“Forget the lost luggage, lousy food and tight- leg rooms. We are all going to go through the whole- body imager to show our naked-bodies in public, thanks to Al Qaeda,” warned Samuel Ampah writing in The Ghanaian Journal, of all places, on April 16.
Ampah’s article concerns the Transportation Security Administration‘s introduction of “whole-body imaging machines” – scanners – that provide images of whatever is under the clothes of travelers at airports across the States. “Dress appropriately when you’re flying,” he advised. Lead underwear, perhaps?
We all know that airports check-ins procedures are getting tougher these days. Ampah wrote: “As if all that harassment by the TSA is not stressful enough, now whole-body imaging scanners have been added to tighten-up aviation security and put our naked body parts in public.”
The TSA justifies the scanners with a claim that plastic and ceramic weapons, and explosives that evade conventional metal detectors, are the biggest threat to aviation. They believe that screeners at airports miss a large number of such things in their routine searches.
While Ampah doesn’t say so, it’s just one more reason to use general aviation for business and pleasure – at least, until TSA gets around to imposing the same security on GA as on the airlines, as it is trying to do.
To read the full story: www.theghanaianjournal.com
