By Sandrea:-OPINION
Although I agree that the current airport screening policy that are in effect at US airport are intrusive, uncomfortable and leave the recipient with a feeling of been violated, one has to measure these feeling with the necessity to be vigilant against terrorism.
Terrorist do not care how and what they hurt their only agenda is to maximise carnage and destroy the lives of as many people as they possibly can. It seems to me that the people who are complaining about the intrusive methods such as full body scan forget 9/11 already. We cannot forget that a lot of innocent people lost their lives because the west was not as alert as they should have been and many people are not here today to voice their opinions about the security policies that are in place.
I would agree that no one like to be made to feel like a criminal, but if pat-down and scanning equipment prevent even one explosive device from going onto a plane then I have no problems with these kind of intrusion. The vast majority of the people who are complaining about the security measures would be the first to attack the government if they were not as vigilant and a bomb get onto a place and explode in mid-air killing innocent people and their relatives.
We cannot have it both ways, we cannot complain that we want security to be tightened and yet when the authority does that we complain that they are intrusive. It would seem that we forget that the terrorist and their fanatical ideology knows no boundary, they do not care that there are going to be children on board a plane, children in a shopping mall, as far as they are concern western society are infidels and as such they have a right to destroy our lives by blowing us apart.
How can the authority be less vigilant when you have headlines, like Al-Qaida vows to ‘bleed enemy to death’? These are not idle threats by those individuals and we should not treat them as the ranting of a ‘mad men’, because they are not, these are highly well educated individual who see western way of life as contradictory to their so-called oppressive system. The west being in Afghanistan and Iran also gave these individual a blue-print to undertake terrorist activities against us. If we have to go through a little discomfort to ensure our safety when we fly then I am all for it.
I agree with the head of the Transportation Security Administration, when he on Sunday acknowledged that “new full-body scanners and thorough pat-downs can be invasive and uncomfortable, but the need to stay a step ahead of terrorists rules out changes in airport screening procedures”.
If we do not have anything to be concerned about we should welcome the pat-downs, screening, body scans and any security measure that will keep us safe and secure. There are no fool-proof system and the terrorist will always try and find ways around them, but knowing that our security organisation is doing all that it can to protect our safety should be welcome and applaud, we should not be berating them and giving the terrorist the opportunity to think that we do not appreciate what our security services are trying to do to keep us secure.
I really hope that we will see these measures as being undertaken to protect us and give our security organisation all the support that they need, and when we travel and have to go through airport security, just help them to undertake those measure with at less fuss as possible and bear in mind that we want to reach our chosen destination safe and not have to worry that we may be blown to smithereens because our security was ineffective.
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