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Remember those dangerous TSA body scanners? The brouhaha last November over the TSA’s new security measures seems like a distant memory now. Among other objections raised by the critics, we heard dire warnings that the backscatter x-rays were dangerous to your health, which led many travelers to refuse to go through the scanners and opt for hand pat-downs instead that many found invasive.

Well, it turns out those warning about the dangers of full body scans were wrong. The Wall Street Journal reports that a new analysis, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, has determined that the scanners don’t pose a significant health risk to passengers:

Rebecca Smith-Bindman, a professor of radiology at the University of California, San Francisco and one of the article’s authors, said the amount of radiation emitted by a full-body scan “is a drop in the bucket” compared to the amount of radiation used by X-rays and other medical-imaging procedures such as CT scans. The amount of radiation women would be exposed to from a mammogram is equal to 4,000 airport scans, while the amount from an abdominal CT scan would equal 200,000 airport scans.

Dr. Smith-Bindman said air travelers are exposed to far more radiation from flying, and that going through a full-body scan “is like one or two minutes on an airplane.” She noted everyone is exposed to radiation on a daily basis from the sun and the Earth. Flying increases the amount of radiation exposure from the sun.

You can read the full study here. Bottom line: If your plane circles the airport for a few extra minutes waiting for a free runway, you are exposed to far more extra radiation than you’d go through in a TSA scanner. Of course, this news won’t assuage those who oppose full-body scans on ethical grounds. But for those concerned with health, if you don’t want the TSA to “touch your junk,” it’s perfectly safe to go through the scanner instead.

Image by Quinn Dombrowski.

Before President Obama’s address to the nation, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates set off a firestorm when he declared on the Sunday shows that America had no “vital national interest” in Libya. In his speech Monday night, Obama did little to dispel that notion. The president used the word “interest” six times to describe the reasons for our intervention, but usually in the context of arguing that out action was necessary to avert a humanitarian catastrophe. Said the president:

Qaddafi declared he would show “no mercy” to his own people. He compared them to rats, and threatened to go door to door to inflict punishment … We knew that if we wanted—if we waited one more day, Benghazi, a city nearly the size of Charlotte, could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world. It was not in our national interest to let that happen.

And later:

America has an important strategic interest in preventing Qaddafi from overrunning those who oppose him. A massacre would have driven thousands of additional refugees across Libya’s borders, putting enormous strains on the peaceful—yet fragile—transitions in Egypt and Tunisia. The democratic impulses that are dawning across the region would be eclipsed by the darkest form of dictatorship, as repressive leaders concluded that violence is the best strategy to cling to power. The writ of the United Nations Security Council would have been shown to be little more than empty words, crippling that institution’s future credibility to uphold global peace and security. So while I will never minimize the costs involved in military action, I am convinced that a failure to act in Libya would have carried a far greater price for America.

And still later:

I’ve made it clear that I will never hesitate to use our military swiftly, decisively, and unilaterally when necessary to defend our people, our homeland, our allies and our core interests… There will be times, though, when our safety is not directly threatened, but our interests and our values are. Sometimes, the course of history poses challenges that threaten our common humanity and our common security—responding to natural disasters, for example; or preventing genocide and keeping the peace; ensuring regional security, and maintaining the flow of commerce. These may not be America’s problems alone, but they are important to us. They’re problems worth solving. And in these circumstances, we know that the United States, as the world’s most powerful nation, will often be called upon to help.

These are all compelling moral arguments for the military action the president has ordered. And the president is absolutely right to say that we do have moral, as well as strategic, interests that are worth defending. But Obama could also have made a compelling, hard-nosed argument that military action in Libya was important to American national security. He could have explained that if the Libyan dictator survived he would not likely resume being the benign Muammar Gaddafi of recent years, who handed over his weapons of mass destruction, renounced terrorism, and made nice with the West. More likely, he will be the brutal Gaddafi of old—the state sponsor of terror who blew up Pan Am 103, set up terrorist training camps on Libyan soil, and deployed terrorists for attacks against the West. The president could have argued that Gaddafi would likely put a halt to the destruction of his chemical weapons stockpiles, and the danger would grow that these toxins could fall into the hands of terrorists. The president could have argued that Gaddafi’s survival would not only embolden the Libyan dictator, it would embolden other dictators from Iran to Syria to North Korea—who would see our failure to act as a green light to wreak havoc on the world stage without fear of a decisive American response.

These are but a few of the arguments for military action in Libya that involve compelling strategic interests beyond our moral interests and humanitarian concerns. But Obama did not make them. Indeed he could not make them. Because addressing these strategic interests would require an objective that the president has rejected in Libya: the removal of the Gaddafi regime. So while he made a compelling moral case for action, the best the president could offer in terms of strategic arguments was the need to defend “the writ of the United Nations Security Council.” That is not likely to inspire a lot of Americans to support military intervention in Libya.

Image by Pete Souza.

In suggesting that U.S. military action against Libya is only trying to protect civilians and not trying to achieve regime change, President Obama is trying to have it both ways. He no doubt sincerely wants to prevent the slaughter of innocents, but he also hopes to get lucky and knock over the Qaddafi regime from the air. But he’s deploying more than just luck. As reported by the New York Times this morning, he has deployed an array of lethal close-air support in the form of AC-130 gunships and A-10 attack aircraft. The Times reports that Muammar Qaddafi’s forces are taking a pounding:

From the air, the United States is supplying much more firepower than any other country. The allies have fired nearly 200 Tomahawk cruise missiles since the campaign started on March 19, all but 7 from the United States. The United States has flown about 370 attack missions, and its allied partners have flown a similar number, but the Americans have dropped 455 precision-guided munitions compared with 147 from other coalition members.

Besides taking part in the airstrikes, the American military is taking the lead role in gathering intelligence, intercepting Libyan radio transmissions, for instance, and using the information to orchestrate attacks against the Libyan forces on the ground. And over the weekend the Air Force quietly sent three of its most fearsome weapons to the operation.

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