Confronting a National Idiocy

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The New York Sun

There is reason, every now and then, to be grateful for the development of women’s power. Sometimes it is exerted zanily (why are Boy Scouts more celebrated than Girl Scouts?). But they are mobilizing fast on one of the great national idiocies, which is the federal government’s airport security practices designed to protect us against another September 11.


Maureen Dowd of the New York Times is easily annoyed, but here she put the case cogently in a single paragraph: “First you have to strip, unzipping your boots, unbuckling your belt, and unbuttoning your suit jacket while any guys standing around watch. Then you have to walk around in some flimsy top and stocking or bare feet. Then you have to assume the spread-eagled position. Then a beefy female security agent runs her hands all the way around your breasts, in between, underneath – again with guys standing around staring.”


Ms. Dowd cites the singer and actress Patti LuPone, who at Fort Lauderdale Airport declined just offhandedly to take off her shirt – and was barred from her flight. There was the 71-year-old, Jenepher Field, who walks with the aid of a cane. Ms. Field was subjected to a breast pat-down at the airport in Kansas City.


So it goes, and we have all, men and women, been required to take off our shoes. That is the ongoing tribute we pay to Richard Reid, who contrived to hide explosive devices in his sneakers, intending to blow up a trans-Atlantic airliner. Nobody can reasonably doubt the special fragility of air travel in the age of terrorism. But the question that arises is: Can we apply intelligence to the problem, or are we estopped from doing so by racial and ethnic protocols?


I have cited before a wonderful passage from a book by Ann Coulter: “In early December 2001, ’60 Minutes’ host Steve Kroft interviewed (Transportation Secretary Norman) Mineta about his approach to securing the airlines from terrorist attack. Kroft observed that of 22 men currently on the FBI’s most-wanted list, ‘all but one of them has complexion listed as olive. They all have dark hair and brown eyes. And more than half of them have the name Mohammed.’ Thus, he asks Mineta if airport security should give more scrutiny to someone named Mohammed – ‘just going down a passenger manifest list: Bob, Paul, John, Frank, Steven, Mohammed.’


“The secretary of transportation said, ‘No.’ In fact, Mineta was mystified by Kroft’s question, asking him: ‘Why should Mohammed be singled out?’ The Federal Aviation Administration had a computer profiling system on passengers, but it actually excluded mention of passengers’ race, ethnicity, national origin or religion.”


One wonders: What does the profiling system include?


The objective has to be to reduce reasonably the number of people who are searched, and perhaps the scope of the search. Our computer banks are surely up to the challenge of coming up with a scale from 0 to 100 on the likelihood that a particular traveler is mischievous. Already, our system is disposed to make certain negative inferences. If you buy a one-way ticket, you are suspicious, on the assumption that the reason you didn’t buy the round-trip ticket is that you might as well save the money, since you intend to destroy the airliner on the first leg.


But if we are accumulating negative inferences, why not list the name “Mohammed” among them? Answer: Because this would be resented by the 99.99 percent of Mohammeds who have no desire to engage in terrorism.


But the question here becomes, surely, Why not go ahead and offend the Mohammeds – for reasons absolutely unmotivated by religious or ethnic animus? And the positive inferences: Can we reasonably assume that a passenger who is more than 50 years old edges up in the direction of unlikelihood as a saboteur?


The point is not dismissed by simply finding some 75-year-old who once tried to blow up an airplane. We are talking about likelihood. If the passenger has a clean police record, a family, a job, retirement savings – add these up, one at a time, as the needle on the dial inches asymptotically toward zero likelihood, and you have accomplished something that translates into fewer strip searches for women – or, for that matter, men. One passenger stopped in the Midwest a few months ago and searched turns out to have been the same man who ran for president on the Democratic ticket in the year 2000. Al Gore was a very good sport about it.


An inspiriting contrast was the late Warren Burger, who, even before the nonsense engendered by September 11, flatly refused to travel on any airline that insisted on probing his crotch. His point was that as former chief justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, he should not be treated as a possible terrorist, never mind what some people have said about Earl Warren.


But progress of any kind here requires the application of intelligence, and this is what the feds are afraid to engage in.


The New York Sun

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