Homeland Insecurity

First we had the Shoe Bomber, and now we have the Underpants Bomber, at least according to the pictures in the New York Times, which showed parts of the incendiary device still attached to the man’s undershorts, conclusively answering the question “Boxers or Briefs?” and offering, perhaps, a little more information than some of us need.

Now we learn of new, apparently capricious and random, security procedures and restrictions imposed on already suffering air travelers. Since I spend a good part of my professional life at 30,000 feet, this is of more than academic interest. I’ve already read about full body searches of Orthodox priests and five-year-old girls and international flights on which the entertainment system has remained shut off, though that is certainly preferable to screening Hannah Montana. I have seen other stories of flight attendants ripping blankets and pillows out of passengers’ hands and forcing them to remain seated for the last 90 minutes of flight, and of seven-hour delays going through airport security as each passenger is frisked.  Maybe this is intended to reassure the flying public that Homeland Security has everything well under control, but to me it smacks of panic and desperation and a complete lack of leadership and vision.

The argument in favor of enhanced physical screening at airports following the September 11, 2001 attacks always struck me as suspect, especially as political correctness dictated that an 80-year-old grandmother from Vero Beach, Florida submit to a full-body search (just random screening procedures, you understand) as bearded young men named Ahmed stroll through the screening area unmolested. I happen to know several habitually unshaven men named Ahmed and Rashid and Mohamed who wouldn’t hurt a fly, but if you’re playing the odds – and risk mitigation is very much a question of odds – you’d want to take a different approach if preventing terrorist attacks is really your goal.

I am not suggesting that the Department of Homeland Security does not want to prevent terrorist attacks, but they do seem to be going about it in the wrong way. Hyper-sensitive electronic equipment that fails to work much of the time, as well as random physical screening of passengers and their carry-on baggage may possibly have helped nab a few hapless would-be bombers by accident over the past eight years; Homeland Security, understandably, is not about to tell us. What shocks me, though,  is not that the Underpants Bomber was able to slip through the security screen with explosives in his skivvies; it is that he was on both U.K. and U.S. watch lists but somehow no one bothered to notify the airport authorities and airlines. This is eight years, remember, after President Bush established the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Safety Administration and created the post of Director of National Security, who is supposed to coordinate the disparate intelligence services and prevent a repeat of 9/11, in which FBI agents weeks earlier had flagged suspicious behavior by several of the hijackers only for the information to get lost in the bureaucracy.

It is easy to prevent terrorist attacks in the air: ground all flights. Failing that, we could adopt the Israeli approach, in which highly trained people, many with a background in intelligence, perform screening on all flights to and from Israel, regardless of airline. Procedures include close scrutiny of people’s behavior, hand inspection of all baggage, and detailed and often intrusive personal questioning. As a consequence, Israel has not suffered a hijacking since the 1976 Entebbe incident. If the Israeli approach were adopted in the U.S., with its thousands of daily commercial flights, we’d all have to arrive at the airport two days in advance, so that is probably not an option.  But instead of spending hundreds of millions of dollars on explosives detectors that don’t work and on the legions of civil servants manning the security lines who are about as effective, pleasant, and motivated as the folks down at the Department of Motor Vehicles, we could spend less money and get better results if we paid more attention to proper use of intelligence and to screening of behavior, and less on mindless procedures and rules that do nothing more than antagonize the traveling public.

Confiscating pillows and blankets and prohibiting people from going to the toilet may give a thrill to some sadistic and disgruntled flight staff, but it will not make our skies any safer.  To do that would require intelligence, imagination, and courage, qualities that appear to be in scarce supply right now in our nation’s capital.