Thursday, December 16, 2010

Terrorism: Can you really stop a bomber?

'The system you have in Europe and America is bull****. Unless you adopt an approach that actually works, whatever technology you care to use will make little difference. The terrorists will always be one step ahead,' says Rafi Sela, a top Israeli security consultant. Through his firm, AR Challenges, he is in charge of marketing the automated Israeli method to Europe and America as a complete package - what he calls Trust Based Security, or TBS.

'How many times in the history of aviation have the scanners and security procedures that currently cause such huge anger and inconvenience actually found explosives in baggage or on a passenger?' Sela asks.

The answer, shockingly, is zero. It's true that a bomb packed by the Jordanian Nizar Hindawi in the hand luggage of his pregnant girlfriend Anne Murphy was discovered at Heathrow in 1986. But she was trying to board a flight on the Israeli airline El Al - which uses the same selector method abroad as at Ben Gurion: it was a selector's questioning that revealed Hindawi's plot.

The bombers who killed 270 when Pan Am Flight 103 blew up over Lockerbie in 1988; the 2001 shoe bomber Richard Reid; Umar Abdulmutallab, the former London University student who tried to detonate a bomb in his underpants above Detroit last Christmas; all smuggled their explosives on to aircraft undetected.



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