by Alex Cox
A recent article in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists suggested that 9/11-style hijackings could not occur again, since the passengers would resist the hijackers, rather than passively acquiesce.
It would be good if this were so. But it seems highly unlikely. Air travel has become so unpleasant, so constrained, so prison-like, that travellers acquiesce as a matter of course. You are extremely unlikely to encounter rebellious or non-compliant activity from the harassed and worried customers of an airport. To discourage non-compliance, airports have become remarkably like modern prisons. Let me list four instances.
1. Pointless rules, and changes thereof. I subscribe to a magazine called The Fortune News, written mainly by prisoners in the US system. According to these prison writers, constantly changing rules, the more pointless the better, and their meticulous enforcement, are a constant facet of prison life. What the rules are doesn't really matter. The point is that the rules change constantly, and that the inmates obey them. This is part of the process of making prisoners compliant: via stupid, ever-changing diktats, the system wears them down.
Since 9/11, each time I've been through London's Heathrow airport, the security procedures have changed. Once laptops stayed in our hand luggage. Then they had to be put in plastic bags. Currently, American-style, they must be removed, and put in plastic trays. If you fly to the US from Heathrow, you are recently obliged to remove your shoes for an extra security inspection. If you fly from Frankfurt Main, you aren't. In my local airport in the United States, you must remove video cameras for additional inspection. At San Francisco airport, you're told to leave them in their bags.
The most egregious example of constantly changing airport rules has to do with liquids. The same weekend that British forces in Afghanistan rebelled against their orders, and retreated to the relative safety of Kabul, Blair's government uncovered the "mixed liquid bomb plot," and all hand luggage was banned from US-bound planes. (This conveniently relegated the disastrous military news to the inner pages of a few newspapers.) Hand luggage returned shortly, but contradictory rules about liquids continue to confuse, delay, and defeat the traveler.
Never mind that the "mixed liquid bomb plotters" hadn't purchased any airplane tickets, and most didn't have passports. The absolute bogusness of the alleged plot is revealed by the fact that all confiscated liquids were dumped into the same containers – thereby creating a potential explosive disaster within the airport security zones. There wasn't an explosion, of course, because the plot was never real, and because such liquid bombs – if they exist at all – are hugely difficult to manufacture and to detonate. (See article in The Register for details of how to make a complex and almost certainly ineffective liquid bomb)
Yet the ban on liquids has been extended to all the European Union's airports, and is enforced in the US in constantly changing ways. Last time I flew domestically in the US, my toothpaste was confiscated. The tube, apparently, was 'too big.' But a container of lens-cleaning fluid made it through because the screener didn't notice it.
2. Long periods spent waiting in line. The British are so used to queuing that sometimes foreigners think we must enjoy it. I don't imagine this is so, any more than inmates like it. But forcing people to line up – to shower, to eat, to recreate, to leave the cell block to return to it – is a constant facet of the prison experience. And from the moment you reach the airport, it is part of that prison experience as well. Probably you queued to use public transport en route, or joined a long line of cars on the approach to the terminal. Once inside, you wait in line again for your boarding pass, or to check bags. You queue, often for a very long time, to clear security (BAA, which owns most of the British airports, is a hugely profitable private company, which claims to treat security as a primary concern. Yet many scanners and screening points are routinely unused). And, reaching the plane, you wait in line again. As The Fortune News reports, enforced queuing is a good way of filling up inmates' time, and breaking their resistance.
3. Turning passengers/inmates into unwilling consumers. Trapped people, rather like rats in a maze-and-reward experiment, are easily programmed. In the past, when public spaces such as airports were constructed – at least in the USA – the provision of free drinking water was considered essential. No longer. In the new extension of Heathrow's Terminal Three there are no water fountains at all. In Frankfurt Main airport the taps in the toilets announce that the water is drinkable. But there are no cups. Instead, in both airports, tap water in a plastic bottle can be bought, for a pound or a euro, from a machine owned by the Coca Cola Company.
Arriving at the airport, the passenger is assaulted by commercial advertising. Once through security, he/she is surrounded by shopping experiences, and robotic warnings not to leave luggage unattended, or to make jokes. The notion of public space (such as the atrium waiting room, or the exercise yard) gives way to oppressive and insistent shopping opportunities. Use the pay phone (if you can find one) or the wireless network, and you will pay expensively – just as prisoners calling home via one of the private prison lines pay thousands of times the cost of the call.
4. Constant surveillance. All this harassment and petty prison-tactics are justified in the name of 'security,' whether one is banged up or trying to go on holiday. Politicians tell us prison-style tactics and continual video surveillance are necessary because 'terrorists hate our freedoms.' Yet constant video surveillance in London – the city with more spy cameras than any other in the world – failed to detect or to deter the 7/7 suicide bombers, or the anti-gay terrorist who nail-bombed the Admiral Duncan pub in Soho. And as Benjamin Franklin – a terrorist rebel against the British – observed, those who would trade freedom for security end up with neither. Just as they deserve.
The term 'non-compliant' comes, I think, from the medical profession, where it's used to describe patients (like the famous protagonist of ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST) who won't take their meds or follow doctor's orders. Clearly it applies to certain members of the prison population, such as the celebrated Jimmy Boyle. In an airport, non-compliance equals, at very least, a denial of boarding, if not physical restraint followed by arrest.
Compliant people do as they are told. Thus they are less of a hassle for bossy types in uniforms. A compliant population is much desired by self-regarding politicians, who don't like answering questions about their current war or being heckled at the Labour Party conference. But, having made it through the airport, having been trained to comply with the orders of policemen, parking lot attendants, check-in staff, baggage screeners, friskers, gatekeepers, and flight attendants – most of whom are probably decent people who equally dislike the way they're programmed to behave – how likely is our beaten-down, compliant passenger to stand up if there's a real emergency?
Compliants don't ask too many questions. They do as they're told, and, one assumes, believe what they're told – or pretend to, most of the time.
But if I were ever confronted by knife-wielding hijackers, or any other gang of bullies, I'd rather be sitting next to a non-compliant. Boyle, or McMurphy, or Tod, or the filmmaker Kim Ryan, any one would be fine. I'll trust the bolshy, every time – as opposed to the rebellious instincts of a worried businessman who's bought a fast pass for airport security, and a pair of slip-on shoes.