect an unborn baby. But it does concentrate the dose in the skin. Some scientists are concerned that this aspect has not been properly studied.
Airport Security
Leaving aside the radiation, let’s look at U.S. airport security from the perspective of a terrorist — or a Martian. We have TSA agents scurrying about, fighting the last war against the shoe and the underwear bombers, both caught by vigilant human beings. The threat is from aspiring martyrs, who are captive to an ideology that advocates turning its sons and daughters and even little children into bombs.
Is the remedy to subject all Americans to virtual strip searches — and even little children to groping that we teach them is wrong? Does it make us safe, and are the medical and psychological side effects worth it?
Inmates of Nazi concentration camps were frequently subjected to strip searches. It was just one more way to dehumanize the prisoners.
The TSA exposes American travelers to enhanced risk of loss (or theft) of important things like their indispensable government-issued photo ID. While in the scanner their luggage is unattended so what about that risk of “introduction of items without their knowledge”? And what about the transmission of scabies, crab lice, bedbug larvae, and all manner of germs by TSA examiners? Should they change gloves and wash their hands between subjects just as hospital personnel must do?
How much “safety” is enough? Will a virtual stripping suffice or do we need an invasive body cavity search of everyone? Even then there would be threats such as swallowed explosives detonated by radio frequency, a bomb set off in the crowd waiting to get through security, a blast in the luggage compartment, or a missile attack.
The Israelis use intelligence, but Americans seem to have ruled that out, to keep our agents safe from the charge of “profiling.” After all, we wouldn’t want to offend the sensitivities of the young males whose goal in life is to kill us. How about American sensitivities to getting splattered?
Sense and Sensibility
Safety requires vigilance not mindless rules. We need plainclothes observers watching for telltale behavior. We might consider screening polygraphs with questions such as “Where do you expect to be this evening?” For suspected explosives we have sniffers, both technological and canines.
Watching the holiday scene at the airport may awaken Americans to the reality that we are not rich enough nor powerful enough to keep acting this foolishly.
Let’s use those scanners to check luggage and cargo. But it’s not the radiation that’s the problem. It’s the abandonment of common sense by both the TSA and those travelers who fall victim to media madness and lunacy.
