A few weeks ago, agents of the Transportation Security Administration at Reagan National Airport stopped my mother-in-law, a very nice and unthreatening 79-year-old in Washington to lobby on behalf of public libraries, and asked her an enormously rude question.
She’d just passed through one of the TSA’s advanced imaging machines when an agent asked, rather too loudly: “Are you wearing a sanitary napkin?”
My mother-in-law has a fine sense of humor, so she wasn’t terribly offended. “No. Why do you ask?” The agent responded, “Well, are you wearing anything else down there?”
At this point, her traveling companion asked if there was a problem. “There’s an anomaly in the crotch area,” the agent said.
My mother-in-law was again made to raise her arms in the stick-’em-up position as the scanner looked under her clothing. The “anomaly” disappeared; she boarded her flight. Later, she asked me, “What did they think I was, a lady underpants bomber?”
They weren’t thinking at all. They were responding mechanically, and crudely.
This little episode was a source of laughter for us in her family until word came, a few days later, that Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri, a Yemen-based bomb designer affiliated with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, had designed a new nonmetallic explosive device that could be worn like a pair of form-fitting briefs.
Once detonated, it could have punched a hole through the skin of the US-bound aircraft the terrorists were targeting.
Luckily, AQAP provided this underwear bomb to a double agent, who turned it over to intelligence officials. Specialists said it was more sophisticated than the one that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to detonate over Detroit in 2009.
Which raised an obvious question: Would the TSA have been able to identify this most dangerous anomaly in the crotch area?
I asked John Pistole, the TSA’s administrator. He mentioned the TSA’s new scanning devices, now in use at about 180 airports. “The advanced imaging technology gives us the best chance to detect the underwear-type device,” he said.
The best chance? “This is not 100 percent guaranteed,” he said. “If it comes down to a terrorist who has a well-concealed device, and we have no intelligence about him, and he comes to an advanced-imaging technology machine, it is still our best technology. But it’s really an open question about whether the machine, or the AIT operator, would detect the device.”
What about one of those TSA pat-downs? Pistole told me that the TSA has developed mock-ups of the bomb, and agents are being instructed on its design and how to detect it.
“If done properly, it may be found,” he said.
I admire his calibrated answer. But I came away from our conversation unconvinced that the TSA can keep up with advances in jihadist bomb-making.
As a frequent flier who generally chooses the pat-down over the scanner, I can say that on some occasions the manual search I experienced was so rote that I could have passed through security with a bag of grenades down my pants.
And the devil’s workshop operating in Yemen under al-Asiri’s direction is the obsession of counterterrorist forces worldwide precisely because it is focused on designing a bomb that will defeat airport security.
Which suggests an obvious conclusion: The existence of this latest iteration of the underwear bomb is, as the security expert Bruce Schneier argues, an advertisement against increased airport security — not in favor of it.
When even the head of the TSA admits that its technology might not be able to stop innovative new bombs, it might be time to look at our counterterrorism spending priorities — and focus more resources on stopping embryonic plots and less on harassing my mother-in-law.
Jeffrey Goldberg is a Bloomberg View columnist and a national correspondent for the Atlantic. © 2012, Bloomberg News.