I will second this—I have been in many, many different airports around the world over the past several years, and the security in Schiphol-Amsterdam is as tight as anyplace I have ever been to; retinal scanners, multiple human checkpoints, (I was once asked what the nature of my visit to the Netherlands was, and when I told them I was simply on vacation and had attended a couple of concerts, I was actually asked for my ticket stubs) and more canine-patrol dog teams than you would see at a Phish-SnoopDogg-Willie Nelson show…
If you can sneak an explosive device through at Schiphol Airport, I imagine you can get one through at just about any major US airport.
I saw that after I posted… (I should know that I need to fully read a thread like this before I chime in here with my hard-won “wisdom” but as I mentioned, security in Amsterdam is tight as a drum and so it resonated with me when I scanned this thread)
This was a special situation, thought, with the connection in Amsterdam. Depending on the nature of the international connection, you may be rescreened there, and as others have said, the Dutch are usually pretty thorough.
Yeah. Daddy needed American monies to help keep his son on his meds. The generosity of the American public having recently gone south, his funds dried up and his whackjob son went off his meds and now look at the result.
And it’s all our fault because we couldn’t be bothered to some furriner with his antipsychotic meds. Shame! Shame on us all!
Turns out he WAS re-screened in A’dam after all, but was still able to get thru security anyway.
I guess Schiphol is not quite as tight as what I thought it was, or maybe I was just given the ol’ “double secret probation” treatment, doubtless based on my glazed-over stare…
Yeah, you’re always re-screened whenever you make an international transfer, even if it is just an air-side transfer. This is true in pretty much any airport in the world.
Jesus frickin Christ. He’s on a terrorist list AND his father warns a US embassy his son is unstable. what does it take for basic database connections to be made? He had everything but a tattoo on his forehead that said said terrorist.
To whom it may concern. When someone shows up at your embassy and warns you about ANYTHING. DO SOMETHING…
To be fair, there was only one piece of information here: that the father had warned the embassy about his son. That warning was apparently the only reason he was on a watch list, so it isn’t reasonable to count the list as a separate piece of evidence.
Of course since he was on a watch list I would expect that his security check would be thorough enough to pick up the items he smuggled on board. That to me is the biggest flaw in the system here.
Before we get all wowie about the terroristic prowess of Al-Qaeda, let’s review their actions. They were loosely affiliated with the 1993 plot to bomb the World Trade Center Tower #1. (Ramzi Yousef spent some time at an Al-Qaeda training facility and received funding from some of the same sources that went on to fund Al-Qaeda.) Prior to this, the only notable activity of Al-Qaeda was to detonate bombs at a couple of hotels in Yemen in hope of killing US soldiers supporting relief efforts in Somalia. It turned out that they got the wrong hotels, and no US servicepeople were killed. They then proceeded to target relatively undefended US Embassies in Tanzania and Kenya with truck bombs. Although the attacks did kill hundreds of people, only a dozen US citizens were killed. They did manage a fairly effective attack on the USS Cole while it was moored and engaged in fueling operations; 17 sailors were killed. A previous similar attempt on a USN vessel, the USS The Sullivans failed when the attacking boat began to sink due to being overloaded. Their most effective and spectacular attack, involving 19 assailants with boxcutters highjacking and crashing airliners into the World Trade Center #1 and #2 towers, the Pentagon, and an averted attempt to crash a plane into the White House could have been completely averted by securing the cockpit against intrusion during flight, as has been mandated in the post-September 11 attack environment. Since that time, the effectiveness of Al-Qaeda has been limited to a handful of nightclub bombings and the 2005 London bombings (widely attributed to Al-Qaeda but no hard evidence has ever linked the London-based bombers to Al-Qaeda training or support). There is also a lot of news about “Al-Qaeda in Iraq” and “Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan”, but it is unclear how many of the combatants have been trained or armed by Al-Qaeda, as opposed to receiving weapons and whatever training (not much) they’ve received from other fundamentalist Islam supporters.
Basically “Al-Qaeda” has become the default assignation for any yahoo with a grudge and as much information as can be gleaned out of The Poor Man’s James Bond. The reality is that they are a bunch of ass rabbits that make the IRA look like highly trained counterinsurgency operators, and that their imitators barely achieve an even lower standard of effectiveness in their operations. Every time we assign some kind off near-mystical training and effectiveness on a shadowy terrorist organization with cells hiding under every bed, we encourage those who would take advantage of that fear to take more freedoms in the name of security. The reality is that we have known where a lot of the training camps are and have for years, and are simply unwilling to do anything about it, partly because it is politically expedient to ignore them, but mostly because (especially prior to the September 11, 2001 attacks) they just weren’t organized or effective enough to pull off more than occasional attack on a remote embassy or against the civilian population of a neutral country.
A concerted campaign of action could do go a long way toward disrupting all Islamic terrorist funding and training networks, albeit at the expense of ill will from many of our current “partners of convenience”. This has almost nothing to do with occupying Iraq or Afghanistan, of course, as neither nation was a significant base of operation for Islamic terrorists. And it wouldn’t stop random wanna-be jihadists who are actually unaffiliated with any terrorist organization from mixing a few easily concealed chemicals and burning their appendages on board aircraft to the discomfort of other passengers.
He was denied a Visa to the UK for other reasons. And yes, when you’re on a list, it should bump up the security check.
I’m a little alarmed that the threat level wasn’t raised after this. I understand that airport security was elevated but the message I saw was that we’re going to react after-the-fact and only directly to the nature of an attack.
You are alarmed about that stupid color coded thing? I guess I should be concerned about it staying on orange - it will clash with the orange sweater I was planning on wearing while taking my parents to the airport tomorrow.
I’d be more concerned about the specific failures here - namely a guy on a watch list who apparently breezed through security with an explosive device. It is a specific goal of terrorism to destroy the workings of their enemies economy through fear, so I do think a scientific approach is better than a panicked “DO SOMETHING” mentality. Instead of “DO SOMETHING” we need to identify the specific security failures and correct them. It sounds like there was enough information here to keep him from being on the plane with the explosive. Why was he allowed to get on the plane with PETN?!