The Glade 4.0

Well how well is being mean to them working? They remember when we engineered the overthrow of their democratically elected government in 53 just so the UK could retain control of oil wells. We don't really remember that.

He didn't blame the Al Qaeda attack on us but he did say we need to examine our foreign policy to understand why they did it. The CIA call it blowback and the head of the Bin Laden unit (Michael Scheuer) agrees with Paul. Why is "no foreign aid for anyone" suddenly akin to "not supporting one specific nation" especially when not supporting the nations against it means that those nations lose twice as much as Israel does? Why is not pressuring Israel to make decisions we want not support them? I mean the job of the President of the United States of America is to think about what nation's health first and foremost?

It was firmness but with an open hand that we stood against the Soviet Union. Reagan dared to talk to them and the hawks called his approach "limp wristed" yet it worked and are now the same people praising him on a pedestal.

The Republicans should nominate Ron Paul, so Obama will get 4 more years to screw everything up.

Whether or not Ron Paul would be willing to support Israel is a bigger concern for Israel than it is for me as a U.S. voter. I don't live in Israel, and Israel doesn't pay U.S. taxes.

As far as his position on Iran, it's important to remember that Iran is not the United States. We elect a president to lead the United States, not to tell Iran what to do. I'm sure it makes a lot of liberals very uncomfortable to know that there are conservatives in their neighborhood that own guns.

Our nuclear fleet is enough to deter nation-states from hostility. Non nation actors are not something more force is going to be able to solve. Never has been, never will be.

If I thought Ron had the firm hand that Reagan did to go along with the "let's be nice" rhetoric I'd feel much better about it. I'd be ok with him to saying to Iran "let's hug it out" but backing that with the knowledge that if they **** with us things would be very bad for them.

I feel like Iran would have to nuke us specifically to get him to act and then he'd hedge by bringing up the 1953 **** and military bases on holy lands, do some kind of cost benefit analysis and calculate they actually lost more people over the years than they killed with the nuke strike on Philadelphia... and who likes Philly anyway so let's call it even.

Maybe. Iran is crazy and they might not care/call our bluff. At that point you have to be willing to pull the trigger.

...if Congress declares war the President is obliged to wage it.

Obliged how? Morally, possibly, but do you think legally? If so, where do you get that from?

Certainly not from understanding how separation of powers work.

I think there is a good case legally as well as the declaration of war is up to the Legislative and the Executive is there to administer it.

Except for the fact the President doesn't actually get to decide when its time to wear his commander-in-chief hat and send troops - that is up to Congress. The War Powers Act is inferior to the Constitution.

Except for the fact the President doesn't actually get to decide when its time to wear his commander-in-chief hat and send troops...

19 Yet she became more and more promiscuous as she recalled the days of her youth, when she was a prostitute in Egypt. 20 There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses.

Why do you suppose we haven't had another 9-11 scope attack. Is it because of lack of desire or the gropers at TSA? Or is it because we showed we were willing to mess people up?

Things like the TSA gropings are nothing more than security theatre, the real work is done, not by searching a cancer patient's diaper, making everyone take off their shoes, or disallowing water bottles on planes (all of which creates long lines and large congregations of people who are now perfect targets for a bomb attack), but by targeting individuals long before they get to the airport.

Back to The 'Israelification' of airports: High security, little bother
The 'Israelification' of airports: High security, little bother
December 30, 2009

Cathal Kelly


While North America's airports groan under the weight of another sea-change in security protocols, one word keeps popping out of the mouths of experts: Israelification.

That is, how can we make our airports more like Israel's, which deal with far greater terror threat with far less inconvenience.

"It is mindboggling for us Israelis to look at what happens in North America, because we went through this 50 years ago," said Rafi Sela, the president of AR Challenges, a global transportation security consultancy. He's worked with the RCMP, the U.S. Navy Seals and airports around the world.

"Israelis, unlike Canadians and Americans, don't take s--- from anybody. When the security agency in Israel (the ISA) started to tighten security and we had to wait in line for — not for hours — but 30 or 40 minutes, all hell broke loose here. We said, 'We're not going to do this. You're going to find a way that will take care of security without touching the efficiency of the airport."

That, in a nutshell is "Israelification" - a system that protects life and limb without annoying you to death.

Fliers urged to opt out of airport security en masse

Despite facing dozens of potential threats each day, the security set-up at Israel's largest hub, Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion Airport, has not been breached since 2002, when a passenger mistakenly carried a handgun onto a flight. How do they manage that?

"The first thing you do is to look at who is coming into your airport," said Sela.

The first layer of actual security that greets travellers at Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion International Airport is a roadside check. All drivers are stopped and asked two questions: How are you? Where are you coming from?

"Two benign questions. The questions aren't important. The way people act when they answer them is," Sela said.

Officers are looking for nervousness or other signs of "distress" — behavioural profiling. Sela rejects the argument that profiling is discriminatory.

"The word 'profiling' is a political invention by people who don't want to do security," he said. "To us, it doesn't matter if he's black, white, young or old. It's just his behaviour. So what kind of privacy am I really stepping on when I'm doing this?"

Once you've parked your car or gotten off your bus, you pass through the second and third security perimeters.

Armed guards outside the terminal are trained to observe passengers as they move toward the doors, again looking for odd behaviour. At Ben Gurion's half-dozen entrances, another layer of security are watching. At this point, some travellers will be randomly taken aside, and their person and their luggage run through a magnometer.

"This is to see that you don't have heavy metals on you or something that looks suspicious," said Sela.

You are now in the terminal. As you approach your airline check-in desk, a trained interviewer takes your passport and ticket. They ask a series of questions: Who packed your luggage? Has it left your side?

"The whole time, they are looking into your eyes — which is very embarrassing. But this is one of the ways they figure out if you are suspicious or not. It takes 20, 25 seconds," said Sela.

Lines are staggered. People are not allowed to bunch up into inviting targets for a bomber who has gotten this far.

At the check-in desk, your luggage is scanned immediately in a purpose-built area. Sela plays devil's advocate — what if you have escaped the attention of the first four layers of security, and now try to pass a bag with a bomb in it?

"I once put this question to Jacques Duchesneau (the former head of the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority): say there is a bag with play-doh in it and two pens stuck in the play-doh. That is 'Bombs 101' to a screener. I asked Ducheneau, 'What would you do?' And he said, 'Evacuate the terminal.' And I said, 'Oh. My. God.'

"Take Pearson. Do you know how many people are in the terminal at all times? Many thousands. Let's say I'm (doing an evacuation) without panic — which will never happen. But let's say this is the case. How long will it take? Nobody thought about it. I said, 'Two days.'"

A screener at Ben-Gurion has a pair of better options.

First, the screening area is surrounded by contoured, blast-proof glass that can contain the detonation of up to 100 kilos of plastic explosive. Only the few dozen people within the screening area need be removed, and only to a point a few metres away.

Second, all the screening areas contain 'bomb boxes'. If a screener spots a suspect bag, he/she is trained to pick it up and place it in the box, which is blast proof. A bomb squad arrives shortly and wheels the box away for further investigation.

"This is a very small simple example of how we can simply stop a problem that would cripple one of your airports," Sela said.

Five security layers down: you now finally arrive at the only one which Ben-Gurion Airport shares with Pearson — the body and hand-luggage check.

"But here it is done completely, absolutely 180 degrees differently than it is done in North America," Sela said.

"First, it's fast — there's almost no line. That's because they're not looking for liquids, they're not looking at your shoes. They're not looking for everything they look for in North America. They just look at you," said Sela. "Even today with the heightened security in North America, they will check your items to death. But they will never look at you, at how you behave. They will never look into your eyes ... and that's how you figure out the bad guys from the good guys."

That's the process — six layers, four hard, two soft. The goal at Ben-Gurion is to move fliers from the parking lot to the airport lounge in a maximum of 25 minutes.

This doesn't begin to cover the off-site security net that failed so spectacularly in targeting would-be Flight 253 bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab — intelligence. In Israel, Sela said, a coordinated intelligence gathering operation produces a constantly evolving series of threat analyses and vulnerability studies.

"There is absolutely no intelligence and threat analysis done in Canada or the United States," Sela said. "Absolutely none."

But even without the intelligence, Sela maintains, Abdulmutallab would not have gotten past Ben Gurion Airport's behavioural profilers.

So. Eight years after 9/11, why are we still so reactive, so un-Israelified?

Working hard to dampen his outrage, Sela first blames our leaders, and then ourselves.

"We have a saying in Hebrew that it's much easier to look for a lost key under the light, than to look for the key where you actually lost it, because it's dark over there. That's exactly how (North American airport security officials) act," Sela said. "You can easily do what we do. You don't have to replace anything. You have to add just a little bit — technology, training. But you have to completely change the way you go about doing airport security. And that is something that the bureaucrats have a problem with. They are very well enclosed in their own concept."

And rather than fear, he suggests that outrage would be a far more powerful spur to provoking that change.

"Do you know why Israelis are so calm? We have brutal terror attacks on our civilians and still, life in Israel is pretty good. The reason is that people trust their defence forces, their police, their response teams and the security agencies. They know they're doing a good job. You can't say the same thing about Americans and Canadians. They don't trust anybody," Sela said. "But they say, 'So far, so good'. Then if something happens, all hell breaks loose and you've spent eight hours in an airport. Which is ridiculous. Not justifiable

"But, what can you do? Americans and Canadians are nice people and they will do anything because they were told to do so and because they don't know any different."

Our nuclear fleet is enough to deter nation-states from hostility. Non nation actors are not something more force is going to be able to solve. Never has been, never will be.