While you are asked to leave your mineral water outside the gates area, to throw away your hair gel, your mascara and your toothpaste, there's quite a chance you'll go through with your own personal amount of polonium-210.

If we needed another prove of how ridicolous, and theatrically nonsense the new regulations for flight hand luggage were, the recent case of the russian former KGB agent poisoning and the following discover of contamination on four British Airways and one EasyJet crafts is the one.

The focus was on banning liquids from flights, since the discover of some obscure plot on using them to blow up planes; quite a dumb strategy considered that while the 9/11 attack was carried on with planes, both the London attack and the Madrid one were exploited on metro and train stations. That is, if you really think terrorists are going to blow things up using a bottle of Coke (maybe with some help of a couple of Mentos candies?) then why not ban them from subways and trains? And what about theatres (remember the Tchetchenian terrorist act in Moscow?) or in schools (again a Tchetchenian terrorist act, this time in Beslan). What about banning liquids at sports events (no more Gatorade, mate).

I'm talking about continental Europe airports, since I have no recent experience of airports outside the european continent right now, where security checks are performed by few-weeks-trained private personnel, usually formerly unemployed types with facial expressions that speaks for themselves. Apart from the regulations, dumb enough, this is the main problem here.

Maybe it's time to reconsider the whole strategy behind the war on terror, from bombing civilians in some poor developing Country to collecting data on meals ordered by tourists on their way to the States. Because the war on terror is conducted against terrorists, ain't it?