Checkpoint: Backscatter Fears and Naked Aggression

"Don't touch my junk" has a corollary: don't zap my gonads with radiation, either.

Americans on the go are increasingly upset about the intrusiveness of pre-boarding security checks at their airports, whether by full-body scanner or an enhanced pat-down grope. Perhaps lessons can be learned by examining the health effects on Palestinians who have for years submitted to similar security checks.

More than a quarter million Palestinians live in the shadow of the Israeli's separation barrier, particularly in spots where the barrier is jig-sawed to protect hilltop settlers in what they refer to as Judea and Samaria. Ostensibly to deter terrorists, a tall electrified fence and trench system disconnects many Palestinian families living in such isolated rural pockets from their families and jobs in the West Bank. (Gaza is entirely corralled, and any patients and accompanying medical staff who are permitted to leave the enclave undergo such body scans as well.) In order for West Bank residents to reach jobs outside these restricted zones, to see friends and relatives, shop, or even make bank deposits, an Israeli-issued permit is required. All permit-holders must line up to be checked by private Israeli armed security guards or national border police before they are allowed past the separation barrier.

Crossing the Reihan/Bartaa checkpoint into the rest of the West Bank entails a full body backscatter x-ray scan, using machines similar to the bulky TSA scanners at 68 American airports which have raised the hackles of travelers this month.

Like US pilots who object to any extra doses of radiation caused by these virtual strip-searches, many Palestinian women are reluctant to undergo full-body scans twice a day, repeatedly. Even though their refusal denies them access to work or to harvest family fields that lie on the other side of the barrier, many resist.

Three years ago, I interviewed more than a dozen women at a basic health clinic in Um el Reihan run by a Western foreign aid agency. Each one said she was too scared to enter a foreign-built machine that might endanger a pregnancy or reduce her fertility.

Dr Muthanna Jabbarin , who tends the day clinic inside Um el Reihan and returns to Jenin at dusk a couple of days per week, is bothered that he has no access to data about the security equipment and the radiation hazard of malfunctions. He's unable to reassure worried patients who must go through the scanning machine twice daily about possible cancer risks. Several miscarriages, including one suffered by a woman in her eighth month, have raised his concerns. The doctor believes that the heat, the prolonged standing, and the anxiety all take a toll on expectant mothers.

In such a conservative community, many people feel violated because the security apparatus can see through their clothing and records each fold of flesh. Scars from, say, a Caesarean birth or a circumcision will be readily apparent on the screen. Every one of these scans is scrutinized by young Israeli guards. Fears that the images will be kept or photographed on mobile phones and uploaded to the internet are widespread. Numerous Palestinian seamstresses, teachers, and students have abandoned the commute from their Um el Reihan enclave into the West bank to avoid the public humiliation. Now they are marooned in this tiny hamlet which receives no services from either the Palestinian authority or the Israeli government.

Not only are the 350 Palestinian residents of Um el Reihan unable to cross the old Green Line west of their village to enter Israel but, but even if they go east and stand on line for hours, many are delayed or prevented from visiting the rest of the Palestinian territory. Reihan/Bartaa checkpoint, with its requisite body scans and searches, has mutated this little community into a Mid-Eastern gulag. After the Transport Security Administration's latest controversy over backscatter strip searches and groin-thumping frisks, a few more jet-setting Americans may empathize with the plight of these folks in the West Bank.

Jan McGirk was a special correspondent reporting from Gaza and the West Bank for The Lancet, a British medical journal. Crossposted on The Huffington Post.

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Update on Backscatter X-rays

A brief that ran in American newspapers this week noted that Phoenix’s airport (aka International Sky Harbor) now is delaying the installation of controversial backscatter x-rays scanners, similar to the security technology which is operating at Erez checkpoint. Public relations were unlikely to improve over the busy winter holiday season with extra body checks inflicted on harried travelers by undertrained personnel, the airport officials concluded. They prefer to wait a few more months before they introduce these new devices.

The problem is that these scanners reveal more than necessary, giving operators an x-ray peek at what lies underneath passengers' clothing and an opportunity to indulge in crude commentary. But law enforcement experts warned that genitalia must be scanned, since smugglers often prefer to use body cavities or to hide contraband, such as plastic explosive, taped beneath dangly bits. Indeed, the American Civil Liberties Union has slammed these high-tech machines for subjecting airline passengers to “a virtual strip search” much like the ones endured at Israeli checkpoints.

Now the US manufacturers promise that their high resolution graphic images can be rendered to blur intimate zones or to highlight objects inside a line drawing, rather than show them on an unclothed image erected on the screen in real time. No one could confirm what happens to the images perused by adolescent Israeli border guards--and whether individual images get passed around or traded by bored security personnel.

The manufacturers claim that a typical radiation dose from a single security scan is less than 10 microRem (0.1 microSieverts). This amount will not inflict harm on vulnerable people such as pregnant or potentially pregnant women, children, infants, the elderly, or patients undergoing radiation treatment, it is claimed.

The 10 microRem blast is equivalent to:

* The radiation passengers typically get from cosmic rays while flying for two minutes at 30,000 feet.
* One percent (1%) of the ionising radiation dose received by the average person in a typical day. A cat scan would be 100,000 times as potent as a backscatter scan.

There are no statistics available for cumulative exposure.

Arresting image from Erez

Gaza scans - tunnel vision

Wondering what those body scans reveal to Israeli border guards at the northern Gaza checkpoint at Erez? The naked truth about whatever you might be packing.

Once you make it through the Mad Max tunnels and place your feet inside the futuristic "backscatter" tube, you invariably are asked to take off your jacket and raise your hands high. The young border guards often reverse the conveyor belt and send your laptop crashing to the cement floor, but eventually a disembodied Israeli voice will instruct you to wait while a short blast of ultrahigh frequency radio waves tickle your front and back. They penetrate most clothing, but won't go through skin to reveal bone like x-rays do. The idea is to bounce off any illicit items or weapons a border-crosser might be trying to smuggle in.
It's quite revealing, so wear your best undies and be prepared for weird looks if you happen to have peculiarly placed piercings. Palestinians consider this type of scan intrusive and intimidating, particularly for pregnant women crossing into Israel for prenatal care. Many people object if these rather intimate scans are not immediately destroyed. Very few Palestinians use this Erez checkpoint anymore, so pressure for decorum has decreased. The press or humanitarian aid workers don't squawk about this humiliation much.

Following Israeli success with this backscatter scanning system, Heathrow airport and some British prisons are experimenting with it, and now Arizona state will follow suit at Phoenix's Sky Harbour International Airport.