TSA is on the Job!

The recent terrorist attempt to destroy Northwest Airlines Flight 253, enroute from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day has caused expected spasms in the airport security practices at U.S. airports.

Headlines have announced that passengers will now face “tightened security” when preparing to board flights. Hmmm, I thought that’s the kind of security we have been facing since the 9/11 attacks? Newspapers are reporting that passengers should now report up to four hours prior to a flight; they should expect to be patted down by security personnel, who already X-Ray shoes and confiscate water bottles.

The fact is the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has focused on removing objects from airplanes rather than removing potential hijackers and suicide bombers. It is analogous to stopping gun violence by banning guns instead of jailing criminals who use guns.

Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby hit the nail on the head in his August 23, 2006 column when he compared the U.S. version of airport security and real airport security as practiced by Israel. (http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/08/23/what_israeli_security_could_teach_us/)

In the United States, we concentrate on removing bottled water and nail clippers from elderly ladies. In Israel, trained security personnel actively monitor the behavior of passengers, looking for actions that may be out of the ordinary. They look for furtive behavior or facial expressions that may betray hostile intent, or clothing that may conceal a weapon. Then, each passenger is personally interviewed by a security officer, who engages the passenger in a protracted conversation intended to reveal nefarious intent. The interviewers are called what they are: profilers. They operate on the certain knowledge that while all muslims are not terrorists, virtually all terrorists are muslim, and they focus their efforts accordingly.

Their efforts have apparently paid off handsomely for Israel. No El Al airliner has been hijacked for more than thirty years and no airliner has ever been hijacked from Ben Gurion Airport in Israel.

So, could we not institute the same, effective method of implementing airport security in the United States? No, we could not for two distinct reasons:

1. We have fallen victim to the straw dog of Political Correctness, which prevents us from profiling Arab or Muslim men.
2. We would need to hire a professional, well-educated, well-trained, and well-paid airport security force capable of professionally profiling all airport passengers.

We are capable of doing neither. Firstly, political correctness has gripped us so tightly that the press and the Obama Administration spent ridiculous amounts of time and ink to attribute the Fort Hood Massacre to anything other than radical Islamic jihad. Secondly, we have chosen to recruit TSA personnel from the barely educated, minimum wage earning group who are barely capable of confiscating water bottles from old ladies.

The current TSA is staffed by personnel like those in Philadelphia who recently required a U.S. Marine Corps honor guard, in dress blue uniforms and with orders in hand, who were escorting the remains of a Marine killed in action home to his family to submit to an intrusive search. To staff each airport with personnel trained and qualified to profile passengers legally would require many more highly paid employees than the TSA currently employs. It might mean that the TSA would have to release some of the highly compensated executive staff to make room for them. It would mean that actual, proven security techniques were being employed rather than the minimum wage window dressing we currently enjoy.

And we could make their jobs a little easier by pre-screening passengers. In effect, we could issue airport security clearances to people who are willing to submit to a background check to enhance airport security. That way, elderly women might be able to avoid the need to remove their shoes and hand in their water bottles.

But what would be done with the current employees of the TSA if we made the switch to trained, qualified profilers? No problem there. We will be needing lots of personnel to begin making medical decisions once made by doctors when the government takes over the health care system.