Why we need more security in airports

DYCKMAN E-mail: Click here Archive

By MARTIN DYCKMAN

© St. Petersburg Times,
published September 30, 2001

TALLAHASSEE -- In February 1995, a month after the Republican takeover of Congress, the House Aviation Subcommittee met to do its part toward fulfilling the party's "Contract With America." The topic: "Ways to reduce unfunded federal mandates and regulatory burdens on the aviation industry without affecting the safety of the traveling public." Since Sept. 11, many of its members may have been wishing that they could erase all traces of that hearing.

None would wish it more than Rep. James L. Oberstar, D-Minn, the ranking minority member and former chairman of the parent Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, for these were his opening remarks:

"Over 9- to 10-billion bags are screened every year, hundreds of millions of passengers, and we haven't had a skyjacking in the United States because we have had good security, and we have made it happen. This committee has been the leader in the forefront of protecting air travelers against terrorist attacks at home and abroad that we see happening elsewhere around this world."

Subsequent hearings challenged that assumption long before Sept. 11 shattered it. But even a moderately experienced private traveler had to know it wasn't so.

It wasn't at any U.S. airport but at Orly, near Paris, where my wife was made to sort through a suitcase full of her dirty laundry because she hadn't been quick or eager enough to produce a document explaining not why she was leaving France, but why she had been there.

It wasn't at any U.S. airport but at Gatwick, in London, where another schoolteacher of our acquaintance was arrested, in full view of the students she was escorting, when uniformed Bobbies found in her carry-on bag the Swiss switchblades she had confiscated from two of the kids. Once the situation was sorted out, the Brits let her go. But they destroyed the knives on the spot.

It wasn't at any U.S. airport, but at Orly again, when I had to mark time in a concourse for 20 minutes because the airport had been locked down until the bomb squad could clear an unattended bag.

It wasn't in Europe but in the United States where, returning from a domestic trip, I realized that my Swiss Army knife had been in my carry-on bag and wondered how I managed to get through security.

"Getting on an airplane in your country," a British cousin told my wife's college roommate not long before Sept. 11, "is like getting on a bus."

Henceforth, of course, it will be more like going to jail (which is what they have long said about the Israeli airline, El Al). For now, air travel may be the safest thing Americans can do.

But beware: There are such things as ceramic, glass or plastic knives, available for as little as $9 at gun shops and over the Internet, that are undetectable by magnetic screening machines and nearly invisible to X-ray if packed in certain ways; an ad for the $9 "CIA letter opener" boasts that it provides "superior plunging power as well as a sharp edge."

Secondly, President Bush is hung up on keeping those woebegone private security firms to do the actual passenger screening. Yet you won't see him trying to privatize customs -- e.g., drug -- or immigration inspectors, which exposes what's wrong with not having real cops with real guns, real training and real salaries on the front line of terrorism defense. They're going to surcharge passengers for it anyway, so why not make it worth the expense?

Israel is justly famous for its aviation security. But I would think twice about going shopping or night-clubbing there. In the past year, Israel has lost 52 people -- many of them children -- to suicide bombers with preferences for shopping centers, discos and pizzerias. Relatively, it's as if the United States had lost 2,452. Overall, some 90 terrorist attacks have left 176 Israelis dead and 1,743 maimed or otherwise hurt. A comparable U.S. toll would be 8,301 dead (more than the World Trade Center) and 82,216 injured.

This sort of retail terrorism is now a clear and present danger for America, and not one penny of the billions that we must necessarily spend on fortifying airplanes and airports can dispel it. This time, a sports metaphor is true: The best defense is a good offense. We must surprise the terrorists in their lairs and kill them first. But we cannot count on technology to get them all.

Everyone, especially policymakers, needs to read "Safety in the Skies" by Malcolm Gladwell in the Oct. 1 New Yorker. The paradox, he writes, is that each expensively learned lesson in aviation security has eliminated one avenue of attack only to have terrorists find another, "And no hole was bigger than the one found on September 11."

Gladwell would rely not on screening everyone for explosives or weapons, but rather on intensifying security "for a small percentage of passengers deemed to be high-risk." Yes, that means profiling, but not by race or gender. A profile already is practiced, out of sight, to screen-checked baggage. The next step, he urges, is to screen high-risk passengers, however they are defined, with costly but sophisticated machines that "would make hiding knives or other weapons in hand luggage all but impossible." (It was such a personal profile, in that case a young woman traveling alone from Great Britain to Israel, with little money, that led to El Al security discovering the 10-pound bomb that she didn't know her Palestinian boyfriend had stashed in her luggage. And why everyone is now asked whether they packed their own bags.)

"The chief distinction between American and Israeli airport defense," Gladwell explains, ". . . is that the American system focuses on technological examination of the baggage while the Israeli system focuses on personal interrogation and assessment of the passenger -- which has resulted in El Al's having an almost unblemished record against bombings and hijackings over the past 20 years . . ."

But in the end, he warns, "Better law enforcement doesn't eliminate crime. It forces the criminals who remain to come up with something else. And, as we have just been reminded, that something else, all too frequently, is something worse."

More security at airports? By all means. But we'd better have a lot more of it at shopping malls, too. Any Israeli can tell you why.

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