Airport Insecurity

Continued from page 1

By Richard A. Muller

August 9, 2002

Forcing al Qaeda to use suicide bombers gives us a great advantage. Consider the character of Mohammad Atta, the man we once thought could move unnoticed in the Western world. We now know that he applied for a loan from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to buy a crop duster company. But he insulted the USDA officer, Jonelle Bryant, who interviewed him (he called her "but a female"), and he threatened her life ("What's to prevent me from cutting your throat?") (see the ABC interview with Bryant). Such behavior would not go unreported today.

The other terrorists were equally inept. Richard Reid couldn't ignite his own shoe. Jose Padilla, the putative radiological weapon bomber, is a former Chicago street thug with a long arrest record. Zacarias Moussaoui (accused of planning to be the 20th hijacker) couldn't pass a simple written exam in flight school, and told his teachers that he wanted to learn to fly big planes, but was not interested in taking off or landing. He was reported to the FBI and arrested. He is even acting as his own lawyer--as if to confirm his status as a fool. 

The suicide terrorists that al Qaeda attracts are not la crme de la crme, as we once thought. They are l'cume de l'cume, the scum of the scum. On a suicide mission, they would stick out like a bashed thumb. As long as we force al Qaeda to use such people, they will be noticed (even if they weren't before 9/11), and that makes a coordinated attack virtually impossible.

So why search little old ladies at the gate? There are two reasons. The first is to make sure the front line of defense, the x-ray and metal detectors and sniffers at the entrance, are doing what they are supposed to be doing. The random checks will, in time, serve as checks on the efficiency of the checkers in finding illegal materials. The second reason is to overcome the public mania about ethnic profiling. On every flight I have taken in the last eleven months, whenever there was someone in line who even vaguely matched the prejudicial profile of a potential terrorist (e.g. young, dark, perhaps Arab), that person was diverted for a "random" check. Perhaps searching the little old ladies provides cover that minimizes public outrage over profiling.

Rules against scissors and pocket knives accomplish nothing. The danger is explosives. I wish there were a workable technology to detect them. But until there is, let's force the terrorists to use suicide bombers, and let's spot them at the airport. Don't underestimate the success of the security measures. Who do you know who would have predicted, after September 11, that eleven months would pass with no additional terrorist triumph in the skies? The world changed much less than most people had expected.