US security officers are so scared that they close down airport terminals for reasons like a goodbye kiss. A man returning from Haiti walked through a wrong door at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport on January 16, 2010. His mistake led nervous security officials to evacuate a terminal delaying dozens of flights and hundreds of travelers. After a man slipped into a secure area to kiss a woman goodbye, Newark Liberty International Airport shut a terminal for hours on January 7, 2010. Watch the video of the kiss delaying thousands of passengers. John Reid became known as the shoe bomber after he attempted to

Thus, you can guess what you will have to take off after Nigerian passenger Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab hid firecrackers in his underpants and set them off aboard a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on December 25, 2009.

Analogous to the military-industrial complex, a security-political complex has emerged that promotes its interests by hiring public affairs specialists in Washington, DC to lobby politicians. However, the new industry’s interests are not the same as public interests.

Some politicians - including senators Frank Lautenberg (New Jersey) and Joe Lieberman (Connecticut) - try to make political gains from the panic and fuel the public scare. Lautenberg, for example, blew the goodbye kiss up to a terrorist act.

Giovanni Bisignani - director-general of the International Air Transport Association (IATA) – writes in a letter of December 30, 2009 to Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano that the Detroit incident emphasizes the need for effective cooperation and information sharing among and within intelligence agencies.

IATA recommends fewer intensive pat-downs and better screening procedures as a means to achieve security requirements with reduced delays. Instead of looking for "bad" things - nail clippers and rogue bottles of shampoo - security systems need to focus on finding bad people. Adding body scans to an old system will not deliver the results we need.

Governments should invest in a check point of the future that combines the best of screening technology with the best of intelligence gathering. Nigerian passenger Abdulmutallab made it to a security watch list in the UK. His father had reported him to a US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer in Nigeria as a possible threat. However, the 13 different intelligence agencies in the USA cooperate poorly and missed these warnings.

Dick Cheney is part of the security-political complex. He was CEO of Halliburton before becoming vice-president of the USA in 2001-2009. He channeled billions of tax payers’ money to Halliburton, but failed to organize the intelligence community efficiently and effectively. Failing US intelligence agencies are a big worry for the airline industry.

Related articles: “DHS in panic for 2 days” and “US flight crews terrified”

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