My main source of income is as a satellite uplink engineer. That’s a fancy way of saying I drive the big satellite trucks with the clamshell dishes you see springing up at most major breaking news events across the country. I’m based in the midwest and work for whichever network hires me first. I’m on call 24/7 because you never know when major news will hit. It knows no boundaries as far as time of day and holiday. It has, and will continue, to disrupt my life at inopportune times. All of this is to say, when my phone started ringing, late in the afternoon this past Christmas Day, I was neither shocked, nor surprised. December had been a really slow month, so why wouldn’t it get busy on Christmas day, which happens to be my, as well as my daughter’s birthday? Fate’s a little funny that way. What was a surprise was the content of the call. Someone had tried to blow up a packed airliner en route to Detroit, and had set himself and maybe a part of the plane on fire.
As I listened to the news on the drive to Detroit, it became clear that the plane was not on fire and landed safely. No one was injured except the would-be terrorist. I thought for a moment that this wouldn’t be a big deal, but I quickly realized that on a traditionally slow news week, the networks were going to milk this baby for all it was worth. I usually pack for a longer trip than I expect to take, and this time was no exception. You never know what’s going to happen that’s going to keep you on-scene for God-knows-how-long. I got myself situated at Detroit’s Metro Airport with a lovely vista of Delta planes all sitting at their gates, for a background shot. I met my crew from CBS news, and was delighted to find them a talented, capable, and funny group of broadcast professionals. Over the next four days we did live reports for the CBS Evening News, CBS Sunday Morning(one of the best programs on all of television), The Early Show, as well as reports for a barrage of local CBS affiliates. Long hours, but made better by the crew who were a group of genuinely great people. Believe me, it doesn’t always work that way.
As the information came in, and we learned more about the man whom I dubbed, and will be hereafter referred to as “Abdul Firepants”, a picture, and many more questions began to emerge. The picture showed that this man was not stereotypically Al Qaeda. He was not of Arabian descent, he didn’t harbor “The Look” that many screeners use in
profiling for a terrorist. There were, as have been reported, a great many signs that this guy was one to watch out for. It can be surmised that officials for the airlines as well as officials on the ground, failed miserably in their efforts to weed these people out of the system. This failure, led to a series of responses that may make it safer to fly to the U.S. in the short run…but it’s the long run which concerns me.
It is unknown whether it was a failure of the device or a failure of its execution that caused the bomb in Abdul Firepant’s trousers to simply set him on fire, rather than blow up the plane. What is known, is that it didn’t work, and the device set its carrier on fire rather than create an explosion that, given where the terrorist was seated, would’ve brought flight 253 to a catastrophic end. After weighing the information I knew, I came to a somewhat disturbing conclusion. Is there a way to defend ourselves against people like this? In Al Qaeda’s own statement, they said they were sending men “Who cherish death, as much as we cherish life”. Can we defend against this? If you’re dealing with men who aren’t afraid to die, is any safeguard ever enough? You can set up all the screeners and scanners in the world, will it matter? I’m sure, in the short-term, it probably will, but these guys will figure out ways to fly with bombs surgically buried within their bodies, where a scanner may not pick them up. Then what? An even bigger concern, is whether these people who wish to do us harm, will realize the airline industry is too tightly watched now, and try something else. Want a nightmare scenario? Operatives infiltrate organizations which transport fuel in large tankers. Imagine 10 to 20 operatives nationwide, who in a coordinated effort, drive their fuel heavy trucks into high school gymnasiums on a Thursday night, when the gyms are packed with people watching high school basketball. The trucks are then detonated. Scared yet? These are the kind of people we’re dealing with.
One thing we have going in our defense, is vigilance. I have a friend, who is a retired Navy SEAL. He now works a government contractor, who comes up with terrorism scenarios that the Feds train to discover, defuse, and derail. The interesting thing is, my friend says they have to build in the screw-ups & mistakes that the terrorists will make, in order to be discovered. Makes me glad the SEALS are on our side. We are watchful, we are vigilant, and we are good at correcting mistakes that have been made, or fixing holes in our defenses. I’m just saying we need to make sure our guard stays up. They’re not always going to be a shoe-bomber or a crotch-bomber, or some other poorly executed attempt at high-stakes murder. Sometimes, they get through, and we are all too familiar with the results, when that happens.
