also, i know when i flew out of ben gurion back in 2002, it took us nearly 30 minutes to get through security just to be allowed into the area where they let us board the plane. the two things i found most interesting about the security process were: (1) they expect you to put your check-in luggage on the x-ray machine yourself, and pick it up yourself. once it's cleared, they put it on a gurney which is taken along with all the other passengers' luggage when the plane is ready to board. i don't recall once *not* knowing where my luggage was.

and (2) when they found something they considered suspicious in the x-ray scan, they asked me to open the bag IN FRONT OF THEM so they could search it better. none of this "bag goes into a black hole until you pick it up at your destination with an eerily creepy note left by the person you don't know from the government who had his/her hands in your carefully packed bag and may have taken your stuff from you" kind of thing.

the problem that most security experts cite when gushing about the israeli airport security model is that it only works for small airports which don't handle the kind of traffic US airports are famous for. if you look at the top 25 busiest airports in the world, roughly half are US airports. it's a great, fabulous security model which is 100% effective but completely impractical for the volume of traffic we need it to be used for.