Originally Posted by
TSORon
Well I can tell you what the doctors told me when I got mine. They said that they would only perform it on someone under general anesthesia. From that I deduced that the pain was far more than I, or anyone really, was willing to accept or in most people tolerate. Yuk.
A full colonoscopy goes beyond the bend in the colon, and is supposed to be much more painful; my father-in-law had one and had general. I don't think it would be practical to get anything even as high as a sigmoidoscope goes without medical assistance, but the amount you could get without even going beyond the rectum is large enough to be worrisome to me.
Is that (call it about 8-12 cubic inches, at a guess absent experimental data) enough to take down a plane? No idea, but even if not I'd certainly not like to be on the plane when someone tries. I'd be curious if anyone more knowledgeable about explosives could comment about whether that's a sufficient amount.
In my youth. Yes, there are many things that “will” fit, of all sizes, but doing so and then transiting a large section of an airport, a checkpoint, and then a significant portion of the sterile area without betraying one’s self is something only James Bond 007 would try.
You may be right - hence my comment about the "have to go to the bathroom" dance above - but people can get used to a lot if motivated either by sexual kinks or (I'd assume) fanatacism, and it would be easy enough to train for - for example with a condom or similar full of inert substance like modeling clay/plasticine/play-doh.
More to it than that. What happens during a normal open incision surgical procedure? How long must that person spend recovering?
Given enough planning and a not-too-solid explosive, you could probably it laparascopically as well, but that would be a good deal harder. With an open incision, would they actually need to recover for more than a couple of days? As far as I know, TSA does not particularly flag people who show signs of recent surgery.
What’s the possibility of infection or toxic materials killing the patient?
In the shorter or the longer run? Since the key phrase here seems to be "suicide bomber" rather than "hijacker," they're unlikely to care about the longer run - and finding something that will be biologically neutral for a couple of days, and keeping the person on high dose antibiotics for the same couple of days, is much easier problem then creating something that's safe in the longer term. Even there, you have readily available off-the-shelf biologically neutral covers -- for example the ones used for breast implants.
How likely is it that a surgeon will knowingly implant an explosive device knowing that it is designed to be used to kill people?
There are clearly doctors who
might be willing to do this -for one example, Nidal Malik Hasan was a physician, although it's not clear to me whether he was actually tied to any terrorist organization or just an individual nutter. Whether any of them have the surgical skills necessary, who knows? It's unlikely in the west, but it just takes a couple of them to try this.
Again you are not thinking of the roadblocks to this.
To which? Medically implanting the device, or internal carry? The former sounds very difficult to test and I may very well be missing details that make it impossible, although the obvious roadblocks all seem surmountable.
The latter sounds both practical and very readily testable given inert items and a few volunteers (shouldn't be hard to find, up in San Francisco); there's also quite a bit of experience with it in the drug-smuggling trade (and presumably with detecting it in customs enforcement, but the timelines involved are quite a bit different.) Bathroom access is generally not that limited, and people tend to respect the privacy of others when using the john even in airports and on planes.
Richard Reid’s idea of exploding shoes, while attempted by another idiot, posed a significant threat to the aircraft, and the concept still poses a major threat.
If so, the shoe x-rays make sense, and I can't say it's any great imposition either individually or constitutionally. That said, a lot of other countries' airport security rules seem to disagree.
The design of an IED is limited only by the imagination of the designer.
Certainly. As can the ingenuity of hiding it. Reactively closing the door after each failed attempt doesn't seem like the right way of combatting the threat, nor, frankly is the prospect of an individual airliner being downed - even as a frequent very-long-haul flier thus having an above par chance of being on that plane - necessarily worth the invasiveness of some
possible security procedures.