Holland's Schiphol Airport to Use Full-Body Scanners

Suddenly, the miraculous has occurred. Dutch authorities have announced they will immediately begin to use the full body scanners they already possessed at Schiphol Airport in the Netherlands. Schiphol Airport has approximately 15 body scanners and two of them had been put into use on a voluntary basis. Now they will be used to screen passengers headed for the U.S. Privacy concerns, real enough yesterday, have magically evaporated against the narrow escape of nearly 300 people from an airline bomber.

Respect for the human right of privacy is important but failing to have used this software because of often cited "privacy concerns" is incompetent or worse. Was it a desire to cut airline costs? Was it a cold, think-tank calculation that a certain number of dead bodies could be weighed against the costs, the inconvenience, the delay, the objections of factions and sects who raised the flag of privacy concerns for reasons that made sense only to a few?

Software developers have created backscatter scanners which stylize the subject. In any event, we live in a world where everyone has endless opportunities to see that we are all very much alike. Unless there are places in the world where people are born with their clothes on, no one has been shielded from this reality which most people find acceptable, if not appropriate and somehow comical.

The "privacy" argument disguises a deeper dysfunction-a sclerosis, an inability to act in the interest of public safety. It is common enough for people to treat each other with respect, even when they are naked, so passing through a full body scanner so that security personnel could view an outline of you should not be an impediment to better security for airline passengers.

According to the Associated Press, another Nigerian man was arrested in Mogadishu prior to the attempted Christmas bombing. That occurred in November, presumably. The circumstances of that potential bomber were identical down to the use of PETN, volatile liquids, and syringes to trigger the explosive reaction. It shouldn't surprise anyone that the man tried to bribe security officers at the time of his arrest.

After days of waiting, President Obama saw the writing on the wall and came out with a necessarily blunt statement on the "systemic failure" which allowed the plot to proceed so far. The President knows, even if a CNN "expert" told viewers as early as this morning that the intelligence information stayed at the CIA desk in Langley, that the information regarding the Christmas bomber had been disseminated through Homeland Security and the FBI prior to the attack. One may think that the CNN organization has more reason to protect its liberal underpinnings than does Janet Napolitano and Homeland Security, but CNN is a bureaucracy, and information is routinely lost, re-shaped, spun, and misunderstood, just as it is in government.

President Obama needs to "kick some ass and take names," as they say in some corners of the country. The screw-up is large enough to warrant a firing or two at the top, and this would put things a bit more in line and send the right message in every direction. This is a most propitious time to take ownership of national security, to restore some of the confidence and credibility which has been lost in the transition of administrations. Plain speaking, as President Obama showed he is capable of yesterday, is not a strictly partisan objective. It is one of the things necessary to restore the confidence of America in a sclerotic, bloated political bureaucracy which rewards inaction and passivity.