November 22, 2010
Informed Comment
Looking for PETN, Scanning Grandma at the Airport, and the Future of
Air Travel
Juan Cole
In all the furor about the new TSA scanners and pat-downs at airports,
what surprises me is that there is very little discussion of what
exactly the inspectors are now looking for and why they are shifting
tactics.
The old scanners and procedures designed to discover metal (guns,
knives, bombs with timers or detonators) are helpless before a
relatively low-tech alternative kind of explosive that is favored by
al-Qaeda and similar groups.
The inspectors are looking for forms of PETN, or pentaerythritol
tetranitrate, which is from the same family of explosives as
nitroglycerin and which is used to make plastic explosives such as
Semtex.
Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, used PETN, as did Umar Farouk
Abdulmutallab, the crotch bomber, last year this time over Detroit.
PETN was in the HP cartridges sent by a Yemeni terrorist in cargo
planes recently. And, a suicide bomber put some up his anus and used it
in an attempt to assassinate the son of the Saudi minister of the
interior (which does counter-terrorism). Yes, he was the first ass
bomber, and he missed his target, though he no longer cares about that,
what with being dead and all.
The problem with PETN is that it cannot be detected by sniffing dogs or
by ordinary scanners. But if you had a pouch of it on your person, the
new scanners could see the pouch, and likewise a thorough pat-down
would lead to its discovery.
The TSA guys are trying to look more systematically for PETN. That is
why they have adopted these more intrusive methods. And, there has been
chatter among the terrorist groups abroad about launching attacks on
American airliners with this relatively undetectable explosive.
None of us likes the result, which is a significant invasion of
privacy.
But if al-Qaeda and its sympathizers could manage to blow up only a few
airliners with PETN, they could have a significant negative effect on
the economy and could very possibly drive some American airlines into
bankruptcy. Al-Qaeda is about using small numbers of men and low-tech
techniques to paralyze a whole civilization, which was the point of the
September 11 attacks.
Since the Bush administration hyped the `war on terror' trope half to
death, many in the American public no longer want to hear about this
danger. But it is part of my business in life to deliver the horrific
news that the threat is real.
The question is really what level of risk Americans are willing to live
with. On the one hand, studies suggest that the crotch bomber could not
really have brought down the airliner over Detroit last year, even if
he had been able to detonate his payload. And, 500 million Europeans
decline to take off their shoes when they travel by air, but there
haven't been any successful shoe bombings over there, nevertheless.
On the other hand, it would only take a few small teams making a
concerted effort at bombing airliners, to spook travelers and
consumers. With the US at risk of a double dip recession, this moment
might appeal to al-Qaeda and al-Qaeda wannabes to strike. Al-Qaeda in
Yemen is openly talking of a low-tech, high-explosive war against US
economic interests, a war of a thousand cuts. Its planned method?
PETN-based mail bombs.
I doubt it is possible to outlaw or control PETN. The only alternative
to looking for it systematically on air passengers and in cargo would
be to just take a chance that no al-Qaeda operatives will be able
successfully to detonate a PETN based explosive on an airliner.
And, you have to wonder whether air travel was not anyway a bubble. It
depends on inexpensive fuel, which probably won't be with us for long.
It has a very big carbon imprint, which may soon be illegal. And it is
vulnerable to low-tech chemical sabotage. Our generation perhaps, and
the next one almost certainly, will have the unprecedented experience
of having their world become larger and less accessible, after two
centuries during which it shrank and seemed conquerable. Cisco's
telepresence technology may be the future much moreso than the
airlines.